Total doom, y’all!
Lessons From The Last Time Civilization Collapsed
Consider this, if you would: a network of far-flung, powerful, high tech civilizations closely tied by trade and diplomatic embassies; an accelerating threat of climate change and its pressure on food production; a rising wave of displaced populations ready to sweep across and overwhelm developed nations.
Sound familiar?
While that laundry list of impending doom could be aimed at our era, it’s actually a description of the world 3,000 years ago. It is humanity’s first “global” dark age as described by archeologist and George Washington University professor Eric H. Cline in his recent book 1177 B C: The Year Civilization Collapsed.
1177 B.C. is, for Cline, a milepost. A thousand years before Rome or Christ or Buddha, there existed a powerful array of civilizations in the Near and Middle East that had risen to the height of their glory. Then, fairly suddenly, the great web of interconnected civilizations imploded and disappeared.
What they are talking about is the Bronze Age, particularly the late Bronze Age. This period started around 3,000 B.C., so, around 5,000 years ago. Let’s continue
It was the transport of copper and tin for bronze that helped establish complex trade networks. Grain and manufactured goods also became part of that transportation web. Alliances between city-states followed. In this way, the Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and Babylonians became the economic powerhouses of the ancient world — what Cline calls the ” Together they built the first version of a “global” culture using long-distance economic and military partnerships that required advanced — for its day — technologies.
So what took all these cultures down at the same time? The story begins, but does not end, with climate change.
The evidence that a prolonged shift in climate was a factor in bringing down the Mediterranean Bronze Age comes from a number of studies, including one published in 2013, showing that cooling sea surface temperatures led to lower rainfall over inland farming areas. from sea sediments also indicates a fairly rapid transition to a dryer climate in during this period that includes the Late Bronze Age collapse.
That is the one and only mention of cooling within the article. I have not read the book, so I do not know if the author, Eric H. Cline, stokes the flames of runaway global warming today, or spends lots of time discussing what happened with the climate of the time, namely, cooling.
We can see that, 5, 000 years ago, the Earth was experiencing a warm period, followed by a small cool period, some warming, then a deep cool period, one which would coincide with the end of the Bronze Age. But, the narrative from NPR seems to be doom from “climate change” for today based on the civilization collapse from then, without mentioning the cause, nor that the civilizations seemed to thrive during that warm period, which was warmer than today.
BTW, what caused that warm period? Sure wasn’t fossil fueled vehicles. What caused the Roman Warm Period? The Roman Empire’s collapse, interestingly, coincided with another cool period, known as The Dark Ages. In context with the data, we see that human civilization does much better in warm periods than cool ones.
This is why it’s virtually impossible to have a real conversation with Warmists: they are completely dishonest.
