Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Among the changes and vicissitudes to which the physical constitution of our globe is per-
petually subject, one of the most extraordinary, and from which the most interesting and
important results may be anticipated, appears to have taken place in the course of the last
two or three years, and is still in operation…. The event to which we have alluded is the
disappearance of the whole, or greater part of th[e] vast barrier of ice. 11
Barrow proceeds on an ambitious survey of the history of climate of the last millennium, be-
ginning with what is called today the Medieval Warm Period, when “vineyards were very
common in England” and colonists from Denmark and Norway settled the south coast of
Greenland. When the Little Ice Age subsequently descended on Europe and North America, a
new regime of cooler temperatures enlarged the empire of northern ice, cutting of the Nord-
ic settlements and closing the northwest passage. Since 1815, Barrow continues, a further
drastic drop in temperatures has killed crops across the hemisphere and fueled the Alpine gla-
ciers (he is well-informed of developments to be described in the next chapter). But this last
“deterioration of climate,” Barrow argues, is cause for celebration because it represents the
last gasp of the four-hundred-year cooling regime over Europe.
How did Barrow reach this original conclusion? “It can scarcely be doubted,” he argues,
that Europe's recent string of cold summers has been owed to the presence of Arctic icebergs
drifting southward en masse in the Atlantic. Once these ice floes have melted in the southern
latitudes, as they must, and the Arctic is ice free, his readers might look forward to “once
again enjoying the genial warmth of the western breeze, and those soft and gentle zephyrs,
which, in our time, have existed only in the imagination of the poet.” 12 An open Arctic will
transform foggy England into a sunny Arcadia.
Barrow should not bear full responsibility for his trumped-up utopian views of climate
change in 1817. Percy Shelley himself had dared to imagine something very similar only a
few years prior in his revolutionary poem Queen Mab . Shelley's Fairy Queen looks forward
to an era of global warming in which ice caps are “unloosed,” and changing wind and ocean
circulation usher in a new climatic regime “full of bliss” for humankind:
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,
Where matter dared not vegetate or live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves
And melodize with man's blessed nature there. 13
Barrow's conservative Quarterly Review loathed Shelley's radical poetry; the editors called it
“satanic.” But by 1817, the educated classes were steeped in the new earth science of Buffon
and Cuvier, who promoted the idea that Earth's long history included episodes of radical en-
vironmental change. Pastoral images of perpetual summer and polar gardens proved irresist-
ible to writers of all political persuasions. An unfrozen north meant prosperity and freedom,
perhaps even a revolution in consciousness. Few except those with firsthand knowledge of the
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