Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

A review of the risks of sudden global cooling and

its effects on agriculture
Kjeld C. Engvild
Plant Research Department, PRD-313, Risoe National Laboratory, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
Received 11 February 2002; received in revised form 28 November 2002; accepted 14 December 2002

Abstract
Global warming has received much attention, but evidence from the past shows that sudden global cooling has occurred with
severe failures of agriculture. Extrapolating from dendrochronological evidence, one can predict the following: Approximately
once per century there will be a drop of about 0.51 C in mean temperature worldwide. In some of these cases, perhaps once
every 200 or 300 years this might endanger agricultural production globally. About once per millenium there will be periods of
520 years where the temperature is seriously below normal. The last major one year temperature drop was 1816, the year without a summer, probably caused by the cooling effect of the eruption of the volcano Tambora, Indonesia. The last decade-long
cooling event was a.d. 536545 where dust veil, cold, famine, and plague was recorded in Byzantium and China. Very large
volcanic eruptions or a comet/asteroid impact have been suggested as cause. Nuclear winter after large-scale nuclear war is a
well-known scenario, but climate instabilities may also be caused by changes in the sun, Milankovitch cycles, changes in ocean
currents, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, dusting from comets passing close, methane released from its hydrate, and pollution. The
risks associated with sudden global cooling are rather smaller than the risks of global warming, but they are real. A dangerous
sudden cooling event will happen sooner or later. Ability to change to cold-resistant crops rapidly in large parts of the world
may be necessary to avoid major famines. With some important exceptions, fundamental research in abrupt climate change
is in place, but agricultural or economic research on volcanic/comet-dusting/nuclear winters and their mitigation is lacking.
2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Dust veil; Dry fog; Haze; Global change; Nuclear winter; Volcanic winter

1. Unstable climate
Normally people believe that climate is quite stable. Many recognize that the recent global warming is
probably due to increases in greenhouse gases, such
as methane and carbon dioxide. Many people also recognize that there has been a little ice age from about
13501850 where Londoners skated on the Thames,
the Dutch painted vivid winter scenery from their
canals and armies crossed the straits of the Baltic sea
Tel.: +45-46-77-41-44; fax: +45-46-77-42-02.
E-mail address: kjeld.engvild@risoe.dk (K.C. Engvild).

on foot. The recurrence of ice ages is taught in schools,

and we learn that we are probably living in an interglacial age. Even so, very few people think that climate
is very variable, although Christmases were whiter in
childhood and hurricanes seem to be stronger now.
Also many climatologists have had this concept of a
stable climate as a fundamental assumption.
This attitude started to change after 1980, when
more and more scientific results emerged on Greenland and Antarctic ice cores (Dansgaard et al., 1993;
Petit et al., 1999; Adams et al., 1999; Taylor, 1999;
Stocker, 2000; Lockwood, 2001), on ocean sediments
(Bond et al., 1992, 2001), on tree rings series spanning

0168-1923/03/$ see front matter 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0168-1923(02)00253-8

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K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

6000 years (Baillie and Munro, 1988; Baillie, 1994,

1995, 1999; Briffa et al., 1998; Briffa, 2000; DArrigo
et al., 2001), and from archaeology. The evidence
is that climate changes quite often, sometimes very
rapidly. Climatologists talk about Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles during the ice age (Dansgaard et al., 1993;
Rahmstorf, 2002), with changes in mean temperatures of 510 C within 203040 years. Some historians talk about rapid climate changes as cause of the
large migrations and falls of great empires (Hsu, 1998;
DeMenocal, 2001; Weiss and Bradley, 2001). The climate changes may vary from the scale of 1 year, over
decades, millennia and 100 000 years (Adams et al.,
1999; Taylor, 1999). In the following I shall discuss
some of the evidence that climate changes might happen suddenly, the possible causes, and what the consequences might be.
1.1. Years without summer
The year without a summer was recorded in
both North America and Europe in 1816 (Stommel
and Stommel, 1979; Stothers, 1984). There were
crop-killing frosts in July in Massachusetts and food
riots in France. The maize harvest was particularly
affected while the wheat yields suffered less. Evidence from dendrochronology, the science of dating
by tree rings, has shown that the year without a summer was not a unique event. Such years have not
been uncommon since a.d. 1400. Briffa et al. (1998)
have pinpointed five other years (Table 1). The mean
temperature drop was 0.40.8 C. Other evidence also

shows strong yearly variability within the last 600

years (Mann et al., 1998).
1.2. Decade-long cold excursions
It has long been recognized that climate changed
several times during historic times (Denton and
Karlen, 1973; Bond et al., 1997; DeMenocal et al.,
2000). The climate was quite warm during the Bronze
Age in Western Europe, and it was harsher and colder
during the Iron Age. There was a cold spell called the
little ice age, which lasted from about 1350 to 1850.
At least seven cases are known where temperatures
dropped suddenly and stayed low for 316 years
(Table 2). Again important evidence comes from
the dendrochronologists with their world wide net
of tree ring series, spanning 6000 years, from Irish,
English and German oaks, Scandinavian pines, and
American bristle cone pines and foxtails (LaMarche
and Hirschboeck, 1984; Baillie and Munro, 1988;
Baillie, 1994, 1995, 1999; Keys, 1999; Briffa, 2000;
DArrigo et al., 2001). The temperature fell from a.d.
536 to 545, which was described both in Chinese and
Byzantine chronicles as a period of weak sun, visible
only for a few hours around noon, and casting no
shadow (Baillie, 1995, 1999). During the period there
was crop failure, famine and pestilence (Baillie, 1999;
Keys, 1999). Holocene variability has also been documented in glacier and tree line fluctuations (Karln,
1998). The evidence for the 536545 a.d. cooling
(Table 2) is solid with independent tree chronologies,
and historical confirmation from several places. The

Table 1
The mean summer temperatures on the northern hemisphere after very large volcano eruptions, deduced from low tree ring density
Year

Mean summer
temperature fall ( C)

Volcano eruption

Volcanic explosivity
index

1453
1601
1641
1695

0.5
0.8
0.5
0.4

Kuwae, SW Pacific, 1452

Huaynaputina, Peru, 1600
Parker, Philipines, 1641
Unknown

6
6?
6

1816
1817

0.5
0.4

Tambora, Indonesia, 1815

1912
1991

0.4
(0.5)a

Katmai, Alaska, 1912

Pinatubo, Philipines

6
6

Data according to Briffa et al. (1998) and Briffa, 2000. The Volcano explosivity index goes from 0 (no change) to 7 (super colossal).
a Global mean temperature fall (McCormick et al., 1995).

K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

129

Table 2
Decade-long episodes of very narrow tree rings and frost ring anomalies, spanning most of the northern hemisphere
Year

Tree ring anomalies

Volcano

536545 a.d.

Oak, N. Ireland; Scots pine, Fennoscandia; bristle cone

pine, USA; fox tail, USA; fitzroya, Argentina, Chile
Bristle cone pine, USA; oak, England
Oak, Germany; bristle cone pine, USA
Oak, N. Ireland; Juniper, wide rings, wet conditions, Turkey
Bristle cone pine, USA; oak, N. Ireland; oak, England
Oak, N. Ireland, extensive flooding?
Oak, N. Ireland
Oak, N. Ireland

Comet/asteroid? Baillie; Krakatoa? (Keys, 1999)

4441 b.c.
208204 b.c.
11591141 b.c.
16341627 b.c.
23542345 b.c.
About 3190 b.c.
About 4370 b.c.

Unknown (Stothers, 1999)

Unknown
Hekla 3?
Santorini?

Data taken from Baillie (1995, 1999). Also compare LaMarche and Hirschboeck (1984), Baillie and Munro (1988), Briffa (2000).

evidence for the other decade-long coolings in Table 2

is strong, but the dating of the events is weak due
to fewer tree chronologies. Both tree chronologies
and history point to periods of climate deterioration
(Stothers, 1999; DArrigo et al., 2001).
1.3. Ice age climate changes
The first strong indication of sudden, rapid climate
changes came from the famous oxygen isotope studies of the ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica
(Dansgaard et al., 1993; Petit et al., 1999). It is possible to deduce the temperature during which the ice
formed from the ratios between the stable oxygen
isotopes as measured by mass spectrometry. The ice
cores have covered more than 100 000 years. These
measurements have shown that the Greenland average
temperatures have fluctuated between two levels with
differences in mean yearly temperatures of 7 C over

periods of about 3000 years. These very large shifts

in mean temperatures occurred very rapidly over a period from 50 to 200 years. Over long time-scales, temperature highs and temperature lows occurred roughly
simultaneously in Greenland and the Antarctica. On
shorter time-scales, cooling in the arctic often coincided with warming in the Antarctic and vice versa,
so-called see-sawing (Blunier et al., 1998; Stocker,
2000; Rahmstorf, 2002) (Fig. 1).

2. Possible causes
Many causes for the temperature variations have
been proposed (Crowley, 2000; Zachos et al., 2001):
(1) changes in the solar constant, that is changes in
the energy output of the sun; (2) Milankovitch cycles,
changes in the earths orbit altering the irradiation
close to the poles; (3) changes in ocean currents

Fig. 1. The very large variations in Greenland temperature during the last ice age. Courtesy: Johnsen and Dansgaard (unpublished), compare
Dansgaard et al. (1993).

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K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

which changes heat transport from equator to the

poles; (4) volcanic eruptions creating dust veils; (5)
comet/asteroid impacts creating dust veils; (6) dusting from comets passing close, creating dust veils
as stratospheric ice. In the future can be added two
new causes of human origin: (7) changes caused by
pollution haze and greenhouse gases and (8) nuclear
winter caused by dust veil after large-scale nuclear
war.
Several of the mechanisms act via changes in radiative forcing, i.e. via changes in the amount of energy that reaches the surface of the earth (Eddy, 1976;
Hansen et al., 1997; Hansen, 2000). Change in this
amount of less than one percent will cause changes in
climate especially if the these changes happen close
to the poles.
These various mechanisms interact in subtle ways,
linked by positive and negative feedbacks, so there
are large disagreements about the importance of each.
Large feedback exists between for example dust veils,
ocean currents, presence or absence of permanent
snow cover and ocean pack ice, cloud cover, with
resultant changes in the albedo of the earth.
2.1. Changes in the solar output
Most people assume that the energy output of our
sun is constant. But there is good evidence that this is
only an approximation. Perry and Hsu (2000) believe
that all important climate changes can be explained by
changes in solar output; this is probably too simplified.
However, the peak of the little ice age from 1350 to
1850 coincided with the Maunder minimum (Eddy,
1976), a reduction in the number of sun spots which
seem linked to reduced solar output. It is a fact that
the production of 14 C varies so much that age determination by the counting of tree rings must be used to
calibrate 14 C age determination (Stuiver and Becker,
1993). 14 C is produced in the stratosphere by cosmic
rays which are modulated by solar activity such that
low solar activity causes high 14 C production (Beer
et al., 2000). So there have clearly been changes in
solar activity in the past. Bond et al. (2001) and Van
Geel et al. (1999), have shown strong correlation between climate cycles and the content of 14 C and 10 Be
in sediments. There is also some evidence that the
solar wind/cosmic radiation changes influence cloud
cover (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen, 1997).

2.2. Milankovitch cycles

So why has there been ice ages lasting about
100 000 years interspersed with interglacials of
1020 000 years? Milankovitch suggested that this
can be explained by an astronomic model (Muller and
MacDonald, 1997; Alley and Clark, 1999; Rial, 1999;
Zachos et al., 2001). The amount of sunshine received
at the poles varies according to the tilt of the earth, the
earths distance to the sun and whether northern summer or southern summer occurs when earth is far from
the sun. The three Milankovitch cycles have periods
of 100 000, 40 000 and 23 000 years. Modern models
tend to support the Milankovitch model (Alley and
Clark, 1999; Zachos et al., 2001), but a major difficulty
seems to be that the 100 000 years ice age cycle coincides with the Milankovitch cycle which is weakest.
2.3. Ocean currents
Climate and ocean currents are intricately linked,
as proven by el Nio and la Nia phenomena. The
present interglacial climate is probably maintained
by the Thermohaline Conveyor (Rahmstorf, 1995,
2002; Broecker, 1995, 1997; Stocker, 2000). The conveyor consists of the Gulf Stream plus the formation
of very dense cold high-salt water close to Iceland
and Greenland by evaporation and pack ice freezing.
The dense water sinks and forms deep-water currents
flowing south to the Antarctic and then north into the
Indian and pacific oceans. This total system of ocean
currents seems to be quite sensitive to small disturbances, especially fresh water influx, causing some
climatologists to talk of chaotic climate (Rahmstorf,
1995; Broecker, 1995, 1997).
2.4. Volcanoes, dust veils and SO2
Large volcano eruptions can have effects on climate through the formation of dust veils and sulfuric
acid clouds in the stratosphere, formed from SO2 and
water vapor (Lamb, 1970). Dust particles and the sulfuric acid droplets both act on climate by reflecting or
absorbing light; they increase the earths albedo, and
the overall effect is measurable cooling (Andreae and
Crutzen, 1997; Bertrand et al., 1999; Stothers, 1999;
Robock, 2000; Zielinski, 2000; Ramanathan et al.,
2001). Outbreaks in the tropics have larger climate

K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

effects than outbreaks close to the poles, because the

haze will quickly spread north and south and cover
both hemispheres. The most recent example is the eruption of Pinatubo, which caused a cooling of about
0.5 C in 1991 (McCormick et al., 1995). The Tambora
eruption in Indonesia in 1815 was about 100 times bigger (Stothers, 1984). It was probably the cause of the
year without a summer in 1816 (Stommel and Stommel, 1979) and the very bad years after that. The Toba
erution about 75 000 years ago was 100 times larger
than Tambora (Rampino and Self, 1992). It probably
caused a decade-long deep plunge in temperature.
It has been proposed that the eruption and destruction of Santorini caused a major climate change
along with the elimination of the Minoan civilization
(LaMarche and Hirschboeck, 1984; Rampino et al.,
1988; Baillie and Munro, 1988; Baillie, 1999). Traces
of large eruptions are numerous in the Greenland ice
cores as sulfuric acid acidity (Hammer et al., 1980). If
several very large eruptions occur within a short timespan, there could be decade-long cooling of several degrees centigrade, with complete destruction of crops.
The decade-long cooling 536543 is very well documented in dendrochronological records (LaMarche
and Hirschboeck, 1984; Briffa, 2000; DArrigo et al.,
2001) and the presence of haze/dust veil is evident in
the historical records (Baillie, 1999; Keys, 1999). It
has, however, been difficult to find a corresponding
large acid layer in the arctic or Antarctic ice pointing
to large-scale volcanism (Baillie, 1995, 1999).

131

about 10 megatons of TNT (Chyba et al., 1993) and

flattened the forest over 2000 km2 .
The impacts of comet ShoemakerLevy 9 fragments on the gas planet Jupiter in 1994 (Boslough
and Crawford, 1997; Crawford, 1997; Toon et al.,
1997; Levy, 1998) have shown that comet air-burst
impacts are quite complex. For example, an outgassed comet, a flying rubble pile 0.3-km diameter,
mass about 14 million tons, at 15 km/s would hit the
earth about once per 3700 years (Solar System Collisions, http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact.html,
Shoemaker, 1983; Chapman and Morrison, 1994;
Kring et al., 1996). Such a rubble pile would explode in a few kilometers altitude with an energy of
300 Megatons TNT and produce a fireball more than
1000 km high. The fine dust and vapor condensates
would cover the entire globe above the stratosphere
at heights of 50200 km within days. This dust veil
would slowly drift to the ground over the next couple
of years. The dust in the stratosphere would weigh
1012 million tons. Supplemented with atmospheric
water vapor and newly synthesized nitrogen oxides
this would give 3050 mg of smoke for every square
meter earth surface, which could reduce insulation
especially near the poles. The seriousness of such an
impact would to a very large degree depend on the
number of fires ignited. An impact over the pacific
would not be so dangerous, but if many thousands
of square kilometers were ignited simultaneously, the
earth might be covered in smoke and soot comparable
to the nuclear winter scenarios.

2.5. Comets and asteroids

2.6. Comet dusting
That the Dinosaurs died out because of an asteroid
impact 65 million years ago has caught the imagination of the public (Alvarez et al., 1980; Cockell and
Stokes, 1999). Each year the earth is hit by 5-m meteoroids delivering an explosion 50 km above ground
level equivalent to one kiloton TNT, comparable to
a small nuclear weapon. The small country of Estonia has three crater fields, Kaalijrv, Ilumetsa and
Tsoorikme from three separate impacts during the
last 10 000 years (Raukas, 2000). Most asteroid/comet
impacts never hit the ground. Instead there are high
air-burst impacts in the military language. Last time
there was a very large asteroid impact was in 1908,
where a 3050 m large bolide exploded in about 10 km
altitude over Tunguska in Siberia with an energy of

In addition to the standard risks of comet/asteroid

impacts (Near Earth Object Program, http://neo.jpl.
nasa.gov; Kring et al., 1996; Toon et al., 1997) the
earth might be hit by large numbers of meteorites
from a comet passing very closewithin the orbit
of the moonbut not hitting the earth (Hoyle and
Wickramasinghe, 1978; Clube and Napier, 1990;
Clube et al., 1996). The resulting dust veil from, e.g.
millions of tons of meteorites would cause major
cooling. The probability of a comet dusting is much
larger than the probability of an impact. In the first
case the comet should pass within a circle of 100 000
200 000 km radius from the earth, in the second case
the comet/asteroid should hit within a circle of about

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K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

78000 km radius. There is some evidence that the

accretion rate of interplanetary dust varies (Farley
et al., 1998; Kortenkamp and Dermott, 1998).
2.7. Other climate factors
The location and the altitude of continents are
important factors in the overall climate of the earth
on a scale of millions of years (Crowley and Burke,
1998; Ruddiman and Kutzbach, 1991). Like the
Milankovitch cycles they are only in indirect ways
important in sudden global cooling. The same is true
for greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane,
which are decreased about one third during ice ages
(Petit et al., 1999). There are great uncertainties of the
reasons for that. There are large reserves of methane
hydrate on the ocean bottoms (Kvenvolden, 1999;
Suess et al., 1999). Some people believe that a catastrophic release of methane from this methane hydrate
could lead to a runaway greenhouse effect (Suess
et al., 1999; Kennett et al., 2000).
2.8. Nuclear winter
Now, the technology of mankind has reached such a
level that we are ourselves able to cause sudden global
cooling. This was first suggested by Crutzen and Birks
(1982), and followed up by Carl Sagan and his students
(Turco et al., 1983, 1990) and many others. The initial
very pessimistic forecasts of nuclear winter after a
serious nuclear war have been modified, so that the
predictions now are nuclear falls in all but the most serious of cases. However, nuclear fall during the growing season would still cause huge crop losses because
of frost damage. The year without a summer 1816
had a global scale mean summer temperature drop of
<1 C (Stothers, 1984; Mann et al., 1998, Table 1).
2.9. Pollution
Much work is done on the influence of the pollution on the climate in the next century. The warming
of the last decade is almost certainly due to greenhouse gases (Mann et al., 1998; Free and Robock,
1999; Crowley, 2000). However, many of the forecasts based on models of the effects of the increase
of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere yield much
larger temperature increases than actually measured

(Ramanathan et al., 2001). This is probably caused by

the cooling effect of aerosols (Rampino et al., 1988;
Capaldo et al., 1999; Robock, 2000; Stanhill and
Cohen, 2001; Ramanathan et al., 2001). Smoke from
burning biomass can influence climate on a regional
scale (Hobbs et al., 1997; Shine and Forster, 1999).
3. Risk assessment
There is at least some experimental or modeling
evidence for all of the mechanisms referred to above.
It is very unlikely that any one mechanism can explain all sudden climate changes. It is likely that
effects of any one major cause are strongly modified
by the combined influence of many other factors. The
empirical climate data that we have from the past
7000 years can be used for a rough estimate of the
risk of sudden global cooling. During the last 600
years there have been seven very cold years akin to
the year without a summer 1816 (Table 1). During
the last 7000 years there have been about 8 very cold
periods lasting 315 years like the 536545 cooling
event (Table 2). This extrapolates roughly to:
One very cold year per century, perhaps with disruptions in agriculture.
One very cold decade per millennium with breakdown of agriculture.
Most reconstructions of past temperatures involve
extensive statistic smoothing which is as it should be
for most purposes. However, when one wants to assess
the crop failure risks associated with lowered mean
summer temperatures, it is adverse weather extremes
during the growing season which are important. The
risk of a serious 1 year temperature drop is perhaps
rather smaller than once per century today because
of the recent global warming trend. The eruption of
Pinatubo in 1991 resulted in a mean temperature drop
of about 0.5 C (McCormick et al., 1995), but there
were no reports of disturbances in world agriculture.
3.1. Changes in rainfall
Another possible consequence of dust/smoke veil is
changes in precipitation. Aerosols act as condensation
nuclei in cloud formation; too much aerosol leads to
the formation of many, but very small droplets which
coalesce poorly to raindrops (reference in Ramanathan

K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

133

et al., 2001; Kaufman et al., 2002). It is quite difficult

to sort out the effects of the various types of aerosols. It
is known that troposphere carbon and organic aerosols
(smoke from burning) inhibits precipitation strongly
(Kaufman et al., 2002; Rosenfeld et al., 2002). Organic
aerosols can be cleansed from the atmosphere at sea
by salt spray induced rain (Rosenfeld et al., 2002).
3.2. Risk factors
Some of the risk factors are fairly easy to estimate
and model, other factors are almost impossible to
predict. There are also so many feedback mechanisms
that the end results from stipulated causes become
difficult to estimate. The most common cause for
cooling events is probably volcanic eruptions (Lamb,
1970; Hammer et al., 1980; Rampino et al., 1988;
Zielinski, 2000). These are notoriously difficult to
predict, although large volcanic eruptions will happen eventually, for example in Iceland or the Aleuts.
Another parameter for global cooling, ocean currents,
seem actually to be chaotic in nature (Rahmstorf,
1995, 2002; Broecker, 1997). This means that very
small differences in initial conditions can end up in
almost opposite effects. The effect of other factors,
clouds, albedo, dust veils, ice cover e t c on the global
conveyor requires large-scale modeling (Crowley,
2000; Zachos et al., 2001). With the present knowledge it is not possible to give an assessment of the
risk of a new ice age starting.
Paradoxically, the most farfetched risk, that
of comet/asteroid impact is quite easy to predict
(Shoemaker, 1983; Chapman and Morrison, 1994).
The long-term effects of all types of impacts have
not yet been calculated (Levy, 1998; Boslough and
Crawford, 1997). Most efforts have been concentrated
on very large dinosaur or very small Tunguska
impacts. At present, about 2300 near earth objects are
known (Fig. 2); 650 of these are larger than 1 km in
diameter. More than one new one is discovered every
day; 500 potentially hazardous objects are known;
they are larger than 150 m and may approach the earth
closer than 20 times the distance to the moon (Near
Earth Object Program, http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov, Stuart,
2001). Asteroid 1950 DA has a 0.3% chance of colliding with the earth in 2880 (Giorgini et al., 2002).
Within the decade we expect to know the orbits of
90% of the kilometer size near earth objects, provided

Fig. 2. The asteroids in the vicinity of the earth on 15

March 2001. Three months later an entirely different asteroid population was close to the earth. From Scott Manley.
http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/spm/neo map.html.

the projected doubling of the modest resources is realized. This means that we can predict asteroid/comet
impacts centuries in advance and may be able to deflect dangerous objects. Only long period comets will
remain unforeseen until a few months before impact.
The >300 short-period comets and centaurs (asteroids
in orbits between Jupiter and Neptune) may change to
earth crossing orbits after close passages to Jupiter or
Saturn. Significant orbit changes occurred more than
50 times during the last century (Kronk, 2001). The
most famous examples are the comets HaleBopp
and ShoemakerLevy 9 (Levy, 1998). Both long- and
short-period comets can dust the earth when passing
close, but the risks of short-period comets are larger,
because they return frequently and most of them move
in the same plane as the planets.
The risk of nuclear winter (Crutzen and Birks,
1982; Turco et al., 1990; Robock, 1996) has decreased
very much since the ending of the cold war. But
that situation may change very quickly, especially if
economic conditions deteriorate in any of the larger
countries with nuclear capability. Under such circumstances there are great risks that leaders with the evil
political genius of a Hitler or Stalin may emerge and
bring nuclear winter back to reality.

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K.C. Engvild / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 115 (2003) 127137

4. Possible mitigation
In general, it will be much easier to deal with the
consequences of cooling after dust veils from volcanoes or comet/asteroid impacts than after nuclear winter, because the general infrastructure and energy supply of society will remain intact.
The major risks (Smith, 2000) of global coolings are
the famines connected with crop failures. The world
cereal stock levels are about 30% of the yearly production (FAO, 2001). Difficulties in developing countries
will begin already a few months after the first crop failures. In case of a cooling event lasting more than a year
famines will also hit the developed countries (Harwell
and Cropper, 1985); in that case crop losses in the
northern hemisphere cannot be compensated with
imports from the southern hemisphere or vice versa.
A general awareness that there may be a problem
is an important beginning. For example, necessary
seed supplies of appropriate frost/cold-resistant crops
should be available. Sufficient knowledge among agricultural extension agents is necessary, and the necessary agricultural and economic research should be
in place. The warning times for the formation of volcanic dust veils are of the order of months. Asteroid
or comet dusting may happen instantaneously, if the
parent body has not been seen. With the current automated surveys (Stuart, 2001) more and more threatening objects are found and warning times may become
centuries. Warning time for nuclear war can be very
short, probably only weeks; nuclear war probabilities
wax and wane with the current political climate.
The developed countries with large meat production can to some degree extend their food resources by
slaughtering most of their animals early and change
to primarily eating plant products. This option is not
available in most of the developing countries, especially not where two or three crops are grown each
year.
The lessons of history have been that it is weather
extremes, rather than the means that result in crop
failure; frost in July had serious consequences in
USA in the year without summer 1816 (Stommel and
Stommel, 1979). In other areas of the world drought
or flooding might follow sudden global cooling.
There is a need for stress tolerant crops, and the ordinary definitions may have to be extended. It is not
enough that a wheat cultivar is cold tolerant during

winter, it must also be cold tolerant during growth, anthesis and grain filling. Finding such cultivars is difficult, perhaps impossible as frost resistance depends on
proper hardening. Probably the strongest detrimental
effects on crops will be where crops are grown under
marginal conditions, either on marginal land or under
marginal temperatures.
The change to frost/cold-resistant crops might be
fairly easy in some countries, such as growing hardy
potatoes or beets instead of cereal grain, or growing
wheat instead of maize. In some developing countries
hardy alternative crops have been known for centuries,
such as grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) in Bangladesh,
India, and China, and Cassava tubers (Manihot esculenta) in Africa and South America. Most research on
the effect of global cooling on agriculture was done
in relation to nuclear winter (Ehrlich et al., 1983;
Harwell and Cropper, 1985; Myers, 1989) and very
little has been done since then (Robock, 1996). The
large-scale research in the agricultural consequences
of global warming (Rtter and vandeGeijn, 1999) has
little relevance in the global cooling case. There is
a need to for agricultural and economic research addressing the issues of sudden global cooling and the
following famines.
Small cooling events are much more frequent than
catastrophic events. From observation of the smaller
events, we might learn what the large catastrophes
would be like. It is necessary that all possible causes
are investigated. Much of the relevant research effort
is already in place in climatology, space sciences,
volcanoes, and geology; but redirection is needed in
several areas. For example Hoyles comet dusting
hypothesis (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1978; Clube
and Napier, 1990; Clube et al., 1996) needs serious
investigation. Also the dendrochronological evidence
for several decade-long coolings during the last milleniums needs confirmation and extension (Baillie and
Munro, 1988; Baillie, 1994, 1995, 1999).

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