Open University Lecture
We are pleased to invite you to the 5th Open University Lecture hosted by the Centre for Climate Change Research, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland) . The lecture, entitled: ‘Lessons from the Little Ice Age (1500-1800) - How did we handle the last climate crisis?’ will be delivered by Professor Dominik Collet from the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo.
The event will take place online via the Microsoft Teams platform on 1 December 2025 at 5:00 p.m. CET (UTC +01:00).
Link to participate in the meeting:
Summary of the talk:
What happened the last time European societies encountered rapid climate change? How did people react when they faced similar challenges to current scenarios? This talk will retrace the most recent period of major climatic shifts, the Little Ice Age (1500-1800). It presents the “climate history” of this volatile period, investigating how past societies adapted to climatic change. Combining the “archives of nature” (tree-rings, ice-cores, etc.) and the “archives of society” (historical records) the talk will explore extreme climate events of the period. They brought famine and poverty and arguably influenced the First Partition of Poland Lithuania (1772) but also triggered new welfare and public health initiatives. Revisiting these experiences might improve our understanding current challenges and help to broaden our repertoire of action.
Speaker's short bio:
Dominik Collet is professor for Climate and Environmental History at the University of Oslo. He works on the primarily on past interactions of climate and society, the history of disasters and the global history of things. Prof. Collet previously taught at the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg and has been a fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) and the Centre for Advanced research (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is the author of numerous books and papers on climate history and currently leads several interdisciplinary research projects on the topic including: ClimateCultures – the Little Ice Age in the Nordics (1500-1800) and Unsustainable? Past Impacts and Future Challenges of Volcanic Climate Shocks (Clim-SHOCK).
Photo: Winter landscape with iceskaters, c. 1608, Hendrick Avercamp. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/ Public Domain