See if you can guess what is missing from the op-ed by Eric H. Cline in the Times, in all but a brief mention
Climate Change Doomed the Ancients
THIS month, a report issued by a prominent military advisory board concluded that climate change posed a serious threat to America’s national security.
The authors, 16 retired high-ranking officers, warned that droughts, rising seas and extreme weather events, among other environmental threats, were already causing global “instability and conflict.â€
But Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a stalwart believer that global warming is a “hoax,†dismissed the report as a publicity stunt.
Perhaps the senator needs a history lesson, because climate change has been leading to global conflict — and even the collapse of civilizations — for more than 3,000 years. Drought and famine led to internal rebellions in some societies and the sacking of others, as people fleeing hardship at home became conquerors abroad.
One of the most vivid examples comes from around 1200 B.C. A centuries-long drought in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions, contributed to — if not caused — widespread famine, unrest and ultimately the destruction of many once prosperous cities, according to four recent studies.
Perhaps Eric needs that history lesson, since pretty much every mention of failed civilizations resulted from the Earth moving from a warm to a cool period during the Holocene. The Hittites, mentioned because they dealt with a long period of drought, were dealing with a cooling climate.
While sea levels may not have been rising then, as they are now, changes in the water temperature may have been to blame for making life virtually unlivable in parts of the region.
A 2012 study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science found that the surface temperatures of the Mediterranean Sea cooled rapidly during this time, severely reducing precipitation over the coasts.
Wait, cooling waters were causing problems?
We still do not know the specific details of the collapse at the end of the Late Bronze Age or how the cascade of events came to change society so drastically. But it is clear that climate change was one of the primary drivers, or stressors, leading to the societal breakdown.
The era that followed is known as the first Dark Ages, during which the thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C. suddenly ceased to exist. It took decades, and even hundreds of years in some areas, for the people in these regions to rebuild.
Last time I checked, the Dark Ages were a period of cooling.
But there is one important difference. The Late Bronze Age civilizations collapsed at the hands of Mother Nature. It remains to be seen if we will cause the collapse of our own.
Wait, what? Mother Nature? Why can’t MN be the cause now? And, it sure seems that civilization flourished during the warm periods and had lots of problems during the cool ones.
