Edward Gibbon on climate change

[nwhyte]

Along with my various other reading projects I'm slowly working through Gibbon, who may not be a laugh a minute but has a surprising number of jokes. I was struck by his conclusions regarding climate change, which are more or less along the right lines if not quite for the right reasons:

Comments

[communicator]

I think Gibbon, like Montaigne and Hazlitt, seems to be a modern person, living in a previous age, using a modern mind to grapple with what is around him.

[martin_wisse]

So you're doing the funky Gibbon at the moment?

(Since it's stuck in my head, why not share the pain...)

[rozk]

If you've never seen it, my bicentennial tribute to Gibbon is here.

I am going to reread him a little for my novel - did you know that Georgaina Duchess of Devonshire, her lover Bess, her sister Harriet Ponsonby and Harriet's daughter Caroline all took refuge with Gibbon from the Terror and the war? And that they were all of them involved in some sort of letter-smuggling out of Paris? And that Caroline at 12 made Gibbon's life hell by constant teasing - she was later Lady Caroline Lamb?

[nwhyte]

Both your link and your historical footnotes are wonderful. (Did Amanda foreman mention this and I just forgot? Or is it your own research?)

[rozk]

All of this is Amanda Foreman, basically. But she mentions the letter-smuggling without thinking of it as intelligence work of some kind. She is oddly over-focused sometimes - I noticed a couple of things she does not pick up on elsewhere.

She mentions that Georgaina considered publishing her poems and that her publisher was going to be Joseph Johnson and she does not seem to know who he was. (Publisher of Paine and Wollstonecraft and Godwin and altogether an odd person for someone not known for advanced views to be acquainted with - Foxite though Georgaina was.)

Also, while being clear that the Georgaina/Bess thing was sexual, she doesn't pick up on one obvious clue which is that in a couple of letters they quote the Book of Ruth to each other. Now, that is not conclusive evidence, but imagine if you were writing about an ambiguous male relationship and failed to pick up on quotations from the relevant bits of Kings...

[anonymous]

I think Gibbon is mistaken about the Rhine "frequently" freezing over, at least before around 400CE. Certainly there was a famous incursion over the frozen Rhine in the early 5th century, but as far as I'm aware the historical evidence suggests that this was unusual, and indeed the difficulty that Rome had in dealing with would support the view that there was no recent precedent, and so it took Rome by surprise

[applez]

Hmm...I can't help thinking one can look up the tree ring and ancient pollen data sets from Europe, Russia, and Asia to draw up a picture of what climate was like in the time of Ovid.

[applez]

There are quite a lot of proxies - O16/O18 is another. They will give you some idea of how warm or cold a period of years was, but we can't easily know about variations on a smaller scale (e.g. was there a particularly cold week where Ovid's wine froze). Also the various proxies don't always completely agree with each other.

Paul T

Time scale

[applez]

I would assume "Europe was much formerly cold than present" to mean a timescale longer than a week, but perhaps less long than a century, which would certainly be hard to discern in data clutter.

Re: Time scale

[applez]

Ovid's exile was early in the 1st century CE, and the incursion of the Vandals et al over the frozen rhine was early in the 5th century CE, so it may be that Gibbon is assuming that the climate was the same in the roughly 400 years between. In reality, it is likely that Europe was warming by the time of Ovid, and cooling by 400CE. Gibbon is almost certainly correct that there have been periods when Europe was cooler than it was at the time he was writing, but they are likely before and after the period of Roman imperial dominance (and that may not be a coincidence).

Paul T