I wonder what it would be like if we had never figured out why and how the climate is changing. What if we had a vague sense that the weather is getting warmer and weirder — there sure do seem to be a lot of floods and droughts! Were there quite so many back in our childhoods? — but no sense of the causes and trajectory of those changes? What would we think about what’s happening to the world around us? How would those changes show up in our culture?
The fact of the matter is that we do know, all too well, about climate change. We have a very good sense of what is happening, why it’s happening, and what is likely to happen in the future. We’ve been simultaneously gifted with the ability to do something about the problem and burdened with the necessity of witnessing what happens when we haven’t done enough.
People in the past usually didn’t know why, or whether, their climate was changing. Because they didn’t know, we haven’t known, until recently. It’s only in recent years that scientists and historians have been able to piece together past changes in the climate.
There have been three significant climatic changes (before our own) in the last millennium. All of them saw the world get colder, not warmer. The first, the “Little Ice Age,” was given its name by a Dutch scientist in 1939 who was attempting to explain how glaciers could have formed since the end of the most recent (Big) ice age. It describes a period of colder temperatures — probably caused by decreased solar activity, volcanoes, and declining human population from outbreaks of disease — in the Northern Hemisphere between the 1500s and the 1800s.
The second episode of climate change was more definitively caused by a volcanic eruption, which occurred in what’s now Indonesia. Mt. Tambora, which erupted in 1815, ejected millions of tons of dust and sulfur into the atmosphere, cooling the globe by a degree or more for a couple of years.
Most of the people who experienced the effects of the Little Ice Age and Tambora — freezing lakes and rivers, failed crops, economic upheaval, strange colors in the sky, even blue and red snow, tinted by volcanic dust — had no idea why they were happening, or that they were part of a global climate event. Historians have recently pieced together scattered evidence from around the world, compiling the global effects of these events. I can recommend Brian Fagan’s Little Ice Age, Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis, and Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora, if you’re interested in some of these feats of historical sleuthing.
In 1883, there was an eruption at Mt. Krakatoa — slightly smaller than the one at Tambora — that cooled the northern hemisphere by about half a degree. This time, thanks to new technology, people around the world understood why their skies were turning colors and why the temperature was a little colder.
One thing that strikes me about all three of these episodes is the way that changes in the natural world showed up in art and culture. Even if people weren’t fully aware of why their world was changing, they couldn’t help but record the effects of these climatic changes.
The golden age of Dutch painting coincided with the peak of the Little Ice Age, so we have a lot of artistic evidence of the cold weather in the Netherlands. In fact, there’s a whole genre of Dutch art that can best be described as “winter fun paintings.” These days, accumulating snow is fairly rare in the Netherlands, but these paintings make it seem as if winter weather — with abundant snow and fully-frozen lakes and canals — was quite common in the 1600s.
Dutch winter paintings generally portray the cold weather as a pretty fun time — townspeople are outside frolicking on the ice and snow rather than huddling miserably by the fire. Hendrick Avercamp made a number of these:
Several of Avercamp’s paintings capture the growing sport of Kolf, a kind of hybrid of golf and hockey. Here, we see some fishermen gawking at a fancy rich guy getting ready to hit a shot:
Kolf wasn’t the only new sport. This painting, by Adriaen van de Venne, shows the ambitious new sport of ice sailing, a sort of bobsledding using wind instead of altitude as a propellant:
There were lots of evocative engravings, like this one after Pieter Brueghel the Elder:
I really enjoy this one, showing two ice-skating owls, one dressed in fancy women’s clothes and the other in more humble men’s clothing. The inscription reads “How well we go together,” as they’re connected by a string with dead mice (!) hanging from it.
The River Thames hasn’t completely frozen over since the early 1960s, but it used to do so somewhat regularly during the Little Ice Age. Much like their Dutch counterparts, British people turned these cold conditions into an opportunity for fun, holding occasional “frost fairs” starting in 1608.
The Thames didn’t freeze in most years, but when conditions got cold enough for long enough, the river became a place for fun — or at least a way to mitigate the misery of cold conditions. John Evelyn described the winter of 1683 — a year in which it became cold enough to hold a frost fair — in pretty bleak terms:
The weather continuing intolerably severe, streets of booths were set upon the Thames; the air was so very cold and thick, as of many years, there had not ben the like. The small pox was very mortal.
In contrast to Evelyn’s account, the art from the frost fairs is pretty jolly, showing businesses set up on the ice, sports, and other contests, along with, of course, ice skating. Here’s an illustration from 1608:
Here’s one from 1683, the year John Evelyn described above. Here you can see bull baiting (in rings), people riding on all sorts of sleds and horse-pulled boats, and a promenade of shops:
The nineteenth-century volcanic eruptions at Tambora and Krakatoa had a number of effects — they killed many thousands of people in their immediate vicinity, they dramatically cooled the earth, and (at least in the case of Tambora) they made it snow in the summer, killing crops worldwide. But they also injected huge amounts of dust into the atmosphere, which affected the way the sky looked.
In 2007, a group of scholars cataloged sunset paintings between 1500 and 1900, correlating the colors they saw in the paintings with the level of volcanic activity on Earth. They found a significant relationship between the colors used to depict the sky and the level of volcanic activity.
During these periods of short-term volcanic climate change, skies got darker and sunsets got more dramatic. According to the study, we can best see the skies after Tambora in J.M.W. Turner’s Fall of the Carthaginian Empire, painted in 1817:
In the reddened, dark, and cloudy skies of Theodore Gericault’s Landscape with an Aqueduct:
And in Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s The Banks of the Spree near Stralau:
Turner’s sketchbook of sky studies is full of dramatic red-and-orange sunsets:
Perhaps the most iconic Tambora painting is Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 Woman Before the Rising Sun:
Though a smaller eruption, Krakatoa turned skies red, as well. Because of the new global telegram network, news of the eruption spread far and wide in 1883. This time, people understood that the changing sky — and colder temperatures — were a result of the volcanic particles that remained suspended in the atmosphere. A number of observers captured the strange phenomena. William Ascroft captured this remarkable series of sunsets in November 1883:
We may see some of Krakatoa’s effects in Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark:
A German scientist named Eduard Pechuël-Loesche spent a lot of time in 1884 cataloging the various atmospheric effects that he witnessed. He seemed especially interested in the visual effects that the volcanic particles created in the sky:
Some art historians have even speculated that Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream reflects the skies he witnessed after the Krakatoa eruption:
Munch described his experience of the 1883 eruption in his journal:
I was walking along the road with two friends -- then the Sun set -- all at once the sky became blood red -- and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired -- clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city.
My friends went on… and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.
The image stuck in his head for ten years, until he finally figured out how to paint the blood-red sunset that haunted his memories.
It’s worth remembering that, in addition to inspiring memorable art, each of these climate events caused immense human suffering. Our own experience with climate change is certain to do the same. But I think these artworks are a reminder that environmental issues aren’t just restricted to nature. They show up all over the place — in our economy, in our politics, in our culture, and even in our art.
A fascinating idea. Thank you for writing the essay.
Except for the blind acceptance of the modern day 'climate change' hoax, a great piece.