This is the fourth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paid subscribers received an email soliciting questions and I got some. I picked the five that I think I can shed the most light upon.
Also, to continue what feels like a little tradition we’re starting here, first of all I’d like to make a short comment on updates/corrections to previous posts, that I’ve come across since I wrote them.
There’s this very interesting paper in Nature, a primer on the difficulties involved in estimating climate patterns since the end of the Younger Dryas cooling period (don’t be intimidated by the title: “Complex spatio-temporal structure of the Holocene Thermal Maximum”).
This is what the authors write in the abstract: “Climate reconstructions suggest an early-middle Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) followed by gradual cooling, whereas climate models indicate continuous warming. This discrepancy either implies seasonal biases in proxy-based climate reconstructions, or that the climate model sensitivity to forcings and feedbacks needs to be reevaluated.”
What they mean, roughly, is: we know, because of a massive pile of evidence that keeps accumulating, that there was really sudden warming right after the Younger Dryas, marking the start of the current Holocene era, followed by a general cooling trend (broke or at least interrupted around the 20th century); and yet lots of people who are wrong keep denying this evidence and insisting that there was mostly climate warming rather than cooling in the global context after that sudden warming period, because they need to make their contemporary political points.
This is all pretty consistent with the points I made in this very early post, regarding the revolutionary effects of warming weather on long-suffering human populations. I’m not saying this is the settled, absolute truth, but the best — indeed, the only — interpretation of the available evidence. The Holocene, spanning all of human written history, has been mostly a period of cooling, not warming, climate, save for small warming periods; and we’re now in one of those warming periods, and this period may be long or last forever for all I know. I don’t study the future, but the past. Now for the questions:
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