Europe's chill linked to disease ---BBC

[Demeter]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4755328.stm

By Kate Ravilious



Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study. Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says. The Little Ice Age was a period of some 300 years when Europe experienced a dip in average temperatures.

Dr Thomas van Hoof and his colleagues studied pollen grains and leaf remains collected from lake-bed sediments in the southeast Netherlands. Monitoring the ups and downs in abundance of cereal pollen (like buckwheat) and tree pollen (like birch and oak) enabled them to estimate changes in land-use between AD 1000 and 1500. The team found an increase in cereal pollen from 1200 onwards (reflecting agricultural expansion), followed by a sudden dive around 1347, linked to the agricultural crisis caused by the arrival of the Black Death, most probably a bacterial disease spread by rat fleas.
his bubonic plague is said to have wiped out over a third of Europe's population.

From around 1500, Europe appears to have been gripped by a chill lasting some 300 years. There are many theories as to what caused these bitter years, but popular ideas include a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or a change in ocean circulation. The new data adds weight to the theory that the Black Death could have played a pivotal role.

Not everyone is convinced, however. Dr Tim Lenton, an environmental scientist from the University of East Anglia, UK, said: "It is a nice study and the carbon dioxide changes could certainly be a contributory factor, but I think they are too modest to explain all the climate change seen." And Professor Richard Houghton, a climate expert from Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, US, believes that the oceans would have compensated for the change. "The atmosphere is in equilibrium with the ocean and this tends to dampen or offset small changes in terrestrial carbon uptake," he explained. Nonetheless, the new findings are likely to cause a stir. "It appears that the human impact on the environment started much earlier than the industrial revolution," said Dr van Hoof.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4755328.stm

Published: 2006/02/27 13:48:08 GMT

[xchrom]

1. i thought there was some doubt about whether the

plague that racked europe was in fact bubonic?

any way i can't see how farming at that time would have that kind of severe impact on the environment.

[SheilaT]

2. I saw something on TV recently

(one of the science-type channels) in which some researcher is convinced the Black Death wasn't bubonic plague, but he seems to be the only one who thinks that. At least I haven't ever run across anything in all of the many things I've read about it that suggests other scientists think that way.

What's often overlooked in the spread of the plague is that 14th Century Europeans lived in great filth, often not bathing at all. Needless to say hand-washing was pretty much non-existent, and hand-washing is the single best and most effective public health measure out there.

That's another reason fears of avian flu creating another epidemic as happened in 1918 miss the point. 90 years ago even in this country many, perhaps most, people did not have running water. Hand-washing was much less common than now.

[GliderGuider]

3. The reason there's some doubt about it being the plague

is that quarantines of towns were effective in keeping the plague from spreading. This implies that it was spread by human-to-human contact rather than rats carrying diseased fleas - rats don't obey quarantines, while people do. One speculation, based on the reports of victims vomiting blood continuously until they died, is that it might have been some kind of haemmorrhagic disease.

From the CBC:

It is clear, therefore, that throughout the Age of Plagues, the disease was correctly recognised as a directly infectious disease and this belief continued until the end of the 19th Century. Why then is it popularly assumed that these devastating epidemics were outbreaks of bubonic plague, a disease that is spread to humans by rats and fleas? This bacterial disease had been grumbling in Asia for centuries, but in the 1890s it erupted violently and caused grievous loss of life. Steamships then carried infected rats and fleas from the infested warehouses of the Chinese ports to many of the warmer parts of the world, wherever suitable rodent hosts could be found, and the pandemic of the 20th Century had begun.

Swellings of the lymph glands (called buboes) are one feature of bubonic plague and, because these were also found in some victims of the Black Death, everybody in about 1900 leaped to the conclusion that bubonic plague was also responsible for all the plagues of Europe in the Middle Ages and this view has persisted for the whole of the twentieth century. However, the real diagnostic feature of the Black Death was the haemorrhagic red spots on the chest, which were called God’s tokens and were the result of bleeding from damaged blood vessels under the skin. Nobody compared the two diseases objectively and this view, based solely on the appearance of one symptom, was universally accepted without question. To distinguish clearly between the two diseases, we have named the disease that caused the Black Death haemorrhagic plague.

The History of the Black Death

[SheilaT]

7. Th Black Death occurred

in three different forms, one of which was spread by rats' fleas, and the most virulent and deadly of which was an airborne version, which is what you and the researcher are referring to. I can't recall the third way. They've long been considered to be three different forms of the same disease, by which I mean that it was the same pathogen with three different methods of transmission.

At least that's been the conventional thinking for some time, and of course modern science can certainly change our understanding of things.

[EuroObserver]

4. Very interesting, thanks.

Seems to me that this disease may also have had a lot to do with the many social changes that began to take place in mid-medieval Europe, including (but certainly not limited to) the beginning of the end of traditional feudalism; wonderfully inspired while at the same time very practical varieties of monasticism, and then universities in relatively very independent (of the otherwise totalitarian divine/military-right authorities) cities/city states; the various varieties of Protestantism; the social nature of the USA as we know it today.

Ah, and we also have The Canterbury Tales and The Decamaron, for example (and just for a start).

Better (ie. real) scholars than I could jump in here...

[Demeter]

5. You Almost Make Me Look Forward to Global Warming!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Yes, the disruptions caused by killing 1/3 of the population

must have been paradoxically liberating for a lot of people. Imagine a group of peasants discovering that the lord of the manor and all his family are dead...