Chapter 1 - The Climate History of North America

Summary

Using a combination of computer model simulations and evidence derived from natural and textual archives, scholars have come to understand that climate change shaped the human history of North America from first settlement to the present. The advance and retreat of continent-straddling ice sheets during the Pleistocene sculpted its distinctive landscape, while the smaller oscillations of the relatively warm Medieval Climate Anomaly and the cooler Little Ice Age influenced the fate of its peoples. Since the nineteenth century, warming driven by human greenhouse gas emissions increased the likelihood of weather extremes that inspired political and social change across the United States. It is in this dynamic context that ideas of climate change found expression in American literary culture.