Tim Worstall

Climate Change is Good!

Or at least the last bout of it had some good consequences:

As the climate became drier 6,000 years ago, and the monsoon system
over North Africa and Asia collapsed, people found it increasingly
difficult to sustain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Animals they preyed on moved away or died out, while the plants they relied on for fruit and vegetables became harder to find.

Man’s response was to congregate close to rivers and to turn to
agriculture as a reliable source of food, giving rise to the first
towns and cities, the British Association for the Advancement of
Science was told.

The drying of the climate led to a wave of urban civilisations
becoming established in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and Asia, said Nick
Brooks, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the
University of East Anglia.

“Civilisation did not arise as the result of a benign
environment which allows humanity to indulge a preference for living in
complex, urban, ‘civilised’ societies,” he said.

“What we tend to think of today as civilisation was in large
part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic
climate change. We see a real shift around 6,000 years ago, where what
we see is aridification.

So climate change is in fact responsible for readin’, writin’, ’rithmetic and all that as well. Generations of schoolboys will be so glad to hear that.

In

16 responses

  1. Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny Avatar
    Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny

    I always take this sort of research with a pinch of salt, it’s very speculative.
    I did notice, however, one standard line in there. First you have this:
    >Dr Brooks questioned the assumption that civilisation should be regarded as an advance, claiming that for most people the move into towns and cities meant a harder lifestyle, less personal freedom, a greater chance of wars breaking out and more inequality under autocratic governments.
    And then you have this:
    >Once the first cities had been created, it was unlikely that mankind would go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, he told the conference. “It’s a bit like the nuclear bomb — once it’s created, there’s no getting rid of it.
    So on the one hand he’s saying that we were on balance worse off by leaving the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But on the other hand he concedes that no-one in a million years is ever going to want to go back to it, which suggests that despite its faults civilization was an advance after all.

    Reply
  2. Nick (South Africa) Avatar
    Nick (South Africa)

    So on the one hand he’s saying that we were on balance worse off by leaving the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
    Er no, that’s not the point – the point is that the climate change provided the pressure to cause the adaption to urbanisation and cultivation. Not quite the same thing.

    Reply
  3. johnny bonk Avatar
    johnny bonk

    Im with Scott on this – speculative at best.
    Surely humans do not need external factors to put resources under strain, we can do that merely by thriving upon any abundance we find to the point where that abundance becomes a scarcity.
    Also, though necessity may indeed be the mother of invention, one does not need to be starving to try out new ways of doing things. People may have dabbled with agriculture to make the working day less arduous (that sounds very reasonably) or out of pure curiosity.
    People then must have been very like people today – it is not that many generations ago.
    We are of our natures – expansive, enterprising and acquisitive – and we dont need excuses to conceive and enact improvements to our condition.

    Reply
  4. Neil Craig Avatar
    Neil Craig

    If it is warmer living is uaually easier – this applies to plants too, which is why it was possible to produce the surplus food needed to create cities. The late Roman & Medieval warm periods were both eras of success followed by colder & darker centuries.
    Of course suggesting that ancient global warming was beneficial does not improve your grant getting opportunities so this is phrased in such a way as to make civilization into a bad thing.

    Reply
  5. james c Avatar
    james c

    Have you ever heard of the past tense? ‘Is good’ should be ‘was good’. You will need to know that if you want to be a journalist.
    James C
    Tim adds: Who wants to be a journalist? Bloody hard work that job. Now, a pontificator, a columnist, that’s different, no work or talent required. Fortunately.

    Reply
  6. Lou Gold Avatar
    Lou Gold

    This is one of the most fascinating hypotheses that I’ve seen. If correct, it could explain a lot about the way we are.
    In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East the rise of civilization was associated with the innovation of irrigation which allowed more food to be produced to support a larger population. But something triggered this process. For thousands of years hunter-gatherers had maintained a balance between population size, lifestyle and available food. What changed?
    It seems correct to assume that an ecological imbalance challenging survival began to appear. Perhaps, climate variation affected food availability. Perhaps people multiplied and population overshot the capacity of the niche. Perhaps there was an in-migration of people from regions that were less productive. Something must have begun to challenge survival. What other than necessity could have brought forth the enormous undertaking of building a large scale system of irrigation?
    Ecological pressures appeared and resulted in both competition for scarce resource and the desperate search for methods to increase food production. This would build a new consciousness of attempting to control (or at least mitigate) the forces of nature. The garden of abundance would be replaced by civilization and the politics of scarcity. The consciousness of adaptation and flexibility would be replaced by one of conquest and control.
    The threat of scarcity and the fear of suffering well may be the engines that drove humans toward technological civilization. We became “problem-solvers”, or at least we tried. Some fixes worked for at least some and those some wrote the history. They quite understandably named the cumulative impacts of development and technology, “civilization” and “progress.” Indeed, these words are now so embedded in our language that it would be difficult to use “civilization” or “progress” to signal acts of desperation. But they are easily used to convey a sense of our rising up above (and against) nature.
    Could it be that these exalted words really describe a “worst case” outcome of being “thrust out of the garden”? Could civilization and progress have been an “original sin” triggering an endless need for problem-solving — a habitual cycle of reaching for techno-fixes to solve the problems created by the previously set of techno-fixes? We know that the new expressway lane only creates a bigger traffic jam but we build it anyway. Is thinking that nature might be controlled (or escaped) both the way of civilization and the path of illusion?
    It is noteworthy that the very same historical era that gave us civilization also gave us formal institutional religion. At first, these were exoteric religions of “oneness”, of conquest, power and control. Eventually, there also emerged counter esoteric spiritual traditions of compassion, forgiveness and detachment, in an effort to correct a consciousness that had become separated from nature, spirit and one another.
    As Nick Brooks says, “Once the cat is out of the bag, it doesn’t go back. You can’t uninvent technology.” Is civilization, like the ego, a fact of life — a survival strategy firmed into an entrenched habit, a well defended and self perpetuating form? Is it both an immediate adaptive solution and an eventual limitation to further growth? Is this how civilization’s illusion and the consciousness of control were built?
    Of course, I’m using hyperbole to stimulate thought. Turning it into yet another judgment against the human race is both harsh and unproductive. We are what we are and we struggle to do as well as we can. We get stuck with both our triumphs and our mistakes and we maintain a faith that says that we can learn. But now, in another era of great challenges, it may be that learning how to let go of our illusions is as important as learning how to fix them.

    Reply
  7. Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny Avatar
    Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny

    Nick, he “questioned the assumption that civilisation should be regarded as an advance”. Now, perhaps after the development of civilization environmental circumstances were always so unfavourable to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that there was never any opportunity to go back to it. But that seems unlikely. So the more realistic conclusion is that no-one wanted to go back, because despite the bad elements, civilization was, on balance, better than the old way.

    Reply
  8. Lou Gold Avatar
    Lou Gold

    Scott, the fact that they did not return to a previous hunter-gather lifestyle can be the consequence of having lost the special adaptations that previously had made it good. For example the fact that contemporary city people would not have an easy time living on a farm does not mean that city life is healthier or happier than rural life.

    Reply
  9. Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny Avatar
    Scott Campbell at Blithering Bunny

    Lou, billions of people have lived the civilized lifestyle (or what Brooks is counting as the “civilized lifestyle”) for thousands and thousands of years. And there have been countless complaints about its bad aspects. And thanks to techological devlepments of civilization, those bad aspects get incredible publicity. And there have been no shortage of people filled with romantic dreams about returning to a “primitive” lifestyle, or at least questioning whether civilization is better (such as Brooks himself, for instance).
    But despite all of this, virtually no-one does it, and almost all of those who do try it out find it not to their liking after all. This isn’t due to the loss of any “special adaptations”. It’s because almost everyone prefers, on balance, the civilized lifestyle. The h-g life, for all its good elements, is not an easy one. Even those people brought up in a more primitive way of life, who have had little contact with the modern world and regard it with suspicion, eventually find their numbers dwindle as members go off to the cities. No-one comes back the other way.
    Try as you might to twist out of it, there is a tension — I don’t say contradiction, it isn’t that straightforward of course — between the admission that no-one wants to go back to h-g life, and that claim that leaving the h-g lifestyle behind was not an advance. Brooks seems to be unaware of this tension.
    P.S. You say the “new expressway lane only creates a bigger traffic jam”. This is far too strong a claim. Plenty of road-widening has resulted in a better traffic flow (if it hadn’t, then traffic would have ground to a total halt decades ago).

    Reply
  10. DirtCrashr Avatar
    DirtCrashr

    Once you create a bureaucracy it’s hard to destroy it.

    Reply
  11. Haute Monde Avatar
    Haute Monde

    Punch Bowl….

    …. fouled.

    Reply
  12. NotSaussure Avatar
    NotSaussure

    I wonder how many people’s dreams of returning to a “primitive” lifestyle include eschewing anesthetics or running a pretty high risk of losing their children to childhood diseases and their wives in childbirth.

    Reply
  13. james C Avatar
    james C

    ‘Tim adds: Who wants to be a journalist? Bloody hard work that job. Now, a pontificator, a columnist, that’s different, no work or talent required. Fortunately.’
    Well done, you got the tenses right.The punctuation is another matter and half of your sentences have no verb.
    James

    Reply
  14. gene berman Avatar
    gene berman

    More comprehensive understanding of the matter can be had simply, despite imperfect knowledge of past conditions (and dramatic local variations in conditions).
    No one has challenged (let alone discredited) Malthus’ observation (and contribution to biologic and economic science) that organisms reproduce to a point where such increase is limited by scarcity of resources on which life depends. Malthus’ pessimism was erroneous (or at least short-sighted) in underappreciating the human potential to (vastly) increase those scarce means of sustenance.
    A key to that potential is glimpsed (though not well fleshed out) in Ricardo’s “Law of Comparative Cost,” illustrating that trading partners maximize gains by concentrating effort in areas in which their COMPARATIVE advantage is greatest–not necessarily on crops for which their land was best suited but on those for which (shown by market prices) their superiority was greatest.
    It is apparent that this narrowly-stated economic law is broader in understanding human life. Indeed, Mises (Chapter VIII, esp. pp.159 ff.) calls it Ricardo’s “Law of Association,” underpinning human social life and civilization itself.
    It is also worth pointing out (as Mises does) that the benefits of civilization derive, ultimately (whether recognized by all it beneficiaries or not) from the myriad inequalities in mental and physical attributes of the cooperating individuals–much as the Ricardian exposition involved comparison of pieces of land with differing agricultural potential.
    The speculation (and that is, indeed, what it is) on whether and to what extent abrupt or violent change in climate caused this or that change in general behavior is moot. What is obvious is that the human animal had a pre-existing genetic potential for the development of regular agriculture, for civilization, and even for urbanization–or at least a preponderance surviving had those potentials to a degree that would call into question whether ancestral populations–lacking such potential–could be called, in any way, human.
    Believe it or not, you started me off on my rant, Johnny Bonk. Good on yer!

    Reply
  15. Nick Brooks Avatar
    Nick Brooks

    Just been alerted to this thread. Interesting and considered comments here – good to see this stimulated some debate. I’ll confess that I get bored of all this progress and civilisation ideological claptrap. Having said that, I’m a big fan of healthcare, Venice, the iPod etc. If I could have all these I’d be happy to be a hi-tech hunter gatherer. The intention is not to idealize pre-urban societies, but to get people thinking a bit more about the processes that got us where we are today, and what an understanding of them can teach us about ourselves. It is very difficult to uninvent technology and complexity, so whether we’d all be better off going back to prehistoric lifestyles is a moot point. In any case I doubt this would be possible or desirable given the situation on the planet today. This is a great example of a bit of (admittedly provocotive) academic work being jumped on by people of various persuasions as they either use it to justify their own beliefs or villify it because it doesn’t fit in with their world view, It’s great fun to watch! Of course I’m treasing a bit – keep up the discussion! There was a academic paper on this that you can download from teh URL (see “pulications” link). Note the second paragraph should have been a footnote, so bear this in mind for continuity. My sloppy proor reading. Regards, Nick.

    Reply
  16. Nick Brooks Avatar
    Nick Brooks

    Apologies for the typos by the way – on a dodgy keyboard and in a rush…

    Reply

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