The commentaries of White and of Büntgen and Hellmann in this journal fail to prove that Europe experienced the kind of sustained falls in temperature between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that can justify the notion of a Little Ice Age. Neither of them adequately addresses the cogency of the anecdotal or statistical evidence as presented in Kelly and Ó Gráda's article, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,” especially with regard to the spurious peaks and troughs created by the smoothing of temperature series—the so-called Slutsky Effect.

The supposed ramifications of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into economic, political, and cultural history. The available annual temperature series from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century, however, contain no major breaks, cycles, or trends that could be associated with the existence of a Little Ice Age. Furthermore, the series of resonant images, ranging from frost fairs to contracting glaciers and from dwindling vineyards to disappearing Viking colonies, often adduced as effects of a Little Ice Age, can also be explained without resort to climate change.

The striking improvement in life expectancy that took place in England between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century cannot be explained either by an increase in real wages or by better climatic conditions. The decrease in the risk of utter destitution or of death from famine that was evident on the eve of the Industrial Revolution stemmed, in part, from institutional changes in the old poor law, which began to take shape and become effective early in the seventeenth century.