London, Moscow, Old Delhi, Istabul, Edo, just some of the great cities that suffered heat waves, exceptional droughts, giant conflagrations and then numbing cold – all during The Little Ice Age.
Great Droughts, Great Fires, Great Cold
By tom0mason
CAGW advocates and the UN-IPCC do not want you looking at past times, do not want you to learn from documented history.
Of note is that in year 1666 when months of heatwave and drought affected most of Europe. At that time, London had lain under an exceptional drought since November 1665, and the wooden buildings were tinder-dry after the long hot summer of 1666. After such an unusually hot and dry spring, temperatures in the summer of 1666 rose 1.5°C above normal (estimated), and a precipitation shortfall of 6 inches turned London’s mostly wooden dwellings into large tinderboxes awaiting a spark. The same conditions prevailed in much of northwestern Europe, giving rise to fires in scores of German cities.
However the published diary writing of people like Samuel Pepys and others who survived the conflagration, such as the child Daniel Defoe (he would later write about the plagues and diseases of that time, and a first hand account of the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703), ensured the spectacular destruction of London were well documented, and it’s infamy was not overshadowed by other urban fires elsewhere in the world during this time.
London however was not the only capital city where unusual drought in the mid seventeenth century produced a ‘Great Fire’.
Moscow in 1648, after several months without rain, ‘within a few hours more than half the city inside the White Wall, and about half the city outside the wall, went up in flames’.
Large part of the new Mughal capital Shahjahanabad, aka ‘Old Delhi’, burnt down in 1662.
Istanbul suffered more, with numerically more devastating fires in the seventeenth century than in any other period of its history: one notable blaze was in 1660 (again after a prolonged drought) when it burned down 280,000 houses and several public buildings.
Major blazes also regularly devastated Edo, the largest city in Japan, notably the Meireki fire of 1657 – which, like those in Moscow in 1648, Istanbul in 1660 and London in 1666, broke out after an abnormal droughts.
All these happened during the LIA
And yes by December 1666, London like much of Europe was in the grip of a very cold winter, with severe frosts and ice over many European rivers including much of London’s Thames.
[Sources: wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London and http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/londonfire.htm
and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, by Geoffrey Parker.]
Note: The Great Fire of London consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated to have destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City’s 80,000 inhabitants.
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