A This 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. A这本书将会提供关于小冰河期和其他气候转变的详细解释。不过在开始之前我们先要了解一下相关的历史信息。 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. 我们会认为气候和与它相对的天气相比是不变的，然而在过去的73 万年间出现了8 次冰河期。人类在整个生存过程中受尽气候的影响。 Our ancestors adapted to the universal but irregular global warming since the end of the last great Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, with dazzling opportunism. 我们的祖先还是在1 万年前最后一次大冰河期末期万幸地适应了这种普遍但却不规则的全球变暖过程。 They developed strategies for surviving harsh drought cycles, decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold; adopted agriculture and stock-raising, which revolutionized human life; and founded the world's first pre-industrial civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas. 他们运用了各种策略幸存于干燥的环境中。几十年的严重风雨以及不寻常的寒冷，使他们学会改变了人类生活的耕种和畜牧，并在埃及、美索不达米亚和美洲实现了世界上最早的前工业化文明。 But the price of sudden climate change, in famine, disease and suffering, was often high. 但是突然的气候变化导致的饥荒、灾难和痛苦的代价却是非常高的。

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B The Little Ice Age lasted from roughly 1300 until the middle of the nineteenth century. B小冰河期从1300 年开始到19 世纪中叶结束。 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. 欧洲在大概两个世纪以前经历了一个非常寒冷的冰冻期。在瑞士阿尔卑斯山脉上的冰川是有记录中最低的部分，而环绕冰岛的冰块也存在了很多年。 The climatic events of the Little Ice Age did more than help shape the modern world. 这些小冰河期的气候事件做了许多改变现代世界的事， They are the deeply important context for the current unprecedented global warming. 它们对于现在发生的空前的全球变暖也有重大影响。 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. 小冰河期与完全的冰冻还是有很大的区别的，不过它更像是一些不规则和不稳定的气候变化，其中很少有能够持续多于1/4 世纪的，这些变化来源于复杂且尚不得而知的大气和海洋互动。 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. 这种不稳定带来了周而复始的严寒的冬季和东风，然后突然离去转变为若干年的春季和初夏时节才有的大雨、舒适的冬天以及频繁的大西洋风暴，又或者，变为长时间的干旱，轻柔的东北风以及夏天的热浪。

C Reconstructing the climate changes of the past is extremely difficult, because systematic weather observations began only a few centuries ago, in Europe and North America. C气候变化的重建过程是非常困难的，因为系统的天气观测在几个世纪前在欧洲和北美才刚刚开始。 Records from India and tropical Africa are even more recent. 而印度和热带非洲更是只有最近的气候记录。 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. 在没有记录之前，我们只有一些从树的年轮和冰核中发现的大规模的关于重建的“间接记录”，以及一些不完整的文字记录。 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. 现在，我们拥有上百个整个北半球的年轮记录，以及一些南半球的记录，还有一些从南极洲、格陵兰以及其他地方钻探出的冰核中的温度记录。 We are close to knowledge of annual summer and winter temperature variations over much of the northern hemisphere going back 600 years. 有了这些，我们几乎了解了600 年前北半球大部分地区每年冬夏温度变化的情况。

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D This 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. D这本书描述了过去10 个世纪的气候变化史，以及欧洲人在适应这种变化时的一些方法。 Part One describes the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 900 t0 1200. 第一部分描述了从大约900-1200 年间的中世纪温暖期。 During these three centuries, Norse voyagers from Northern Europe explored northern seas, settled Greenland, and visited North America. 在这300 年间，北欧航海家们探索了北部海域，包括格陵兰，并且去到了北美洲。 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. 这段时期并不是一直保持着温暖，而是从大冰河期开始一直保持着恒定的雨季和气温的变化。 Mean European temperatures were about the same as today, perhaps slightly cooler. 那时欧洲的平均温度和现在基本一样，也可能会比现在的温度要冷一点点。

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E It is known that the Little Ice Age cooling began in Greenland and the Arctic in about 1200. E我们现在所知道的是小冰河期的冰冻过程是从1200 年在格陵兰和北极洲开始的。 As the Arctic ice pack spread southward, Norse voyages to the west were rerouted into the open Atlantic, then ended altogether. 由于北极的冰块向南扩散，北欧通往西边的航行被重新引入辽阔的大西洋中并在那里终结。 Storminess increased in the North Atlantic and North Sea. 暴风雨在北大西洋和北海逐渐增多。 Colder, much wetter weather descended on Europe between 1315 and 1319, when thousands perished in a continent-wide famine. 更冷更湿的天气在1315 年和1319 年之间降临了欧洲，上千人在遍布欧洲的饥荒中死亡。 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. 到了1400 年，天气变得更加难以预测，同时出现了更多的风暴天气，在16 世纪末期还出现了更突然的天气变化以及几十年寒冷天气导致的更低的温度。 Fish were a vital commodity in growing towns and cities, where food supplies were a constant concern. 当食物供应吃紧时，鱼类成为发展中城镇的必需品。 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. 干的鳕鱼和鲱鱼成为欧洲鱼市上最主要的产品，不过水温的变化逼迫船队去更远的海域谋生。 The Basques, Dutch, and English developed the first offshore fishing boats adapted to a colder and stormier Atlantic. 巴斯克人、荷兰人以及英国人发明了第一艘可以在更冷和风暴更强的大西洋海域捕鱼的渔船。 A gradual agricultural revolution in northern Europe stemmed from concerns over food supplies at a time of rising populations. 由于担心人口增长导致食品供应不足北欧也出现了渐进式的农业革命。 The revolution involved intensive commercial farming and the growing of animal fodder on land not previously used for crops. 这个革命包括集中的商业耕种及将更多的土地用于种植动物草料而不是从前的谷物。 The increased productivity from farmland made some countries self-sufficient in grain and livestock and offered effective protection against famine. 农场不断增加的生产能力使很多国家在牲畜和谷物方面可以自给自足，并有效地保证了不被饥荒所威胁。

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F Global temperatures began to rise slowly after 1850, with the beginning of the Modern Warm Period. F全球气温从1850 年开始缓慢上升，这也是现代温暖期的开始。 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. 有大量缺乏土地的欧洲农场主及其他受到爱尔兰土豆枯萎病影响而遭受饥荒的人迁移到了北美、澳大利亚、新西兰以及南非。 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. 1850 年到1890 年间，有上百万公顷的森林在被新来者的斧子砍伐前就被流行于全世界的密集式欧洲耕种法所砍倒。 The unprecedented land clearance released vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, triggering for the first time humanly caused global warming. 这种前所未有的陆地清理过程向大气释放了大量的二氧化碳，也引发了第一次人为的全球变暖事件。 Temperatures climbed more rapidly in the twentieth century as the use of fossil fuels proliferated and greenhouse gas levels continued to soar. 由于密集的使用化石燃料以及温室气体水平的不断升高，20 世纪的温度不断迅速攀升。 The rise has been even steeper since the early 1980s. 从1980 年到现在温度升高得更加迅速。 The Little Ice Age has given way to a new climatic regime, marked by prolonged and steady warming. 伴随着延长了的和稳定的变暖过程，小冰河期为新的气候体系提供了一种办法。 At the same time, extreme weather events like Category 5 hurricanes are becoming more frequent. 而与此同时，如5 级飓风等极端气候事件也出现得越来越频繁。