Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

by Philipp Blom

Perhaps this is all too vast for us to take in, perhaps it is simply too inconvenient, perhaps it seems too abstract—but it becomes more concrete with every hurricane and every flood. The rich Western societies of today are no more effective in combating climate change than those that existed around the year 1600, albeit for different reasons. Historically, the idea of global climate change simply did not exist, and there were no data to support such a theory. Today, data and projections exist, but they point in a direction that is too frightening, and also simply too big, on an individual level, as well as too disruptive to national and global economies built on growth and expanding exploitation.