Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker (Yale University Press, 2013) is largely the story of humankind's reaction to the 'Little Ice Age', which peaked in the seventeenth century.
The direct effects were mainly on agriculture, with poor harvests leading to famine, plague, riots and repression, and war.
The deteriorating climate even affected tropical areas. For example, in Africa the Sahara, Sahel, savanna, dry woodland, and tropical rain forest belts all moved a couple hundred miles south as the areas formerly suitable for some form of agriculture, or at least pastoralism, suffered repeated drought. Naturally, people were forced to move too. The Sahel region, which had been prosperous in the late middle ages, declined. Many of the migrants ended up in the orbit of the newly emergent African kingdoms along the coast whose power was based on the expanding transatlantic slave trade, and naturally, not a few got caught up in that.
Northern areas didn't just suffer from cold. London, Moscow, Istanbul, Edo, and many other cities all suffered catastrophic fires, inflamed at least in part from drought conditions.
The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World by Cyprian Broodbank (Oxford University Press, 2013) covers a much longer time-period, and therefore includes descriptions of large swings in climate.
As background, the author reminds us that the last Ice Age lasted for a long time. There were major fluctuations in climate though, especially as we pulled out of the Pleistocene. The warmest period since more than 100,000 years ago was immediately after the 1,100 year-long Younger Dryas, when, in about 10,700 BC, after more than two thousand years of melting, ice age conditions returned. The subsequent warming period saw average temperatures about 2 degrees celsius warmer than at present. This was followed by the so-called '6200 event', another cold snap, this one lasting only 200 years. Both of these reversals were produced by large scale iceberg calving in the North Atlantic, accompanied in each case by an enormous and sudden rush of cold water draining from post-glacial lakes in North America and northern Eurasia.
The end of the Younger Dryas reinstated sea level rise, with a peak rate of 2.3-4.0 cm (0.9-1.6 in.) per year, or up to 4 m (13 ft) a century, at about 7500 BC. The sea still stood 55 m (180 ft) below its present level in 9600 BC; by 8000 BC it lay at -35 m (-115 ft), at which stage most coastal outlines resembled today's, and by 5500 BC at only -10 m (-50 ft), after which the rate of rise petered out to reach approximately current levels a millennium and a half later.
... Encroachment on the remnants of glacial plains was largely over by 8000-7000 BC, bringing the sea in certain areas right back to the feet of the mountain façade. The generation of islands from land hitherto joined to the mainland continued for longer -- even the British Isles only became such again around 6200 BC.
