• Energy Research

AbstractRecent decades have seen the rapid expansion of scholarship that identifies societal responses to past climatic fluctuations. This fast-changing scholarship, which was recently synthesized as the History of Climate and Society (HCS), is today undertaken primary by archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians and paleoclimatologists. This review is the first to consider how scholars in all of these disciplines approach HCS studies. It begins by explaining how climatic changes and anomalies are reconstructed by paleoclimatologists and historical climatologists. It then provides a broad overview of major changes and anomalies over the 300,000-year history of Homo sapiens, explaining both the causes and environmental consequences of these fluctuations. Next, it introduces the sources, methods, and models employed by scholars in major HCS disciplines. It continues by describing the debates, themes, and findings of HCS scholarship in its major disciplines, and then outlines the potential of transdisciplinary, ‘consilient’ approaches to the field. It concludes by explaining how HCS studies can inform policy and activism that confronts anthropogenic global warming.

A large scholarship currently holds that before the onset of anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes long provoked subsistence crises and, occasionally, civilizational collapses among human societies. This scholarship, which we term the 'history of climate and society' (HCS), is pursued by researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeologists, economists, geneticists, geographers, historians, linguists and palaeoclimatologists. We argue that, despite the wide interest in HCS, the field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Here we propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate-society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties inherent in discerning that influence across different spatiotemporal scales. Although we acknowledge that climate change has sometimes had destructive effects on past societies, the application of our framework to numerous case studies uncovers five pathways by which populations survived-and often thrived-in the face of climatic pressures.

Abstract Concern has risen that current global warming and more frequent extreme events such as droughts and floods will increase conflict around the world. This concern has spurred both social science research on contemporary climate, peace, and conflict as well as research in the historical sciences on past climate, weather, warfare, and violence. This perspectives article compares these two fields of scholarship and examines how each may benefit the other. It finds significant convergences in methods and insights across contemporary and historical research as well as persistent patterns in causal pathways between climate and conflict. Contemporary climate, peace, and conflict (CPC) research may sharpen methods and causal models for historical researchers. Historical studies, particularly those informed by contemporary research, may elucidate deep origins and long-term effects of climate-related conflicts. For policymakers and the public, history offers comprehensible ways to make sense of complex and contingent linkages and to construct cogent narratives of the past as well as storylines for the future.