The Economic Impact of the Little Ice Age

• Main Authors: Morgan Kelly, Cormac Ó Gráda
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Greenland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.621.8619; http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/wp10_14.pdf

We investigate by how much the Little Ice Age reduced the harvests on which pre-industrial Europeans relied for survival. We find that weather strongly affected crop yields, but can find little evidence that western Eu-rope experienced long swings or structural breaks in climate. Instead, an-nual summer temperature reconstructions between the fourteenth and twen-tieth centuries behave as almost independent draws from a distribution with a constant mean but time varying volatility; while winter temperatures be-have similarly until the late nineteenth century when they rise markedly, consistent with anthropogenic global warming. Our results suggest that the existing consensus about a Little Ice Age in western Europe stems from a Slutsky effect, where the standard climatological practice of smoothing data prior to analysis induces spurious cyclicality in uncorrelated data. The Little Ice Age is conventionally viewed as a major event of climatic history, with episodes of deep cold causing glaciers to advance, the Thames in London to freeze, and the Norse colonies in Greenland to perish. The consensus among