Climate Change Driving War?

The terms "Enlightenment" and "Age of Reason" are not so precisely demarcated, many scholars use a long age of enlightenment to mean from the 1650s forward, and others divide into two. This is part of the "lumpers/splitters" problem, that some people like small units, others like large ones. The Wikipedia article takes the lumpers point of view, but that isn't universal. However, it is generally believed in history that the Peace of Westphalia and the coming of absolutism and the "age of Reason" are linked, and that while there were precursors to this, in the form of say King James I of England's The True Law of Free Monarchy and the policies in France, that the turbulence of the Thirty Years War was the trigger for a more general change. So why that war happened, as it did, is an important question, if climate was part of that answer ?and more broadly, if climate fluctuations show a correlation to political events, then it changes the notion of what historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists need to study and include in their works. Never again will an author be able to wave their hand and dismiss as anecdotal accounts of climate, because now we have better ability to reconstruct. And if climate isn't a factor, then that too is something that needs to be shown, not just assumed.

In terms of climate and history, for a long time there have been observations of linkage between historical periods and climatic events, one of the most famous of these is the period of reduced growing periods known as the "Little Ice Age" and the destabilization of the medieval order on Eurasia. Another more specific one is the relationship between the volcanic eruptions of the 1770's and 1780's and cold snaps that led to poor harvests as a contributing factor to the fall of the ancien regime. Franklin speculated at the time that the eruptions were leading to cold, and Talleyrand famously quipped that "we are all dancing on a volcano," in reference to the problems of the ancien regime in France and poor harvests which were driving inflation in food and social instability.

However, until recently there were not good paleo-climate reconstructions. Paleo-climatology is a fundamentally computational discipline ? it is computers and algorythms by which chronologies are constructed and pieced together: from dendrology, that is trees, ice cores, and other "proxies" for climate. The survey linked to is one of the first, but by no means the last. This is important because much of history has been outside of a real test of theories as to why what happened. As computational climatology matures, it provides a challenge to the dominant view in history, economics, and sociology, that internal factors drive history and events, and a way to apply scientific measurements. Since chronology, and dates, are often "floating" ? that is, we don't really know what certain dates in the past were, only our best guesses, it means that instead of arguments over texts, we are getting measurements, and ultimately facts, to determine when events occured. If you see a date before about 1300 BC in a history text, assume it is approximate, simply because our understanding of what dates were is based on reconstructions. That is best guesses.

One of the most important examples of how this matters is in the coming of what is now called the "Neo-lithic Revolution." For a long time it was seen as an internally driven event, however, recent discoveries show that "The Younger Dryas" coincided with the explosion of domestication of plants and animals, but also how many of the first domestication events: figs, rye, dogs, and perhaps goats, were not in the present warm and stable climate era, but in the colder but relatively stable Younger Dryas period. Perhaps, and one has to say perhaps, what later became agriculture started not because it was a good deal, but because times were harder, but more consistent, and the peoples around the world started domestication because it was a cushion when hunting and gathering were not e

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/9BoNUqPZAGA/Climate-Change-Driving-War

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