David, I have a book suggestion for you and for anyone interested in the impact of climate change across history: "Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey", by John L. Brooke.
This is interdisciplinary Big History or Deep History on the grandest scale. Brooke is not a climate scientist, but a historian in my own field of pre-Civil War American history. Like you he looks at climate science with a historian’s eye. He has made a thorough study of the scientific literature (pre-2014 when the book was published) which is exhaustively footnoted, and synthesizes geology, climatology, paleontology, archaeology, and traditional historical scholarship from the formation of the Earth to the modern Anthropocene.
Brooke’s major theme is the determinative impact of climate change and epidemic disease on human evolution and the rise and fall of human societies. The rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, for example, can be attributed in part to changing monsoon patterns. He makes the case for the Little Ice Age and the Black Death as the jumping off points for the ever more accelerated development of the modern world. Yet Brooke also argues that this breakthrough to modernity would not have been possible without the cumulative development of human capacity, shaped in response to climate change, between c. 3000 BC and 1350 AD. A period often looked upon as one of static agrarian economies under the jackboot of rigid autocratic states.
Referencing the work of several world historians, Brooke concludes: “These world historians take a long, developmental view for good reason; sustained modern economic growth did not and could not erupt out of the palace economies of the Bronze Age, any more than it could out of the Neolithic. Thus these historians focus on the cumulative development of human intellectual, technological, and sociopolitical capacities as forging a springboard for modernity.” (p. 263)
This book discusses in exhaustive detail the issues and examples of climate change you raise in your post, and much more. Brooke broadly agrees with your argument that warmer, wetter climates have led to human flourishing. But there were some big downsides as well. Pre-agrarian Paleolithic foraging societies were generally much healthier than the agrarian and urban societies that arose during the Holocene. Hunter-gatherers led a more active life, had a more varied, healthier diet, and lived in much less densely populated societies, reducing exposure to and spread of infectious diseases.
Much larger and more densely populated sedentary agrarian societies subsisting on a monotonous diet, living in close quarters with farm animals, relying on back-breaking labor that the human body had not evolved for to earn their daily bread, led to the emergence, and spread, of new epidemic diseases that produced a steep decline in human health. Skeletal evidence shows that agrarian and urban people were several inches shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hunter-gatherer societies were also more egalitarian than the stratified, hierarchical, oppressive, agrarian/urban states and empires that followed.
Nonetheless, Brooke believes while the lives of ancient and medieval agrarian people were “were relatively uncomfortable and perhaps unpleasant; their societies and economies were relatively sustainable — and resilient.” But again “life was not pleasant. A pervasive hierarchy — and poverty — shaped the human condition. A peasant family in the late Middle Ages, on average, had a standard of living not unlike that of a peasant family in the Bronze Age, and probably the late Neolithic. Average life expectancy at birth ranged from the low twenties to the mid-thirties at best.” When these societies collapsed, after having endured for hundreds of years, it was due to “earth system forces”: deteriorating climate – global cooling – and/or pandemic disease, driving them to destruction. (pp. 391, 529)
Contrasting archaic agrarian societies with modern industrial societies, Brooke writes:
“Ancient populations suffered poor individual life outcomes, with poor health and low life expectancy; conversely, they imposed relatively low environmental impact and enjoyed long-term societal sustainability. Whatever their flaws, and there were many, ancient societies should not be condemned for any major environmental failings. Modern populations, by contrast, enjoy excellent and improving high individual outcomes, with amazingly good health and high life expectancy, and are causing systemic changes on the entire global ecology. Whether they are sustainable is very much an open question.” (pp. 529-530)
As I tell my students, the challenge going forward is whether or not modernity and all its benefits for the human condition – freedom, health, lifestyle choice, and prosperity on a scale unimaginable to earlier generations – can be sustained in the face of anthropogenic climate change.
Given the detail of his work and the nature of his topic, Brooke’s writing can be dense and academic at times. This makes for heavier reading than, for instance, Brian Fagan’s "The Long Summer." But it is well worth the effort. I keep going back to it, and Brooke’s ideas have influenced how I now teach my college history courses. Considering our current brushes with COVID and climate change, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
This matches most of what I was taught doing my grad work in hydrology a decade ago, but in a much more interesting and friendly format. I really enjoyed reading it. There are many creative water harvesting techniques that can address food production in desert areas. I also wouldn’t be too worried about extensive cold periods, because certain animals thrive in that, and humans can go back to their prior hypercarnivore lifestyle.
In a forthcoming book I argue that the degree of Dependency of Natural Conditions (and thus, geography) plays a more important role at explaining the wealth of nations (or the lack thereof) than we often think. Your article fits very well with that narrative, thank you (and btw sparkling wine from Kent is getting better every day…)
Great article. With all the recent talk about recent climate change, it is amazing how little interest there is in pre-modern climate change. It is a fascinating topic.
And you are correct, warmer wetter climate tends to lead to human flourishing (likely because of increase agricultural production).
I feel like your quick take is missing the point on the impact of climate change in our present era.
While on a macro level, warming periods can be expected to lead to a lusher climate with better growing and living conditions in many parts of the globe, there are massive impacts that we can expect that were not significant in previous human eras.
For example, rising sea levels can be expected to flood built-up areas, displacing millions of people and destroying billions (trillions) worth of infrastructure, capital, housing, etc. and creating contamination when flooded areas contain pollutants and toxins.
Secondly, climate change is going to change migratory patterns for animals, leading to invasive species, ecosystem instability, and more spread of disease. I live in Canada where a few decades ago diseases like West Nile Virus and Lyme disease were completely unknown. Not anymore.
Also, a warming climate is not going to be better for all areas of the earth. While some areas may get better/more fertile/more livable, others will get worse, and we are going to face increasing international migration pressures, with the conflict and instability that this entails.
So while it's great that the earth, as a whole, is not going to be rendered into an unlivable desert planet by climate change, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned by it and to work to limit it.
All fair points, Ken. Historically, warming eras have led to rising sea levels and the extension in the range of tropical diseases (as they make tropical belts larger). And it’s also important to point out that runaway global warming would reach a point in which the planet would hold too much heat. I’m certainly not arguing in favor of doing nothing to slow warming or even (God forbid) trying to accelerate it.
I tend to view the aspects of the current global warming trend that can be linked to increased use of carbon-based fuels as an additive layer that rides on top of whatever fluctuations occur from natural, non-human, events.
It would therefore increase/reinforce "natural" warming trends and moderate natural cooling trends.
I think that while it's fine to reduce carbon-based emissions, the real area for focused activity is adaptation, and not prevention. It's not an either/or, but it looks to me like a misdirection of energy/resources to address prevention/reduction as the primary goal, as now seems to be the case.
A little stoicism would be in order, if you ask me... :^)
Fascinating. [Another one I've herd is that the Congo drained into the Mediterranean throng Libya. (and with some clever civil engineering, could e made to do so again.)]
Are you suggesting that these data have not been incorporated into the geophysical modeling of the effects of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere?
I've heard some theorize that the Little Ice Age was triggered first by the deaths (and hence reduced CO2-generating activities) of a significant portion of Europe's population during the Black Death, and that, after some warming, deepened again due to the deaths of much of the population of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the second case, a lot of the indigenous population of the Americas frequently burned the landscape; with their collapse, more CO2 would be sequestered in overgrowth that had previously been regularly burned off.
David, I have a book suggestion for you and for anyone interested in the impact of climate change across history: "Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey", by John L. Brooke.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/climate-change-and-the-course-of-global-history/5D34A7A8FEA6626CD475635ADCFAA4EB
This is interdisciplinary Big History or Deep History on the grandest scale. Brooke is not a climate scientist, but a historian in my own field of pre-Civil War American history. Like you he looks at climate science with a historian’s eye. He has made a thorough study of the scientific literature (pre-2014 when the book was published) which is exhaustively footnoted, and synthesizes geology, climatology, paleontology, archaeology, and traditional historical scholarship from the formation of the Earth to the modern Anthropocene.
Brooke’s major theme is the determinative impact of climate change and epidemic disease on human evolution and the rise and fall of human societies. The rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, for example, can be attributed in part to changing monsoon patterns. He makes the case for the Little Ice Age and the Black Death as the jumping off points for the ever more accelerated development of the modern world. Yet Brooke also argues that this breakthrough to modernity would not have been possible without the cumulative development of human capacity, shaped in response to climate change, between c. 3000 BC and 1350 AD. A period often looked upon as one of static agrarian economies under the jackboot of rigid autocratic states.
Referencing the work of several world historians, Brooke concludes: “These world historians take a long, developmental view for good reason; sustained modern economic growth did not and could not erupt out of the palace economies of the Bronze Age, any more than it could out of the Neolithic. Thus these historians focus on the cumulative development of human intellectual, technological, and sociopolitical capacities as forging a springboard for modernity.” (p. 263)
This book discusses in exhaustive detail the issues and examples of climate change you raise in your post, and much more. Brooke broadly agrees with your argument that warmer, wetter climates have led to human flourishing. But there were some big downsides as well. Pre-agrarian Paleolithic foraging societies were generally much healthier than the agrarian and urban societies that arose during the Holocene. Hunter-gatherers led a more active life, had a more varied, healthier diet, and lived in much less densely populated societies, reducing exposure to and spread of infectious diseases.
Much larger and more densely populated sedentary agrarian societies subsisting on a monotonous diet, living in close quarters with farm animals, relying on back-breaking labor that the human body had not evolved for to earn their daily bread, led to the emergence, and spread, of new epidemic diseases that produced a steep decline in human health. Skeletal evidence shows that agrarian and urban people were several inches shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hunter-gatherer societies were also more egalitarian than the stratified, hierarchical, oppressive, agrarian/urban states and empires that followed.
Nonetheless, Brooke believes while the lives of ancient and medieval agrarian people were “were relatively uncomfortable and perhaps unpleasant; their societies and economies were relatively sustainable — and resilient.” But again “life was not pleasant. A pervasive hierarchy — and poverty — shaped the human condition. A peasant family in the late Middle Ages, on average, had a standard of living not unlike that of a peasant family in the Bronze Age, and probably the late Neolithic. Average life expectancy at birth ranged from the low twenties to the mid-thirties at best.” When these societies collapsed, after having endured for hundreds of years, it was due to “earth system forces”: deteriorating climate – global cooling – and/or pandemic disease, driving them to destruction. (pp. 391, 529)
Contrasting archaic agrarian societies with modern industrial societies, Brooke writes:
“Ancient populations suffered poor individual life outcomes, with poor health and low life expectancy; conversely, they imposed relatively low environmental impact and enjoyed long-term societal sustainability. Whatever their flaws, and there were many, ancient societies should not be condemned for any major environmental failings. Modern populations, by contrast, enjoy excellent and improving high individual outcomes, with amazingly good health and high life expectancy, and are causing systemic changes on the entire global ecology. Whether they are sustainable is very much an open question.” (pp. 529-530)
As I tell my students, the challenge going forward is whether or not modernity and all its benefits for the human condition – freedom, health, lifestyle choice, and prosperity on a scale unimaginable to earlier generations – can be sustained in the face of anthropogenic climate change.
Given the detail of his work and the nature of his topic, Brooke’s writing can be dense and academic at times. This makes for heavier reading than, for instance, Brian Fagan’s "The Long Summer." But it is well worth the effort. I keep going back to it, and Brooke’s ideas have influenced how I now teach my college history courses. Considering our current brushes with COVID and climate change, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Thanks! Looks great
This matches most of what I was taught doing my grad work in hydrology a decade ago, but in a much more interesting and friendly format. I really enjoyed reading it. There are many creative water harvesting techniques that can address food production in desert areas. I also wouldn’t be too worried about extensive cold periods, because certain animals thrive in that, and humans can go back to their prior hypercarnivore lifestyle.
In a forthcoming book I argue that the degree of Dependency of Natural Conditions (and thus, geography) plays a more important role at explaining the wealth of nations (or the lack thereof) than we often think. Your article fits very well with that narrative, thank you (and btw sparkling wine from Kent is getting better every day…)
Great article. With all the recent talk about recent climate change, it is amazing how little interest there is in pre-modern climate change. It is a fascinating topic.
And you are correct, warmer wetter climate tends to lead to human flourishing (likely because of increase agricultural production).
Great article - thanks for sharing it.
David:
I feel like your quick take is missing the point on the impact of climate change in our present era.
While on a macro level, warming periods can be expected to lead to a lusher climate with better growing and living conditions in many parts of the globe, there are massive impacts that we can expect that were not significant in previous human eras.
For example, rising sea levels can be expected to flood built-up areas, displacing millions of people and destroying billions (trillions) worth of infrastructure, capital, housing, etc. and creating contamination when flooded areas contain pollutants and toxins.
Secondly, climate change is going to change migratory patterns for animals, leading to invasive species, ecosystem instability, and more spread of disease. I live in Canada where a few decades ago diseases like West Nile Virus and Lyme disease were completely unknown. Not anymore.
Also, a warming climate is not going to be better for all areas of the earth. While some areas may get better/more fertile/more livable, others will get worse, and we are going to face increasing international migration pressures, with the conflict and instability that this entails.
So while it's great that the earth, as a whole, is not going to be rendered into an unlivable desert planet by climate change, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned by it and to work to limit it.
But thanks for the food for thought!
All fair points, Ken. Historically, warming eras have led to rising sea levels and the extension in the range of tropical diseases (as they make tropical belts larger). And it’s also important to point out that runaway global warming would reach a point in which the planet would hold too much heat. I’m certainly not arguing in favor of doing nothing to slow warming or even (God forbid) trying to accelerate it.
I tend to view the aspects of the current global warming trend that can be linked to increased use of carbon-based fuels as an additive layer that rides on top of whatever fluctuations occur from natural, non-human, events.
It would therefore increase/reinforce "natural" warming trends and moderate natural cooling trends.
I think that while it's fine to reduce carbon-based emissions, the real area for focused activity is adaptation, and not prevention. It's not an either/or, but it looks to me like a misdirection of energy/resources to address prevention/reduction as the primary goal, as now seems to be the case.
A little stoicism would be in order, if you ask me... :^)
Fascinating. [Another one I've herd is that the Congo drained into the Mediterranean throng Libya. (and with some clever civil engineering, could e made to do so again.)]
Are you suggesting that these data have not been incorporated into the geophysical modeling of the effects of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere?
I've heard some theorize that the Little Ice Age was triggered first by the deaths (and hence reduced CO2-generating activities) of a significant portion of Europe's population during the Black Death, and that, after some warming, deepened again due to the deaths of much of the population of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the second case, a lot of the indigenous population of the Americas frequently burned the landscape; with their collapse, more CO2 would be sequestered in overgrowth that had previously been regularly burned off.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
Sounds unlikely, given the circumstances