Sometime
between 750 and 800, Europe entered the Little Optimum
[note omitted] a period of global warming. Across the continent, temperatures in-creased
by an average of more than 1 degree Celsius, but rather than producing
catastrophe, as many current theorists of global warming predict, the warm
weather produced abundance.* England
and Poland became
wine-growing countries, and even the inhabitants of Greenland
began experimenting with vineyards. More important, the warm weather turned
marginal farmland into decent farmland, and decent farmland into good farmland.
In the final centuries of Roman rule, crop yields had fallen two and three to one
– a yield represents the amount of seed harvested to the amount planted:
a return so meager, the Roman agricultural writer Columella feared that the
land had grown old. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as winters became
milder and summers warmer and drier, European farms began to produce yields of
five and six to one, unprecedented by medieval standards.
*Says Dr. Phillip Stott, professor
emeritus of bio-geography at the University
of London, “What has
been forgotten in all the discussion of global warming is a proper sense of
history... During the medieval warm period, the world was warmer than even
today and history shows that it was a wonderful period of plenty for
everyone.” (Phillip
Stott, interview, Daily Telegraph, 4/6/2003.