famine

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“Lessons from the Little Ice Age,” NYT, March 22, 2014), historian Geoffrey Parker—author of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century—suggests the desperate climate of the years 1600 to 1700 is a template for a collapse of civilization in the twenty-first century. But there’s one massive flaw in his theory: The past cultural collapses have almost all occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warmings.