A部分

This book will provide a detailed examination of the Little Ice Age and other climatic shifts, but, before I embark on that, let me provide a historical context. We tend to think of climate – as opposed to weather – as something unchanging, yet humanity has been at the mercy of climate change for its entire existence, with at least eight glacial episodes in the past 730, 000 years. Our ancestors adapted to the universal but irregular global warming since the end of the last great Ice Age, around 10, 000years ago, with dazzling opportunism. They developed strategies for surviving harsh drought cycles, decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold; adopted agriculture and stock-raising, which revolutionised human life; and founded the world’s first pre-industrial civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas. But the price of sudden climate change, in famine, disease and suffering, was often high.

本书将详细考察小冰期和其他气候变化，但在此之前，让我为大家提供一个历史背景。我们常常将气候（而非天气）视为不变的东西，然而整个人类存在的时间里，我们一直受制于气候变化，过去73万年至少有八次冰期。我们的祖先适应了自最后一个大冰期结束以来普遍而不规则的全球变暖，他们用令人惊叹的机智发展出生存干旱、持续几十年的暴雨或寒冷的策略；采用了革命性的农业和畜牧业，改变了人类的生活；创造了埃及、美索不达米亚和美洲的世界上第一个前工业文明。然而，突如其来的气候变化所带来的饥荒、疾病和苦难的代价常常是巨大的。

B部分

The Little Ice Age lasted from roughly 1300 until the middle of the nineteenth century. Only two centuries ago, Europe experienced a cycle of bitterly cold winters; mountain glaciers in the Swiss Alps were the lowest in recorded memory, and pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year. The climatic events of the Little Ice Age did more than help shape the modern world. They are the deeply important context for the current unprecedented global warming. The Little Ice Age was far from a deep freeze, however; rather an irregular seesaw of rapid climatic shifts, few lasting more than a quarter-century, driven by complex and still little understood interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. The seesaw brought cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds, then switched abruptly to years of heavy spring and early summer rains, mild winters, and frequent Atlantic storms, or to periods of droughts, light northeasterly winds, and summer heat waves.

小冰期大约持续了从1300年到19世纪中叶。仅仅两个世纪以前，欧洲经历了一系列寒冷的冬天；瑞士阿尔卑斯山的山地冰川创下了有记录以来的最低水平，冰岛几乎一年四季都被冰雪覆盖。小冰期的气候事件不仅塑造了现代世界，也是当前前所未有的全球变暖的深层重要背景。然而，小冰期远非一场深度冷冻，而是一种不规则的剧烈气候波动，其中很少有持续超过四分之一个世纪的冷暖交替，驱动因复杂而仍不完全理解的大气与海洋相互作用而发生。这种剧烈的气候波动带来了严寒的冬季和东风，然后突然转变为春季和初夏的大雨、温和的冬季和频繁出现的大西洋风暴，或者是干旱、轻微的东北风和夏季的热浪。

C部分

Reconstructing the climate changes of the past is extremely difficult, because systematic weather observations began only a few centuries ago, in Europe and North America. Records from India and tropical Africa are even more recent. For the time before records began, we have only ‘proxy records’ reconstructed largely from tree rings and ice cores, supplemented by a few incomplete written accounts. We now have hundreds of tree-ring records from throughout the northern hemisphere, and many from south of the equator, too, amplified with a growing body of temperature data from ice cores drilled in Antarctica, Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, and other locations. We are close to a knowledge of annual summer and winter temperature variations over much of the northern hemisphere going back 600 years.

重建过去的气候变化极其困难，因为系统的天气观测仅始于几个世纪前的欧洲和北美。印度和热带非洲的记录甚至更近。在记录开始之前的时期，我们只有通过树木年轮和冰芯等“代理记录”重建的数据，再加上一些不完整的书面记载。目前，我们在北半球各地拥有数百份树木年轮记录，还有很多来自赤道以南地区的记录，此外还有从南极洲、格陵兰、秘鲁安第斯山脉和其他地点钻取的冰芯温度数据不断增加。我们已经接近了对北半球大部分地区600年来夏季和冬季温度变化的了解。

D部分

This book is a narrative history of climatic shifts during the past ten centuries, and some of the ways in which people in Europe adapted to them. Part One describes the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 900 to 1200. During these three centuries, Norse voyagers from Northern Europe explored northern seas, settled Greenland, and visited North America. It was not a time of uniform warmth, for then, as always since the Great Ice Age, there were constant shifts in rainfall and temperature. Mean European temperatures were about the same as today, perhaps slightly cooler.

本书是关于过去一千年气候变化及欧洲人民应对这些变化的叙述性历史。第一部分描述了中世纪暖期，大约从公元900年到1200年。在这三个世纪里，北欧的诺斯人在北方海域探索、定居格陵兰，并访问了北美。那并不是一段温暖均匀的时期，因为自大冰期以来，降雨和温度一直在不断变化。欧洲的平均温度与今天大致相同，或许略微较凉。

E部分

It is known that the Little Ice Age cooling began in Greenland and the Arctic in about 1200. As the Arctic ice pack spread southward, Norse voyages to the west were rerouted into the open Atlantic, then ended altogether. Storminess increased in the North Atlantic and North Sea. Colder, much wetter weather descended on Europe between 1315 and 1319, when thousands perished in a continent-wide famine. By 1400, the weather had become decidedly more unpredictable and stormier, with sudden shifts and lower temperatures that culminated in the cold decades of the late sixteenth century. Fish were a vital commodity in growing towns and cities, where food supplies were a constant concern. Dried cod and herring were already the staples of the European fish trade, but changes in water temperatures forced fishing fleets to work further offshore. The Basques, Dutch, and English developed the first offshore fishing boats adapted to a colder and stormier Atlantic. A gradual agricultural revolution in northern Europe stemmed from concerns over food supplies at a time of rising populations. The revolution involved intensive commercial farming and the growing of animal fodder on land not previously used for crops. The increased productivity from farmland made some countries self-sufficient in grain and livestock and offered effective protection against famine.

众所周知，小冰期在大约1200年开始影响格陵兰和北极地区。随着北极冰盖向南扩散，诺斯人的西行航行被重新调整到开阔的大西洋，最终完全中止。北大西洋和北海的风暴加剧。在1315年至1319年之间，更冷、更湿的天气降临欧洲，成千上万人在全欧洲范围内遭受饥荒。到了1400年，天气变得更加不可预测和多风多雨，出现了突然的转变和更低的温度，这在16世纪后期形成了寒冷的几十年。鱼类是不断增长的城镇和城市的重要商品，食物供应一直是一个持续关注的问题。干鱼和鲱鱼已经成为欧洲鱼类贸易的主要产品，但是水温的变化迫使捕鱼船只进一步离岸作业。巴斯克人、荷兰人和英国人发展出了第一种适应更加寒冷和多风的大西洋的离岸渔船。北欧地区逐渐进行的农业革命源于对粮食供应的担忧，在人口上升的时期，他们通过在以前未用于农作物的土地上进行密集商业耕种和种植饲料作物来增加农田产量。农田的增产使一些国家在粮食和牲畜方面自给自足，并有效防范了饥荒。

F部分

Global temperatures began to rise slowly after 1850, with the beginning of the Modern Warm Period. There was a vast migration from Europe by land-hungry farmers and others, to which the famine caused by the Irish potato blight contributed, to North America, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. Millions of hectares of forest and woodland fell before the newcomers’ axes between 1850 and 1890, as intensive European farming methods expanded across the world. The unprecedented land clearance released vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, triggering for the first time humanly caused global warming. Temperatures climbed more rapidly in the twentieth century as the use of fossil fuels proliferated and greenhouse gas levels continued to soar. The rise has been even steeper since the early 1980s. The Little Ice Age has given way to a new climatic regime, marked by prolonged and steady warming. At the same time, extreme weather events like Category 5 hurricanes are becoming more frequent.