Climate change! Global Warming! El Niño and La Niña! These phrases, now part of our daily vocabulary, stir emotions and prompt reactions ranging from fear, to anger, to a feeling of helplessness in the face of impending disaster. For the past several years, the Caribbean, the southeastern United States, and the Gulf Coast have endured repeated hurricane strikes, while the Pacific region has suffered through alternating periods of drought-induced wildfires and torrential downpours. Governments are warned to be prepared for an imminent period of weather-induced environmental crisis caused by a warming cycle in the earth’s climate.
Decades of research have made “climate change” household words, but until now the social sciences have rarely utilized scientific discoveries to understand the connections among climate, catastrophe, environmental crisis, and historical change. Drawing inspiration from hard science and contemporary issues, this book will establish that the current phase of climate-induced stress is not unique and that a similar cycle, a fifty-year warm anomaly, occurred during the last five decades of the eighteenth century. in addition, historical climatology demonstrates that in the period under study (1748–1804) barely a year went by when the world did not experience the effects of an El Niño or La Niña cycle, episodes of severe, prolonged drought counterbalanced by hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. Such scientific facts have little value, however, unless the consequences of environmental stress can be shown to coincide with a known historical narrative.
This book will establish that nexus of science and social science by demonstrating correlations among the late-eighteenth-century climate anomaly, the onset of the El Niño or La Niña cycle, and historical processes. It will argue that—not coincidentally—these phenomena coincided with one of the most critical periods in history, termed the Age of . . .