22 December
Winter here is associated with cold weather and sometimes snow. But there have been much colder winters than others.
Several centuries of relatively low temperatures begun around the 15th century. Average temperatures dropped of about 0.6 °C between 1450 and 1850 in comparison with the following 1850–1950 period. It is known as the Little Ice Age.
It brought colder winters to Europe and North America. For example farms and villages in the Swiss Alps were destroyed by encroaching glaciers, canals and rivers in Great Britain and the Netherlands were frequently frozen.
This was particularly evident during the “Grindelwald Fluctuation” (1560–1630) when the colder temperatures were also associated with more erratic weather, increased storminess, unseasonal snowstorms, and droughts.
Agriculture practices throughout Europe struggled to adapt to the shortened and less reliable growing season, and there were many years of deaths caused by famine, hypothermia, bread riots, but also witch-hunting, as Europeans sought explanations for what they were experiencing, and they blamed marginalized groups and individuals, including poor old women, many of them widows. The peaks of witchcraft persecutions overlap with the hunger crises that occurred in 1570 and 1580. Jewish populations were also blamed for climatic deterioration during the Little Ice Age.
There are effects also in art. For example the depiction of winter in paintings occurred almost entirely from 1565 to 1665. Scholars claim that there had been almost no depictions of winter as a stand alone subject in art prior to this period, and hypothesize that the unusually harsh winter of 1565 inspired great artists to depict highly original images. Snowy winter landscapes, particularly stormy seascapes, became artistic genres in the Dutch Republic. All of the famous winter landscape paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, for example, such as The Hunters in the Snow, are thought to have been painted in 1565.
Paintings and contemporary records in Scotland demonstrate also that curling and ice skating were popular outdoor winter sports also there in this same period, with curling dating back to the 16th century and becoming widely popular in the mid-19th century. And all of this for just a drop of 0.6°C
