Bad things can happen. (Note: the reverse corollary where historians dabble in science also holds great peril.)
Oh, yeah. Now, part of their observations I can understand — they note a strong increase in cereal pollen through the thirteenth century and up to 1347 after which there was a sharp decline. And the positing of reforestation in some areas could have lead to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide but. . . .
Well, it’s just that most medievalists point to much earlier events than 1347 signalling the start of the Little Ice Age. Glacial advances that were noted in thirteenth century Europe. The two early fourteenth century cold snaps that contributed to the decline of the Greenland colony. The Great Famine of 1315-1317. I could go on and on. . . .
And while the Black Death was briefly effective at reducing Europe’s population, an agricultural and demographic upswing was well underway by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By 1750, England was home to some 3.7 million people (approximately the same population that had inhabited the country circa 1300) intensively working the land, deforesting the countryside and draining the marshlands to increase the total amount of arable land by some 30% over the previous era. Mark Overton at BBC History on the Agricultural Revolution.
Historians generally posit the reverse relationship between the Little Ice Age and the Black Death if they find one at all: they argue that with the world, Europe in particular, weakened by malnutrition and privation caused the worsening climate, the population was particularly vulnerable to the bacillus. And it’s going to take a lot more than some backwards positing based on pollen levels to get us to put the cart before the horse. . . .
What’s interesting, in reading up for this post, I discovered wide dispute over what was meant by the Little Ice Age (pegged, variously, from 1300-1800 or 1550-1850) and the Medieval Warm Period (was it the eighth to tenth century or the eleventh through fourteenth?) and scholars of climate sometimes draw on completely different sources of evidence from the historians. And when the climatologists start making enormous leaps of historical deduction based upon their narrow observations without bothering to examine and analyze the rest of the historical data upon how much of the abandoned land was reforested, how soon and how this affected the climate? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.