A 本书详细讨论了小冰期和其他气候变化，但是在我开始部分之前，我要向大家提供一个相关的历史背景。我们倾向于认为气候是不变的(与天气正好相反)。然而，人类自存在之日起就一直受到气候变化的支配——过去的73万年间至少出现过八次冰河期。自从大约一万年前的上一次大冰河期的末期开始，我们的祖先就凭借非凡的投机手段适应着普遍存在却并不规律的全球变暖。他们制定了各种策略，以便在周期性的大干旱、连绵数十年的暴雨或罕见的低温环境中存活；他们发展的农业和畜牧业给人类的生活带来了革命；他们在埃及、美索不达米亚和美洲大陆建立了世界上最早的前工业化文明。但是，气候骤变带来的恶果——饥荒、瘟疫和苦难，往往十分严重。

AThis 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.

B 小冰期大致从公元1300年持续到19世纪中期。仅两个世纪以前，欧洲遭遇了周期性的严冬，瑞士阿尔卑斯山脉的高山冰川的高度达到史上最低，冰岛周围常年被浮冰环绕。小冰期的气候活动不仅在塑造现代地球环境方面发挥了作用，也为如今史无前例的全球变暖现象提供了温床。然而，小冰期远非一个深度冰冻期，它实际上是由大气与海洋之间复杂难解的相互作用引起的、持续期普遍短于25年的一系列不规则气候剧变的集合。这样的起伏波动先是带来周期性的严冬和东风，然后又突然转变为持续数年的春季暴雨、夏季早雨、暖冬和频繁的大西洋风暴，抑或周期性干旱、轻东北风和酷暑热浪。

BThe 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.

C 重构过去的气候变化极其困难，因为系统的天气观测仅仅在几个世纪之前才始于欧洲和北美洲。印度和热带非洲的记录开始得更晚。至于有记录之前的年代，我们只有“代理记录”——大部分根据树木的年轮和冰芯(的数据)重建，并辅之以少量不完整的手写记录。如今，我们拥有几百份树木年轮的记录，遍布北半球和赤道以南的很多地区；我们还从南极洲、格陵兰岛、秘鲁安第斯及其他地区钻得的冰芯中得到了越来越多的温度数据时该记录进行补充。我们很快就要掌握北半球大部600前年的年度冬夏温度变化了。

D 本书讲述了过去10个世纪间气候变化的历史，还介绍了欧洲人为了适应气候变化所采用的一些方法。第一部分描述了中世纪暖期，大致从公元900年持续到1200年。在这三个世纪中，古斯堪的纳维亚的航海者们从欧洲北部出发探索北海，在格陵兰岛定居，并探访了北美大陆。当时的气候就像大冰河期之后的所有时期一样，并非始终如一的暖期：雨量和温度经历着持续的变化。当时欧洲的平均温度和现在差不多，可能稍低一点。

CReconstructing 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.

E 众所周知，大约从公元1200年起，格陵兰岛和北极开始降温，小冰期到来。由于北极浮冰向南扩散，古斯堪的纳维亚向西的航海路线变更至开放的大西洋，然后一切航行都终止了。北大西洋和北海的风暴增加。1315年至1319年间，更冷更潮湿的天气降临欧洲大际同，成千上万的人死于横扫整个大陆的饥荒。到了1400年，天气明显变得更加难以预测，狂风暴雨的几率大增，间或出现气温急转直下，在16世纪末的几十年寒期时降到谷底。在那些正在兴起的城镇里，食品供应向来重要，而鱼类是至关重要的商品。鳕鱼干和鲱鱼干已成为欧洲鱼类贸易的主要产品，但是水温的变化迫使渔船驶向更加远离海岸的海域。巴斯克人、荷兰人和英国人最先造出了能够适应在寒冷、多风暴的大西洋中航行的离岸渔船。在人口增加时期，对食物供应的关心导致了北欧渐进的农业革命。这次革命带来了集中的商业耕种，以及为了种植动物饲料而在非农作物用地上进行的土地开垦。农作物产量的提高使得部分国家能够实现粮食和家畜的自给自足，为抵制饥荒提供了有效保障。

DThis 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.

F 1850年以后，全球温度开始逐渐上升，拉开了现代暖期的序幕。一大批欧洲居民——从渴求土地的农民，到不堪爱尔兰马铃薯饥荒(由马铃薯枯萎病引起)的饥民——移居到了北美、澳大利亚、新西兰和非洲南部。1850年至1890年间，由于集中式欧洲农耕法传遍全球，数百万公顷的森林和林地毁于拓荒者的斧下。前所未有的大规模开荒使得巨量的二氧化碳被排入大气，并引起第一次人为的全球变暖。到了20世纪，由于矿物燃料的使用激增、温室气体量的持续增加，气温攀升的速度进一步加快。尤其是20世纪80年代以来，升温的速度加剧。小冰期被一种新的气候变化模式取代，其显著特点是长期、稳定的升温。与此同时，极端天气，如五级以上的飓风，正变得更加频繁。

EIt 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.

FGlobal 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.