Quantitative analysis of climate change and human crises in history

Abstract

A climate-crisis relationship has long been conceived: Ellsworth Huntington’s (1907) The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographic Basis of History is believed to be the first scholarly work mentioning the climate-crisis relationship.1 Unfortunately, research in this area stagnated after Huntington. The stagnation was, in part, attributable to the absence of accurate and high-resolution paleo-climate reconstructions. Moreover, most of the related studies about the topic were qualitative and based on selective historical cases (e.g., Utterström 1955; Le Roy Ladurie 1972; Bryson and Murray 1977; Gribbin 1978; Hinsch 1988). Although they provide evidence that climatic factors can contribute to human crises in some parts of the world, the evidence itself is anecdotal and it remains unclear to what extent these case-specific findings can be generalized. There was a lack of compelling evidence to confirm the climate-crisis relationship. Research about the climate-crisis relationship also fell from favor because the topic smacked of environmental determinism. In extreme cases during the early twentieth century, some historians actually ruled out investigating natural phenomena altogether, regarding them as purely accidental facts unrelated to huma history (Pfister 2007).