Climate Change and Human Societies: The Last 10,000 Years

The frontispiece to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin, 2005) reproduces a quote from Shelley’s famous poem Ozymandias written in 1817. The poem evokes the faded glory of New Kingdom Egypt’s great empire, one of the first empires in world history, and the royal monuments built by its greatest warrior king Ramses II. Oddly enough, Egypt does not feature in Diamond’s book at all, not even on his map “The World. Prehistoric, Historic and modern societies.”  Only a passing reference is made to the pyramids, and that only in a list, again odd, of “prehistoric peoples” use of transported stone. And yet ancient Egypt provides an abundance of information about the intimate connection between environmental stress and the “collapse” of human societies. Why, in a book that devoted half of its pages to the proposition that ancient history might inform modern circumstances, were Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon and indeed most of the complex societies of the pre-modern world, simply left out by Diamond?  My central argument in this short course will be that History matters and that a deep and broad examination of human societies and climate change over the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, how they were organized, and the problems and challenges that they faced, gives us valuable perspective on current circumstances.

              The reasons for the rise and fall of human civilizations have been debated in the West since Edward Gibbon published the first installment of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776. As great as Gibbon’s work is, it was actually the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun who first theorized the basic ideas of why and how states rise and fall. From Gibbon onward there has been considerable work in several fields, among them History, Archaeology, Economics, Sociology and Political Science, addressing the basic question: Are some societies more durable than others? Why was the Roman Empire enduring while the empires of the ancient Near East experienced cycles of rise and decline? The idea that history moved in “cycles” or “waves” was first made popular by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-22), although the cyclical idea of history goes back to the ancient Greeks. It has come roaring back into fashion in recent historical work and in popular discourse as well. It was made especially popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. This kind of thinking can explain much, but not everything, about patterns in human history and behavior. Our far more detailed understanding now of global climate history adds a good deal of new information. It is this, the relationship between human societies and climate change, that we will discuss in this course. We will examine what and how we know about past climate change and specific societies that will allow us to discuss the variety of complex responses to different scales of climate change.

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Week 1, February 7: The historical understanding of Earth’s Climate. Paleoclimatology

Reading:

• T. Cronin, Paleoclimates: Understanding Climate Change Past and Present. Columbia UP, 2010. Chapter 1 and 2

Additional Paleoclimate readings for discussion:

• J. Manning. The Open Sea: The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome. Princeton University Press. 2018. Chapter 1. 
• M. Binder, Paleoclimate, Princeton University Press. Chapter 1.

Week 2, February 14: Climate patterns and trends in the last 10,000 years

Reading:

• T. Cronin, Paleoclimates: Understanding Climate Change Past and Present. Columbia UP, 2010. Chapter 8.
  
  Additional reading: William J. Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory. The End of the Reign of Chaos.
  Cambridge, 2005.

Week 3, February 21: Volcanoes and climate

Reading:

• L. Marshall et al., “Volcanic effects on climate: recent advances and future avenues,” Bulletin of Volcanology (2022):84, 54. 
• C.G. Abbot, “Do volcanic explosions affect our climate” National Geographic 24/2 (February 1913).
• S. Zielinski, “How paintings of sunsets immortalize past volcanic eruptions,” Smithsonian Magazine. March 25, 2014 

Week 4, February 28: Drought, human movement and climate change. Anasazi, Vikings, and Maya

Reading:

• J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Revised Edition. Penguin, 2005. Chapters 4-6.
• Additional Readings: The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), ed. Elena Xoplaki et al. Pages, 2011.

Week 5, March 7: The Little Ice Age

Reading:

• G. Parker, Global Crisis. war, climate change and catastrophe in the seventeenth century. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2013. Introduction.