The Little Ice Age Energy Transition

Debates are now familiar on how industrial civilisation's use of fossil energy causes global warming, even to the point of pushing the Earth System past environmental thresholds into a new geologic era, the Anthopocene. Much less attention has been paid to how human responses to an already changing climate change may have triggered the transition to flossil energy use. Before the global warming after c. 1850, the long-term climate trend over the past millennia has been towards a cooler climate. This trend was especially pronounced in the northern hemisphere, determined largely by the shifting angle of the Earth axis and internal feedbacks of the climate system (such as ice reflecting more sunlight), with the ultimate prospects of another glacial maximum in about 80 to 120 thousand years. However, countering this trend there were also increasing CO2 and methane levels from human land use - deforestation, wet-rice paddies, domesticated animals - which also had their climate system feedbacks. The stakes were raised in this battle between cooling and warming forces when volcanic eruptions, decreased solar irradiance, and pandemics, butted in on the side of cooling in what is known as the Little Ice Age, c. 1350-1850.

In this project I propose and will try to test how this cooling may have had something to do with the transition to fossil energy use for domestic heating in early modern London and England, c. 1550-1700. Thus, unlike the conventional 'masculine' attention paid to industrial uses and the mechanical transformation of energy through steam engines and railways, this project will be centred more around the domestic hearth, housing, and questions about how changing heating degree days affected the demand for fuel relative to that for other goods. It is curious that although it is well known that coal was used primarily as a domestic source of heating, and the origins and spread of the 'coal-heated house' has been identified as the chief driver of coal demand, almost no attention (barring Margaret Spufford) has been paid to the possible role of climate for this vernacular architectural innovation. Now, given that the principal function of a house is protection from the elements, I will make a case for climate, in addition to the more well-rehearsed explanatory variables such as commercialisation and urban population growth.