The big idea: why you can’t leave climate out of history
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is unfortunate not only because that kind of mixup is a pervasive problem that screws up public discussion of climate change (and is a mistake a newspaper should not tolerate).
But it’s also foolish for an article like this because historians of Europe have long written about the impact of the medieval warming period and the so-called “little ice age” that followed. They would have been more useful for this article.
Also it is not about little ice age, it is about every old civilization, to find clues about their rise and decline. No way you can find any old document written about how hot it was in the summer of 6000BC, but scientist can easily find the climate record from Greenland's ice core. Or how many fish was available in 10,000BC in Chile, by studying the amount of ancient plankton's remnant on the sea bed to estimate the number. Measuring 1000 years old tree rings can give you more accurate weather report and any old documents.
You underestimated how important modern technology and scienctific advancement is to historical discoveries.
The article was about climate change but the examples were all about short term (few years) change in prevailing weather: "One of the key factors in the fall of Cleopatra, for example, appears to have been the massive eruption of the Okmok volcano", "Eruptions help explain other major changes", "Global weather systems such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a cycle of warm and cold periods in the Pacific Ocean, have had huge and unpredictable consequences for human civilisation". After these examples, the article goes on to say "Shifting climate patterns in the distant past are responsible for..." which certainly seems to be true, but none of the examples were about shifting climate patterns.
I think the author didn't know what they were talking about, and that's a shame when good examples exist.
> You underestimated how important modern technology and scienctific advancement is to historical discoveries.
Quite the opposite; the first words of my comment were "This is a good article about historiography".
Results are printed as a 15 books series accumulating ~2000pages. This is by far the most interesting series I have ever read. And it answers many questions unknown to traditional historians. For example why the hell old empires never stop invade/ get invaded? Because god damn it the invaders were actually climate refugees. If they don't move, they all die.
And it is amazing to see that arts and humanities is synonym to ignorant because they always focus on humans or political issues and ignore the truely dominant big picture. Like you see that there is force but never thought about that force is caused by gravity. And you insist that gravity do not exist/ unimportant to analysis force or natural phenomenon.
https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/ja/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-02351014/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...
* The Viking Greenlanders: collapsed primarily due to the North Sea trade routes shifting away from visiting Greenland. Note that Diamond also implicates the reluctance of the Vikings to eat fish, which is mystifying, because fish was a big part of their diet, and today, Nordic cultures' all have a signature fermented fish dish.
* Easter Island: more contentious, but the environmental degradation appears to have largely happened after visitation from Europeans and the collapse of the Rapa Nui civilization, not before.
* Classic Mayan civilization: there's no firm consensus on what brings about the Classic Maya collapse. But it should be noted that from the Late Classic to Early Postclassic, the dominant Mayan centers shift from the ecologically more productive highlands to the more ecologically fragile lowlands (where it persists for several centuries in the Postclassic), which is a bit hard to square with environmental degradation theories.
Completely guessing, but maybe eating fish turned out to be a huge evolutionary advantage... so groups that did outcompeted groups that did not.
Just right off, that's not true. I don't have much objection about the rest of the article. It's a topic like CRT that any modern history education is going to touch on as students finish with baseline skills and move to a more research understanding. Anyone who's been an academic/museum setting knows there's warehouses of unstudied objects to catalog and analyze. It's just boring. Maybe historians are waiting for something exciting, but the small group of object/primary resource studying historians have plenty to work on right now.
History is not static, so many historians focus on re-contextualizing what has "already been studied". This the important meta work that helps to ensure theories and models are always up-to-date. It's similar to math in this regard where finding a new proof to a well-established theorem can be groundbreaking [1]. In history, there are have new translations of The Odyssey that change how a novel that has been taught hundreds of years is seen [2]. A good historian would also point out how these two developments are more closely related than people think -- namely, look what happens when diverse viewpoints are introduced into a well established field of study!
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/24/new-orleans-... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-tr...
Most of the major impacts of climate changes took place over thousands of years, such as the wet period in the Sahara (which once hosted a sizable human population). Both the transition to wet conditions (14-15 kya) and the drying out(5-6 kya) took place over a roughly thousand year period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
Given that our modern understanding of the effects of CO2 and other IR-absorbing gases on global temperatures was worked out by 1980 or so, and that the 40-yr period since then has seen a globally averaged deltaT of +0.4 C, it's interesting to see that global fossil fuel production (annual) has doubled since 1980. This has been matched by the increase of atmospheric CO2 from ~1.6 ppm per year (1980) to ~2.4 ppm per year (2020). Humans, it seems, are rather incapable of long-term planning (regardless of ideology, the socialist countries produce fossil fuels at the same rate as the capitalist countries):
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2636/...
However, if you ask most people who remember the climate conditions in 1980 if there's been any dramatic world-altering change since then, they might point to more frequent wildfires, droughts, floods etc. but in terms of world-shaking events (e.g. WWII, etc.) it hasn't impacted people's lives to the same degree.
Furthermore, the politicians who've tried to make this an issue in elections have turned out to be the very same politicians who work for the fossil fuel industry to expand production (see Obama and the expansion of domestic fracking of natural gas in the USA 2008-2016 etc.). This makes a mockery of much of political climate activism - and in particular, the claim that 'we need to act now!' is pretty nonsensical. Current rates of warming will proceed for the next 100 years even if we eliminate fossil fuels overnight (and all fossil producers seem to have plans to maintain current levels of production for the next 30 years, so...).
All in all, the current fossil fuel-forced climate transition will place new pressures on human civilizations but whether or not that leads to global war, mass migration, genocidal conflict etc. will depend more on human behavioral choices than on climate science.
Of course, we do have the technology today to replace say 3% of fossil fuel consumption with renewables per year, which would eliminate fossil fuel production in 35 years, but this would make fossil fuel producers (and their economic dependents) very sad... and we'll still have to deal with new climate conditions.
But, go talk to some older people that have actually paid attention to the weather. Where I live (SF) they'll talk about how wet and drizzly the winters used to be. In my Mongolian fieldwork they would talk about how the hunting grounds of animals had shifted up into the cooler highlands and how the native grasslands were much more fragile than before. When I was in Canada you could simply look at the ground and see where the glaciers had been, even if you didn't have the pictures from the early 1900s in front of you. Those are all important and noticeable shifts that have happened in a shockingly short time.
However, from this point forward, the trajectory of climate change is locked in for the next 100 years, and even a heroic global effort to eliminate fossil fuels in the next few decades will only have the effect of not making it even worse for people 100 years from now. Practically, this means that as many resources will have to be devoted to adaptation to new climate conditions as to transitioning off fossil fuels.
Notably, the traditional political messaging claims, e.g. "we're facing a climate crisis and we need to take action now!" just don't match up with scientific reality, in the sense that 'taking action now' won't really have any noticeable effect over the next 50 years at least.
Political arguments for renewables like 'cleaning up the air and water' or 'ending dependency on foreign suppliers' would probably be more motivating than 'fixing the climate', because the tipping point has come and gone.
Greenwashing is everywhere.
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.
Stages 1 and 2 are approximately denial, stage 3 is the skepticism you mentioned
If you think society can adapt and a reasonable reduction of CO2 over time is the best approach using market forces, then for example, degrowth sounds like a bad solution. If you think we're doomed in the next decade, then might as well start geoengineering.
Then for example you might be a flat earther too. We've been trying that for past two decades and it's an epic failure.
Arguments about what to do about it, or if it is a 'big deal', are subjective ones- so there is no right or wrong in most cases.
You can both hold the idea that climate change is happening but it's also not going to completely doom the human race to being wiped off the planet. Extreme fear-mongering by climate sensationalists is every bit as bad as "denialism". In fact it's worse, because you make people believe they're helpless while simultaneously creating a group that reacts violently due to the fact they've been conditioned through fear.
Ok, how?
Or, to put it simply: in this case, it's the doomers that need to answer how and why.
Things are improving, humans will adapt etc.
You were far more likely to die from a number of natural things before modern inventions (yes the ones that are now causing climate change) helped keep you well fed, warm, etc.
My issue with climate science, apart from it being more ideological than science when I studied it in college, is that we only ever talk about the last 100 or so years when we know so much more about Earth climate history from geological studies and their impact on prehistoric humans (paleoanthropology). Yet that history is left out. For example, we know that CO2 has been MUCH higher in the past due to increased volcanic activity.
Climate sensationalists have full government and media backing, they scare-mongered an entire generation into thinking they'll be dead or living in some apocalyptic wasteland in the near future. They're using children to push their message.
Climate change exists but its effects have been over-hyped and sensationalized for various reasons.
Might want to learn the difference between terms "industry" and "science".
Are these the same "scientists" that still promote a dangerous COVID vaccine is necessary, masks, and lockdowns were good? The same ones that are trying to claim COVID came from bats?
Trust the science eh?
By the way, there is NO real science that backs up the world ending in a few decades and wiping humanity out in a few generations. That's fake. Just because the little troll Greta said doesn't mean it's science.
How many times will they lie to you before you start to question your gods? You're not promoting science, you're promoting a pseudo-religion masked as science.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-t...
And no, none of the rest of your comment is implied. It's just a bunch of non-sequiturs.
The obvious, traditional vectors of change throughout history suffer the exact same recursive "but what caused that" loop as any other broad question about the nature of things. God made creation, but who made God? You can either choose an arbitrary place to stop (God is the prime mover) or you can keep recursing, trying to put the first order threads ("A war was waged") into their contexts ("Why wage a war? Wars are expensive and risky. What drove these forces into play?)
When you start to look at the motivating factors that drive the first-order events of textbook history, the scope inevitably becomes larger and fuzzier, as you're dealing with many more variables across many more moments of decision.
It can definitely start to feel very speculative, and it is speculative. But it also provides the framework for more testable hypotheses to be explored. At the very least, it should give pause to anyone who thinks anything is obvious.