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  • From: "Thomas Olenio" <tolenio@sentex.net>
  • To: "OFEX" <labruscagrape@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [OFEX] Columella
  • Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:58:30 -0500

 

Hello All,

 

Till I pull out the books and look it up, this will have to suffice….  Later, Tom

 

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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.



  • [OFEX] Columella, Thomas Olenio, 12/11/2006

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