It’s interesting to be reminded of how our lives are intertwined with various other earthly timescales, whether human time, weather time, climate time, or geological time, to name a few.⁠ ⁠ One such reminder is ‘the Little Ice Age’, a climate interval that occurred from around 1400 until 1850. During this period, mountain glaciers expanded in the European Alps, New Zealand, Alaska, and the southern Andes, while the average temperature across the Northern Hemisphere dropped substantially compared to its average temperature during the overall last millennium.⁠ ⁠ In Jonathan Jones’ historical reading of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s paintings, among others from that time, he stresses their connection to the Little Ice Age:⁠ ⁠ ‘Once, when the first painters made their marks on cave walls, all Europe was crushed and churned by glaciers that only survive now in the high Alps. In the 1500s and 1600s, these European glaciers were on the move, swallowing up pastures and devastating communities. The villagers of Chamonix, as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie discovered, petitioned their lords to do something about climate change: "We are terrified of the glaciers ... which are moving forward all the time and have just buried two of our villages and destroyed a third." In Hunters in the Snow, the glaciers have reached the villages around Antwerp. Bruegel's prophecy is accurate. The climate was changing dramatically and dangerously, although in the opposite direction from today's impending crisis. The world was getting colder. ... The winter of 1565 was one of the first when everyone could see something had changed. But what was to be done?’ - The @Guardian⁠ ⁠ Images: Pieter Bruegel the Elder: ’Hunters in the Snow’, 1565; ’Census in Bethlehem’, 1566; ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, 1567; Abraham Hondius: ’The Frozen Thames’, 1677; Unknown painter: ’Frost Fair on the Thames, with Old London Bridge in the Distance’, ca 1685.