For perspective on our global warming, this talk recalls a world not heating up but cooling down. In Europe’s Little Ice Age (c.1300-1800), despite harsher winters, navigators first sought a polar sea route to China but were trapped by ice that’s now melting fast. Their reports of ghostly white bears and unbelievable cold recalled Christian fears of the North as haunted by Satan, making cold a newly powerful figure in poetry and drama for dark states of mind or soul.