Blom does the sensible thing and dodges a final verdict on what caused all those vicious winters ... This is a sweeping story, embracing developments in economics and science, philosophy and exploration, religion and politics. Blom delivers much of his argument through compressed, beautifully clear life sketches of prominent men ... In the course of Nature’s Mutiny... we travel a considerable distance from the subject of unusually cold weather. Too far, a reader might think, for Blom’s argument to be regarded as a case conclusively settled. But it wouldn’t be fair to Nature’s Mutiny to see the issue of proof so starkly. It is a book about a new economic system and the philosophical and cultural trends that accompanied it; climate is central to the story that it tells, but the connections don’t aim for the solidity of algebraic logic. Rather, Blom is seeking to give us a larger picture that is relevant to the current moment. His book is about links and associations rather than about definitive proof; it is about networks and shifts in intellectual mood, about correlations as much as causes. Despite that, Blom’s hypothesis is forceful, and has the potential to be both frightening and, if you hold it up to the light at just the right angle, a little optimistic. The idea can be put like this: climate change changes everything.
The premise of treating historical sources as a way of answering current questions is so good that Blom should have stuck to it. He is tempted, however, into making everything new in the 17th century a result of climate change, and this can only be true by so diluting the notion of causation as to render his claim meaningless — or just plain vulnerable ... The book is marred by errors of fact ... It too often reads like a series of potted histories. But the main thrust is well worth pondering...
In the dense but rewarding Nature’s Mutiny, Philipp Blom exhaustively combs through the annals of another period of extreme weather to show us what our future might resemble and how climate change affects everyone ... Relying on original research materials such as diaries, sermons, logs, wine harvest records and paintings, Blom focuses on an agricultural crisis that, he writes, 'served as a catalyst for change everywhere, facilitating some ideas and practices — social, cultural and political — while making others more difficult or even, in the long run, impossible.'
