News Brief by Kip Hansen — 30 January 2024 — 900 words/7 minutes
Did Climate Change cause the Fall of the Roman Empire? No, but, hey, it makes a great story in these times of climate confusion.
The entertainment magazine, NewScientist, carried a story on 26 January 2024 penned by Alec Luhn, titled: “Plagues that shook the Roman Empire linked to cold, dry periods” with a subtitle of “A study reconstructing the climate of Italy during the Roman Empire based on marine sediments shows that three pandemics coincided with cooler, drier conditions”.
The NewScientist piece is discussing a ScienceAdvances journal paper:
Karin A. F. Zonneveld et al., ”Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE”.
Kyle Harper, of the co-authors, is quoted:
“The Roman Empire rises and falls and rises and falls,” says Harper. “There’s a series of episodes of very extreme crises in some cases. And I think the case is now overwhelmingly clear that both climate change and pandemic disease had a role in many of those episodes.”
Luhn, author of the NewScientist article, goes on to say: “Cooler, drier conditions may have disrupted harvests, weakening the immune systems of Roman citizens and encouraging the spread of disease through migration and conflict. …. Before the Plague of Justinian, which was caused by the same flea-borne bacteria as the 14th-century Black Death, three massive volcanic eruptions dimmed the sun and launched the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’. Historical accounts from this time recorded crop failures.”
Just to drive the point home:
“But Harper [one of the co-authors of the research paper] says the study should raise questions about climate change in the Roman era, as well as our own: ‘It gives you perspective to understand that two to three degrees [Celsius] of change is absolutely enormous and puts tremendous strain on human societies.’”
Students of history may have quite different interpretations of the events of those critical 800 years of Roman history.
Zonneveld et al (2024) doesn’t go unchallenged, not even in the NewScientist coverage:
“While this new sediment record advances our understanding of Roman Italy, we don’t know enough about the rest of the empire to say climate change triggered or amplified the plagues, says Timothy Newfield of Georgetown University in Washington DC. He has argued that the effects of the Plague of Justinian have been exaggerated.
“Whether these three Roman pandemics specifically brought down Rome is in my opinion hard to argue,” he says. “No one variable or two variables can be held accountable.”
Paul Erdkamp, of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has a pre-print up that starts with this “In 1984, the German ancient historian Alexander Demandt listed over two hundred causes of the decline of the Roman world that had been proposed in previous scholarship. The list offers a clear illustration of the fact that our views of the past are very much determined by contemporary concerns.” And goes on to say: “Beneficial climatic conditions generally allowed expansion of exploitation and habitation, but the reverse was far from inevitable. Societal circumstances determined whether drainage, irrigation or changes in cropping strategies overcame adverse natural conditions. Climate change may have caused an increase in the frequency of harvest failures in the West, but far more damaging was the declining ability of society to alleviate the impact of harvest shocks on the food supply, the wider effects of which triggered the spiraling down of the economy of the West [Western Roman Empire].”
Bottom Lines:
1. There is pressure on all fields of science and in all areas of academia to find the Climate Change Crisis in every bit of research. Only a few brave souls see that this is the superposition of current academic fads onto prosaic facts.
2. The NewScientist piece manages to get in Climate Change (see #3) and Pandemics (plagues) while covering one study on “based on marine sediments” which posits “…three pandemics in the Roman Empire coincided with abnormally cold and dry periods” thus causing (contributing to) of the Fall of the Roman Empire, adding to the list of 200 other causes previously identified.
3. And here, while we will see headlines of “climate change caused the Fall of the Holy Roman Empire”, it will be unmentioned that it was not rising temperatures, not warming, heating or boiling, that caused this Great Fall, but “abnormally cold periods”.
4. The Climate Crisis Media cabals might try to use a line like “periods of drought, like today, brought down the Roman Empire” – the IPCC says “it ain’t necessarily so”. Some places at some times are droughty, some have been droughty for a long time. That’s climate and not climate change. To quote Paul Erdkamp: “The concept of climatic change refers to trends in these wild and seemingly random fluctuations, but these trends are far from apparent and readily discernible.”
5. The ability of society of adjust to, to adapt to, to mitigate the challenges of weather and climate determine the success of that society – the same today as it was for the Roman Empire. And that ability depends of wealth, stable beneficent governments and dependable supplies of energy.
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Author’s Comment:
The reason that “climate change” affects poorer countries more than richer countries is that the poorer countries are poor—they haven’t the resources to adapt to, to mitigate, what the world throws at them. In many cases, poor countries do not have stable governments that work for the well-being of their citizens.
Quite simply put: Warm is better.
Stay warm, thanks for reading.
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Yes, warmer is better and more CO2 is better. There isn’t any climate crisis.
New Study: 2001-2020 ‘Global Greening Is An Indisputable Fact’ And It’s Driven By CO2 Fertilization
Our results showed that the global greening was still present in 2001–2020, with 55.15% of areas greening at an accelerated rate…compared with 7.28% of browning.” – Chen et al., 2024
Hooray!
That means more food for hungry people.
More corn for ethanol, yippee!
I prefer my ethanol to come from rye, barley or grapes.
Why dislike corn whiskey? Which includes many Bourbons?
And what about potatoes, e.g., vodka?
Or rice, e.g., Sake?
Then there are apples, e.g., calvados, or plums, pears and many other fruits?
As a kid in high school, near the end of the year, our chemistry teacher encouraged us to ferment stuff and then to distill ethanol and the team with the most distillate would win.
The best team, with over twice the ethanol my ferment produced, used a mixture of honey and raisins. My team used plain sugar.
A slight reminder that fermented honey (mead) can also be distilled.
Then there are the various sugar cane ferments and distilled products that produce rum?
Lastly we need to consider the distillate from fermented agave plants, Tequila?
I keep bourbon, brandy, rum, tequila, vodka and sometimes gin in my liquor cabinet. Other types come and visit whenever I feel their time is due.
The reason gin is only occasional is because my wife and kids could smell my gin for hours afterwards. I switched to vodka and tonic to keep the peace.
And if there had been a climate crisis or/and pandemics it would not have stayed inside the Roman Empire. Borders don’t stop climate or pandemics.
It didn’t, this issue has been pretty well covered for the last 40 years. The western empire had an agrarian collapse at the same time that the cooling trend was a positive in the eastern empire. The hunter gatherer tribes to the north were pushing each other south causing successive waves of invasion into the western empire further adding to the collapse and ushering the dark ages. Don’t think this is news.
I almost miss the days when some people wanted to blame lead poisoning (from leaded glazes in drinking vessels) for the fall of Rome.
As things are going, some day the descendants of these same people will probably be blaming lead deficiencies for the fall of the West.
First we got rid of lead piping in water systems and church rooves as citizens became unsettled with their governments. Finally it was removed from gasoline in internal combustion engines. Public willingness to believe anything in the media, general madness, and economic collapse, followed in the ensuing decades.
You forgot lead paint. The Romans used lead pipes in their plumbing and siphons. The root of the word for “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead–plumbum. The same is true for “plumb” and “plumb bob.”
Don’t forget the use of lead acetate to sweeten wine, and lead plates, etc. The Romans (especially the upper classes) were swimming in the stuff.
Very nice, Kip. Warm wishes!
Yes, warm is definitely better than cold.
Bill ==> Thanks, good to hear from you.
Even without any climate change whatsoever, look at the map- it stretches from Egypt to England, Carthage to the Caucasus. Automatically, the whole empire spanned a variety of climates and geography. Any shift in climate would simply tweak the boundaries of the Köppen zones to slightly different parts of the empire, which collectively would already know how to adjust to it, even without modern high speed transportation or technology. Since I was born in the 1970s, the conventional theory was that the Roman Empire fell apart largely from within, due to factors not dissimilar to what seems to be plaguing the USA today (not the newspaper, obviously).
The “Valley of the Jolly Green Giant”, the Minnesota River valley stretches across the left half of southern Minnesota. It grows some of the best corn crops in the world. Driving along the 12′ high corn crops on rural highways there in August is like driving in tunnels. But if you go less than a hundred miles north of the “Valley”, the corn fields are gone. It’s just too cold to grow corn reliably. However, if you drive south, for 1200 miles, to the planes of South Texas, corn grows abundantly.
I make that trip, every fall, for a climate change of more than 10 degrees C. You can be assured that if the much feared (by the ignorant) 1.5 C Global Warming happens, varieties of corn will still grow in Texas, but some might also be able to grow in Northern Minnesota, or even in the vast fertile planes of Ontario and Manitoba, easing the food needs of the whole world.
Can’t be a very large crop. Not much room on a plane.
Euclidean planes are infinite in extent.
The fertile plain of Ontario is approximately the same latitude as southern Minnesota, Manitoba not so much. Northern Ontario is the Canadian shield not much fertile land there.
Johnesm ==> To be fair, the paper in question is speaking more specifically of the Western Roman Empire. Interestingly, there are more named cold periods and warm periods in this recounting of Roman (European) history.
johnsob
that is exactly what happened, the western empire collapsed under the pressure but the eastern empire thrived.
“Nude”Scientist has no clothes, a la the Emperor.
Climate change is an absolutely meaningless phrase. We must protest every time it is used. If the CAGW crowd were made to use catastrophic anthropogenic global warming instead of climate change they couldn’t get away with this nonsense. They are liars and cheats.
Bob ==> I don’t know….maybe changing climates would be more realistic. When a local climate changes, significantly, over a long period of time, say a few decades, it can be important.
This would be what I call a Minimum Climatically-Important Difference.
Look at Fairbanks, Alaska. 40 years ago, too cold to grow much, but today it is a major agricultural area of Alaska.
Warmer temperature or more resistant crops?
MarkW ==> Longer growing season.
The very notion of “the fall of the Roman Empire” is false. The “Roman Empire” was not a single empire but consisted of multiple empires ruled loosely by multiple contemporaneous political entities that essentially colonized varying portions of what is now Mediterranean Europe, Northern Europe, Northern Africa, and Western Asia. The powers and influences of the various competing political entities waxed and waned over the course of a millenium.
“Rome” is just shorthand for the late antiquity period of southern European culture. One did not need to live in or be from Rome to be a Roman.
Contrary to common misperception, there was no singular conquest of Rome, but rather it was a very slow moving conversion of Roman political organization from Italian/latin domination to a more diverse distribution of political power throughout northern and Western European peoples and west Asian/Anatolian and North African peoples whom the Roman culture had successfully assimilated over hundreds of years. Thus for a millenium after the supposed “fall of Rome” there remained the “Holy Roman Empire” and the Byzantine Empire. And of course Roman culture and institutions continue into the 21st century in the forms of the Latin language and its successor languages of Europe (“Romance languages” and incorporation of Latin terms in modern English and scientific jargon); Roman arts; Roman religion including Christianity in its various sects; Roman customs; etc etc. Rome did not fall – it transformed itself into what is now modern western culture.
Duane:
The Roman Warming Period was a world wide event characterized by adverse weather conditions that brought about heat waves,droughts stormy weather, starvation, flooding, etc., so that Rome may well have fallen due to the effects of climate change —
The Roman Warming Period coincided with the rise of the Roman Republic and into it’s last great ages, roughly 250 AD (yes, I know there is no sharp cutoff). There were very few famines during this period. You’ve got everything backwards. The cooling off afterwards and the plagues probably didn’t help, but mismanagement, debased currency, lack of new conquests, and other factors could well have contributed to mismanaged grain reserves.
A…e over elbow.
“The Roman Warming Period was a world wide event characterized by adverse weather conditions that brought about heat waves,droughts stormy weather, starvation, flooding, etc”
Kind of like today. What you are describing is “weather”. Yes, the Roman Empire experienced weather just like we do today.
Except it was several degrees warmer
and beautifully livable all across the Mediterranean and into the north as well.
Do you have any evidence that the Roman Warming Period was so awful? Every other paper that I have read mentions that the climate was good and crops were abundant.
North Africa was fertile and beautiful as well.
Mark W.
The Minoan Warming Period, the Roman Warming Period, and the Medieval Warm period were periods of low volcanic activity, so that most of the time there were no dimming SO2 aerosols in the atmosphere, and temps increased because of the cleaner air.
As with the MWP, which was a world-wide event, characterized by the many adverse weather events that I noted above, the RWP necessarily had to have similar adverse weather.
And this is the regime that we are now entering, because Clean Air and Net-zero activities are focused on removing SO2 aerosols from the atmosphere! .
See: “Net-Zero Catastrophe beginning?”
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2022.16.1.1035
Of course, the SO2 aerosols from a VEI4 or larger volcanic eruption will stave off the inevitable warming for a couple of years
Burlhenry
it was the warming period that allowed the Roman Empire to come into existence. It was the later cooling period the lead to its demise.
The Roman Republic failed when the Roman Senate became corrupt and self-serving, which then allowed an elite family to seize power, forming the Roman Empire. The warm period allowed the Romans to flourish.
The famous initials SPQR which stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus is interesting. It stands for “the Senate and the people of Rome.” Even back then, the politicians put themselves ahead of the people.
Think this is historically inaccurate. There was a very definite collapse in the early 400s (after a significant revival in the 300s) with the large scale incursions of the Goths etc. The key disaster was the loss of the North African provinces which were economically vital to the empire. The fall, when it happened, was quite sudden.
The idea of a sort of consensual and incremental evolution away from the Empire and into a culture of separate states has been pushed by revisionist historians, but there is no evidence for it, and lots of evidence for the reverse. You have to look at manufactured goods, trade links, buildings and public works etc.
Its very odd to read that the Plague of Justinian is being linked to the Fall via climate change. By the time of Justinian the Western Empire had fallen long ago, and the Plague did not lead to the fall of the Eastern Empire at all. In fact, it continued quite healthily for hundreds of years after Justinian. Successfully fighting off the Islamic conquests until it finally fell to the Turks in 1453.
But the Goths did not eradicate or conquer Roman culture. Roman culture which is the essence of the concept of “Roman empire”. The Goths were assimilated into Roman culture and adopted Roman culture combining it with their own germanic culture. They simply usurped and replaced the weak Roman emperors who simply could not govern a vast administrative empire from one or even several cities.
For it to be a conquest, the Goths and others would have had to eradicate Christianity (instead they adopted Christianity with leadership of the Roman Catholic Church), eschew the concepts of a Roman Empire and emperors, destroyed Roman physical infrastructure, etc. None of that occurred. Roman culture continued another millenium plus after the so-called “fall” of Rome. Indeed, by that time period of around 459 AD, Rome had long been superseded by other capitals such as Constantinople, and had long given over control of the “empire” to regional authorities. Indeed, the population of Rome itself reached a peak of around 1+ million during the first two centuries AD, but by the fifth century it had slowly depopulated to less than 100 thousand.
The Goths did not eradicate or conquer Roman culture, which is the essence of the concept of “Roman empire”. They took control of Roman culture, much as the early Romans took over Greek culture, and added to it. Greece didn’t “fall” – Greece was assimilated, and formed the basis and ideal of Roman culture. The Goths were assimilated into Roman culture over centuries, and adopted Roman culture combining it with their own germanic culture. They simply usurped and replaced the weak Roman emperor of the time who simply could not govern a vast administrative empire from one or even several cities.
For it to be a conquest, the Goths and others would have had to eradicate Christianity; eschew the concepts of a confederation of Roman states (giving up tribal organization); destroyed Roman physical infrastructure, etc. None of that occurred. Roman culture continued another millenium plus after the so-called “fall” of Rome. Indeed, by that time period of around 459 AD, Rome had long been superseded by other capitals such as Constantinople, and had long given over control of the “empire” to regional authorities. Indeed, the population of Rome itself reached a peak of around 1+ million during the first two centuries AD, but by the fifth century it had slowly depopulated to less than 100 thousand.
If there was a “fall” of Rome, it was the abandonment of Great Britain by the Romans, whose administrators and rich patrons simply picked up and left the island to the Britons and Picts when the empire was splintering, but they still left Christianity well established in Britain. Even then the Germanic Saxons, Frisians, and Angles who invaded Britain in the so-called “Dark Ages” adopted Christianity and Roman ways, where even today much of what is the English language is based upon a combination of Latin and germanic words and phrases.
Read ‘The Fall of Rome_ And the End of Civilization’ – Bryan Ward-Perkins.
There really was an empire, and there really was a fall. Whether there was a conquest, depends how you look at it. You say:
“For it to be a conquest, the Goths and others would have had to eradicate Christianity; eschew the concepts of a confederation of Roman states (giving up tribal organization); destroyed Roman physical infrastructure, etc.”
No. For it to be a conquest an invader has simply to take over control of the invaded country or empire. Whether the culture or parts of it remain is an independent issue.
The fall consisted in the fact that after 500 there was no more Roman Empire in the West. Rome itself was depopulated, trade and manufacture had declined sharply. Whether Christianity remained is immaterial.
For many centuries the fall was regarded as a kind of disaster, but lately revisionist historians with a left political agenda have tried to pretend that really there was no fall. Either there was no Empire in the way ordinarily thought of, or there was a sort of consensual migration, largely welcomed. This is all complete nonsense. The evidence is that there was a real Empire, with administrative apparatus, laws, army, integrated economy. And it fell and was replaced by a lot of fragmented independent states. And this didn’t happen peaceably with everyone singing Kumbaya. And the result wasn’t peace and harmony, it was large scale disorder and petty wars.
All you are saying is that the Goths didn’t kill all of the people of those regions.
A lot a BS there
“Thus for a millenium after the supposed “fall of Rome” there remained the “Holy Roman Empire”
According to Ancestry dot com, I’m related to one of those Holy Roman Empire kings.
In the witticism, it was neither Holy, Roman nor an Empire. Like the European Common Market, which was neither European, common, nor a market.
Please don’t fall for that – if you go back a thousand years or so we are all related to one of those kings and/or a king of England/France/Spain whatever.
I, myself, am a direct descendant of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland.
What am I falling for? Is there some kind of fraud being perpetrated at Ancestry that I’m unaware of?
Do they tell everyone they are related to a king of the Holy Roman Empire?
I just mentioned it as a point of interest. It’s no big deal to me.
I’m actually related to several kings, in merry ole England and Scotland, too. It’s still no big deal to me. I get no benefit from it and expect none. I’ll stand on my own two feet.
The uninvited Huns, Vandals, etc., migrated from backward countries to come to Rome where the money was, much like our southern border.
Instead of sucking of government programs, those walk-ins raped and plundered, created chaos, grabbing more and more as their numbers grew. They took money and paid no taxes
You can’t run an empire on no taxes!
Large areas became ungovernable, like Chicago, etc., and more and more of the Empire became debauched, like Hunter’s computer
I could go on, but you get the drift
Most of them were fleeing or being displaced by mongols and other tribes spreading towards the west. Those ‘walk-ins’ became foederati – in exchange for military service they were allowed to settle and prosper within the empire. It’s bad enough trying to sort out the made-up studies without commenters on here making shit up as they fancy.
Dear Readers ==> Not only, apparently, are there over 200 “historical reasons” for the Fall of the Roman Empire, but an addtional few hundred opinions on whether or not there was a Roman Empire to Fall, whether it Fell at all, if it existed, and “What the heck do you mean by Roman Empire?”
Didn’t mean to stir up the historians….Opinions, and “stories”, vary.
The next question will be ‘what is a Roman, anyway?’ Followed by the inevitable ‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’
Underfloor heating, bathrooms, aquaeducts, water closet, steam bath,
Lessons in Latin 🙁
Lots of low-cost labor, aka slaves, kept the Empire going
That was something the Romans got from the Greeks, specifically from the Athenian city state which was the greatest slave-owning society in history, with more slaves than free men. I believe it was the Christian religion which may have got rid of Roman slavery, replacing it with the slightly more acceptable serfdom, which subsequently evolved into the feudal society.
Aquaeducts were Egyptian and Carthaginian before Roman, bathrooms, I think, were Egyptian. Romans were superlative ‘borrowers’ of other peoples technology – like plumbing, but were rather good innovators as well – gears and bearings were used centuries before being rediscovered in the west.
I don’t think my Latin teachers were Roman, but I may be mistaken.
Roman concrete.
I remember the following written in my first year Latin text:
“Latin is dead; as dead as can be.
It killed the ancient Romans, and now it’s killing me.”
So there’s 201 reasons.
Cold spells are associated with war, famine, and plague. No wonder the Green Blob loves them, given how misanthropic they are.
It was the sort of corruption and societal degradation, similar to what we are now seeing in the Net-Zero nonsense, trans agenda, same sex marriage etc etc etc…
… that was a strong cause of the fall of the Roman Empire.
It destroyed itself, then change itself to recover and re-model itself to eventually become a more modern society. (see Duane’s comment below).
That’s it exactly. The Romans had the Plague of Justinian, and we here in the US have the Plague of Joe Biden! Other symptoms include extreme inflation of consumer goods, ever expanding government regulations (and spending – i.e. national debt) and the lack of anything resembling a southern border.
Looking back in history, mass migration of people from very different cultures into a nation or empire generally resulted in one of two outcomes. One, the empire collapsed or fell apart. Two, the empire may have survived (on paper, so to speak) but became so different as to be unrecognizable.
Rome expanded and took over all sorts of different cultures and religions, and for a while they were able to keep control of these territories. That is one theory I’ve heard before – they just got too big (kind of like the US national debt and funding all sorts of other countries for all sorts of reasons) and could not hold it together..
That last has always been my understanding, that the biggest contribution was Rome stopped expanding, stopped conquering new territories, no more new slaves and riches, and did not adapt to that stagnation. They couldn’t expand past the Danube and Rhine, couldn’t expend far into the Mideast deserts to India or the Ukraine steppes. And when the generals could no longer get easy glory conquering at the frontier, they turned inward to try their hand at becoming the next Emperor.
The Empire never sent exploring and conquest expeditions into the Atlantic to see what, if anything, might be *way over there* to invade and seize.
They couldn’t – they didn’t have ships that could handle deep water. Shallow waters like coastal areas, the Mediterranean and the North Sea were about their limit.
That is a very good succinct summary of what went wrong, add in corruption decadence and failure to secure their food supplies and that is a large part of the story.
Nonsense, the expansion happened because the empire was capable of supporting a large population and was able to produce tremendous wealth. They over whelmed their adversaries one after another. This what happens in every societal expansion, the expansion happens because the society can support a larger population with nothing but time on their hands. Those extra people become restless and bingo expansion.
“They over whelmed their adversaries one after another.” Please explain Hadrian’s Wall.
The PICTs gave them a hard time.
Eventually, the PICTs came to profitable terms, because the Romans guarding the wall needed a lot of goodies, which the Romans mostly bought from the PICTs to try to win them over.
You’ll notice Hadrian’s wall has big gates in it? Other Roman walls similar to Hadrian’s also have big gates in them – also examples in Jordan, I believe. These were not to keep adversaries out but to channel trade between both sides of the wall into set areas where they could be controlled and taxed. The Roman Army never had much of a problem marching into Scotland and beating the natives into submission, Mons Graupius as an example, but wisely chose not to try to govern them.
Can you imagine a RINO Senator negotiating 1.8 million walk-ins PER YEAR, and make that the law of the land!
That Senator is totally naive and unpatriotic .
He should be ousted from the Party
From about 4:15. And this from a person who identifies as ”trans”….
Italy is not known as an economic miracle,
It is still an economic basket case, because it has not the will to keep pace with the rest of Europe.
Having more and more of poverty-stricken “tourists”, makes things a lot worse,
Hungary is opposed to all that, keeps them out with a wall, but is penalized by Brussels for not kowtowing to its destructive EU policies
I suspect volcanic ash starving crops of sunlight might have had a bigger effect, at least in the early stages of the period.
https://www.history.com/news/536-volcanic-eruption-fog-eclipse-worst-year#
That’s absolutely the case of the devastating effect of a very large volcanic eruption. It was so severe that there was little agriculture on a global basis for at least two years, as there was a sharp reduction in sunlight and crop yields in China as well as Rome.All of this served to weaken the population which was then subject to a massive bubonic plague.
Much closer to our own times was the onset of poor crop yields and “the year with no sun” in 1816 caused by the eruption of Mount Tambor in April 1815, This happened again in 1883 with the explosion of Krakatoa, and in our lifetimes the explosion of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. At least one national capital was destroyed in 1994: Rabaul capital of the Soloman Islands. It too had a global effect, albeit smaller than the other three monsters.
In the case of 536 AD, it was a monster explosion in Iceland.
Did they just acknowledge the Roman Warming Period?
They’ll be saying the Medieval Period was real next.
What? Who? Why? Did you think through your question? Because the acknowledgement of any “warm period” (Roman, Medieval, Minoan, whatever) is based climate reconstructions. Anecdotal information (ancient writings) are not enough here, they are indirect evidence. Accurate scientific reconstructions are modern stuff, Mann’s famous study (the hockey stick) is one of the first.
Because the acknowledgement of any “warm period” (Roman, Medieval, Minoan, whatever) is based climate reconstructions.
Er, sorry, but NO, they are not. They are based on physical evidence like treelines, isotopic ratios in limestone, lake sediments, fossil pollen etc.
Exactly. These are things that are called climate reconstructions. The physical evidence, an ever increasing mass of it, assembled into a coherent picture.
Yes, we remember how you refused to accept the reality of the MWP in Viking Greenland even when confronted with physical evidence in the form of barley and oat husks.
God, not again… Why do you have to bs? MWP is a North Atlantic phenomenon. Greenland is a (check notes) North Atlantic island.
Wrong as always:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/03/yet-another-study-illustrates-that-the-medieval-warming-period-was-not-regional-but-global/
Why? One single study from 6 years ago? Furthermore, it’s about one place (S. Am.). What we need is a global thing.
That one study alone refutes your assertion that the MWP was limited to the North Atlantic.
Here are four more recent papers which report evidence for the MWP from the Russian Far East, the Indian Ocean, Antarctica, and the South China Sea.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/10/15/4-more-new-reconstructions-affirm-the-medieval-warm-period-was-warmer-than-today/
Why do you insist on lying, especially when it’s so easy to debunk?
It doesn’t, and this is the point you are unable to understand. MWP as a phenomenon was only consistently warm in the North Atlantic. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t be warm at other places. The problem is time here, how synchronous these warm episodes were. In the last 25 or so years we’ve started to get reconstructions with increasingly better spatial and temporal resolution, so we can now see that the MWP wasn’t global.
You just can’t help making things up, can you? At least you now admit climates outside the North Atlantic were also warm during the MWP.
Detailed evidence that warming was not merely worldwide but also synchronous: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/11/evidence-for-a-global-medieval-warm-period/
I’m just referring you to the latest scientific understanding of this problem. If it’s “making things up” then literally the overwhelming majority of the scientific community is “making things up”. You can’t just dismiss this out of hand.
I can’t understand why you guys here are unable to comprehend this after so many repetitions. “Global” means it’s synchronously happening most of the places. In this sense, the MWP was not global. But it doesn’t mean there were no local episodes of warming outside of the North Atlantic. But these were not synchronous with each other. It’s even possible that at certain locations (inside or outside the North Atlantic) the climate was warmer than today. But on average, only the North Atlantic showed detectable, persistent warming during this whole period, and even that was not warmer than today. For that matter, there were other things too (like droughts) at other places, even without warming, eg. in Africa.
nyolci ==> Actually, the MWP is based on written history, thus is labelled by the Climate Team as “anecdotal” and sometimes dismissed.
Seriously? 🙂 How about physical evidence? For that matter, how do you know about the “Minoan Warm Period”? It very often pops up here. Was Homer lamenting about how warm and pleasant it had been a thousands year before? Or was it Hesiod?
nyocli ==> Read the long-term climate science record….from both sides.
“Recently” there have been reconstructions — some of those have wiped out the MWP, some of them have confirmed it.
But the best of evidence of something-like a MWP in Europe results from historical accounts of crops and weather, from the Romans and others. Growing oranges in the UK, for instance. Chinese records show a similar pattern for the same time period.
Temperature reconstructions are only sorta-scientific.
This is plainly false. We have reconstructions with very good temporal and spatial resolution and the picture is getting clearer literally every day.
Plus verified by many paleo studies from the Arctic circle to Antarctica and many places in between.
Well, Kip has to claim it’s based solely on historical records ‘cos he know well that those paleo studies don’t verify that. Please do not embarrass him.
Anecdotal writings and hundreds upon hundreds of scientific studies.
The Hockey stick has been broken, burned and it’s ashes scattered on the seas.
The so called other studies use the disproven methods and misused data.
Oh, Mark, tell me about these, please. Show me a few, right? I mean scientific papers that contradict the Consensus, okay? (I write this word like the Masoretic scribes did when they wrote God’s name, I have to perform a ritual.) BTW, I know there’s a page that has collected 1xxx studies that “contradict” (/s) the Consensus. (See? I had to do it again. The ritual.) Their selection was apparently based on the fact that the papers mentioned the MWP and they were about places outside of (Europe? The North Atlantic?). Of course the cretins who did the selection were unable to understand these papers. So an arbitrary selection based on a few words in the abstract is not enough, you have to actually show that those papers are against the Consensus. (Damn, again…)
IPCC AR6 Annex VII Page 2237
The consensus is that the MWP existed.
As usual it’s the alarmists (the Mann-iacs) who are the loony fringe.
nyolci, you are wrong and should apologise to those who were trying to educate you.
Can we agree that the IPCC reports are reliable sources then?
Exactly. As a North Atlantic phenomenon. Even in your quote, it says (bold is mine):
Actually, the consensus is spelled out explicitly on p. 295:
Yes. We are now in agreement that Mann’s hockey stick (and its imitators) do not show the MWP but the IPCC acknowledges it existed.
Thus we agree with the mainstream science – the MWP existed for half a millennium between 900 and 1400 AD. And we agree with mainstream science that Mann’s hockey stick is wrong, therefore.
The MWP varied in intensity regionally over that period. It did not cancel the weather but set a warmer norm for the weather. And, despite what Mann’s hockey stick claimed, it did exist.
Mann was wrong. The IPCC and historical records agree, his hockey stick is wrong.
Only a looney fringe still stand by that debunked idea.
(See also, phlogiston, Ptolomaic astronomy and the Dr Wakefield’s MMR theory).
Exactly 😉 Like on p. 6 of the IPCC report.
http://www.co2science.org/data/timemap/mwpmap.html
Thx. I’m gonna read this from top to bottom. In the meanwhile, please tell me who is right here. @MCourtney quoted the IPCC, apparently this is an acceptable source here, and a one that contradicts the website you’ve just come up with. @Kip Hansen and @MarkW are advertising opinions that are, hmm, contradictory. According to Kip, MWP is only known from historical sources. MarkW says it is hundreds of scientific studies, beside the historical sources. So three people, three mutually contradictory opinions. Which one is the right one? What is the consensus? (This is not that Consensus, so pls don’t get scared from this word.)
nyocli ==> Not quite what you are going on about. The MWP is generally “accepted” but if one wants proof then one’s only choice is to go to historical records. Temperature reconstructions are not proof of anything…that’s why some confirm a MWP and some deny (don’t include or show) a MWP.
If you have some sort of idea that Climate Science as a whole has proofs, has things that are certain, you have missed the boat entirely.
Try mathematics instead. That field has things are are prove-able and have been proved.
CliSci? Not so much.
Have you studied “science” itself? as a activity? Those of us who have don’t find these kinds of contradictions particularly alarming.
In Medieval times, there were no automatic weather stations recording temperatures. Our proxies for past temperatures are things like: “better growing season for trees” or “more pollen was found at xxx level in lake mud”…but nothing whatever like “surface air temperature at 2 meters height in degrees Celsius”.
So, even though I generally adhere to “there are no stupid questions”, you have asked a stupid question.
Each of the viewpoints you find contradictory are just viewpoints of what we currently understand about the MWP. And, in the larger sense, they all agree with one another.
To understand where I am coming from, you could read my two-part series:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/02/03/reprise-why-i-dont-deny-confessions-of-a-climate-skeptic-part-1/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/02/12/reprise-why-i-dont-deny-confessions-of-a-climate-skeptic-part-2/
Part 1 covers temperatures and reconstructions.
I can’t understand why you peddle this gibberish. Historical records can also give you climate reconstructions but on an extremely coarse scale. What we have today (based on physical evidence) is infinitely better than that (and, for that matter, complements historical evidence well). I know it was a historian who first proposed this and the thing is not even wrong. It was in the 60s. Now we can see the proper outlines.
Just to repeat myself, you are using as proof some very coarse temperature reconstructions based solely on historical records. At least be consistent.
Yes. This is why I find this denialist bsing here extremely tiring.
At least get your story straight. The other side, ie. science, is a coherent thing. Please study it. You can’t claim “this” and some contradictory “that” at the same time. You can say there’s ambiguity and we don’t know. But here you definitely assert something and give three sets of mutually contradictory evidence.
Mr. letter-salad-for-name-II: Mr. Courtney took you apart, and you tried to play some sort of “gotcha” about the IPCC as a source. Courtney-1/letter salad-0. Now Mr. Hansen’s reasoned response is gibberish.. To be expected from one who can’t spell his own name.
I’m utterly devastated 😉
To be honest, Courtney was the one who unwittingly used IPCC as a source, not realizing that it contradicts his point.
Lol
Redge ==> Well, at least the historians acknowledge the MWP.
They wiped themselves out by the same process every previous attempt at settled civilisation and empire building wiped themselves out = Soil Erosion
(David Montgomery’s book ‘Dirt – Erosion of Civilisation’ explains it all)
Supposed ‘sea ports’ and harbours do not, of their own volition float their own way 10+ miles upstream of the river they’re on to become completely landlocked in any the same way heat energy goes up a thermal gradient in the GHGE
Nobody comes to, or ever did in the last 10,000 years, come to England for the balmy and idyllic Mediterranean Climate.
They came to get food.
Just as Rome did – because they’d turned all the pink bits on that map to desert.
nd a whole lot more, all of Spain/Portugal just for starters.
And they were deadly serious about England, hence why men wearing sandals and skirts took only 10 years to build ‘Hadrian’s Wall’
Hadrian himself, a rampant homosexual was the perfect exemplar of what was going on, just as riotous sexual dysfunction is now.
The boys and girls of Rome had almost totally parted company – just as now thank you to the CIA for introducing Feminism.
Caused primarily by ultra low quality food, revolving around a diet devoid of trace-elements and micronutrients exclusively of cooked starch – again exactly as now.
Everything fell apart and all the Good Citizens of Rome wanted to do was shag each other senseless, get drunk and go to all the best parties
Such as we have the Conference of Parties where all those things happen and little else.
Yes you can survive for a while eating sugar but it has all the mind and body bending properties of alcohol – to which the Romans were madly addicted as also we are.
And that desertification created a ‘warm period’ just as it is doing now – by the removal of soil organic material (thus water) from vast areas of ground leading to the onset of Foehn Effect heating
That heating coming out of a climate dominated by cyclonic weather systems over the land masses, drying them out, instead of anticyclonic systems bring rain and cool weather.
But no, The Drug and its ensuing Magical Thinking tells us that Everything is Never Better as we peruse and count our burgeoning mountains of sugar – that Warm Is Good, that The Climate Always Changes and that us puny little humans are powerless in its wake.
Self deprecation as a joke may be funny the first time you hear it, but any time after that it gets increasingly sad and desperate.
Like a drunk as he repeatedly falls over then staggers back up again.
Until, one time, he fails to get back up and everything goes cold and quiet.
And it will go cold.
After every ‘warm period’, temperatures fell and never recovered – slip sliding away, as the song goes.
The 2nd Law rules absolutely every single time, ignore and dismiss it at your very real peril
I believe you Brits use the term ‘barking mad’
It’s one term we use. Talking total bo!!ocks is another.
Used to drink in Newark regularly when I was in the RAF as it’s close to a number of old RAF bases I’ve been stationed at (Swinderby, Waddington and Conningsby). Once got stopped by police after a night out in Newark saying they had a report of a man on the roof of our car. Odd place.
Erosion does not move ports inland, only uplift can do that.
Or sediment deposition, which is the flipside of erosion.
“poor countries do not have stable governments that work for the well-being of their citizens”
. The USA has not been considered a “poor country”. Well, that’s now ‘by the boards’.
A YouTube channel I watch often is by Nick Johnson. He travels America showing, mostly, its worst areas. If you watch enough of his videos you’ll think much of America is destitute- and I think it’s pretty accurate. The MSM never wants to show the ‘hoods he shows.
The Empire was falling apart long before the invasion waves came along as the empire become more and more decadent and running low on true citizens to build their armies with, they started the growing habit of buying fighters from non-citizens and from people not a true supporter of the empire but allowed to live in the outer margins which later tuned on them.
The Roman Warm Period enabled their flourishing.
But, whether it did or not, I still think about them every day.
Of course it was “climate change”, I distinctly remember reading reading in Plutarch’s Lives, how Hannibal crossed the Alps in a column of Range Rover Defenders with himself leading in a Cadillac Escalade.
Landrover Defenders?
Anyway you fit an elephant in the back of one and I’ll believe you!
This may be not as well known as I thought it was. During the Roman optimum that ran from roughly 300BC to 250AD the living was good not only in the empire but also in the East and in between on the central Asian steppe. When the warm period came to an end and the medieval cold took hold by 300-350AD the steppe could not anymore support the large herds of the nomadic people who lived there. So they moved. Where? Well in the north was the Siberian ice wilderness, in the South the Karakoram and Himalayas, and in the east was a wall built by the Chinese who had seen it before. So they went west and drove the Indo European tribes who lived there, like the Visigots, ahead of them forcing those to pour into the empire. That invasion began around 400AD; 50 years later the western empire collapsed, disappeared almost overnight.
Did climate change kill the Roman Empire? It surely did, but it was cold that did it, not heat.
Obviously many failures weakened the Empire but IMHO, your explanation is the most significant one.
One of many. The age of migration may actually have strengthened Rome for a while, rather than weakening it, allowing it to weather other disasters. The ‘invaders’ became ‘foederati’ – in return for a place to settle, they enlisted for military service.
The Roman Empire went through a long period 200 years of decline caused by several things.A decline in the military’s ability to wage and win campaigns against “barbarian” neighbours, economic decline,overspending, corruption and rise of Easter empire.
All sound familiar to us today?
The last Emperor in Rome was 476AD.
It was those German barbarians always causing trouble in the world. Now they are attacking their own people with Nut Zero, rather than starting another war.
What ended the Roman Empire?
The West was severely shaken in 410, when the city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths, a wandering nation of Germanic peoples from the northeast. The fall of Rome was completed in 476, when the German chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus.
Jan 1, 2024
From the article: “The entertainment magazine, NewScientist”
That made me laugh! 🙂
What a joke New Scientist is!
Tom ==> Well done, sir! Both the NewScientist and the (once-great) National Geographic–now owned and operated by Disney Entertainment–have shifted to click-bait entertaining sciencey stories.
Thanks for getting the jibe!
Article says:”…diverse distribution of political power…”
So did DEI kill off Roman Empire?
mkelly ==> Better them than us….
The 165-180 AD and 251-266 AD periods were both during centennial solar minima. Some regions like northwest Europe would be wetter during the negative North Atlantic Oscillation regimes. The next was grand solar minimum from 350 AD, known as the Early Antique Little Ice Age, a migration period, and when the Western Roman Empire declined from.
They were counting sun spots back then?
Solar cycles and their variability are ordered by the planets, so I look at the planets back then. The records can also be corrected, 1645 is far too early for the start of the Maunder Minimum, and there was an unrecognised and unnamed centennial solar minimum from 1550.
Rome stubbornly refused to transition to electric chariots.
Well you say that as a joke but Ancient Rome had gears and bearings, Ancient Egypt had an example of a battery. We had to rediscover these things centuries later.
Very good article.
Many and varied were the reasons for Rome’s eventual downfall. Too many bad emperors. Too few good generals . Too much internal squabbling. Too many enemies on all sides scenting blood. Decadence, Corruption. Not raising enough taxes to keep the army up to strength.
Heralding its end was the invasion of Roman North Africa by the Vandals in the mid 450’s. This cut off taxes from that region and most crucially the supply of grain to Rome.
Here the weather-not climate-played a big part as Rome assembled a very large fleet in 468Ad which would surely have retaken Carthage if it had not been for a huge storm that scattered its ships and meant its attack on Carthage was much weakened and failed
Battle of Cape Bon (468) – Wikipedia
The Western Empire collapsed and the purple was sent to Byzantium for safe keeping. The Eastern Roman Empire successfully retook Carthage 50 years later and some of the old Western Empires lands as well.
We mustn’t forget that the Eastern Roman Empire-in a much diminished form as the years wore on lasted until 1453, seeing off Vikings, Normans, Crusades, Muslim armies, until it eventually was captured by a Muslim horde. Today of course the crowning glory of Constantinople-now Istanbul- is the mosque of Hagia Sophia formerly a Christian church built from 532Ad by Byzantine Emperor Justinian 1.
By the way the Byzantine empire, as did the Roman empire, apparently maintained a good record of weather and events but much were destroyed by war or weather or, as in the case of Byzantine records, by the sacking of that city.
There are other ways to look at history besides events in nature or simple economics, some more thoughtful. Almost forgotten now but, in my opinion, of immense importance was Oswald Spengler’s magisterial work, The Decline of the West, which treats civilizations as “organic.” I urge anyone who is willing to devote considerable time to read it. Here’s what Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West
There may be something in what Kip Hansen is proposing.
In China, the mighty Han Dynasty collapsed in about 300AD to be replaced by the Jin Dynasty. With Chinese weather records going back 4,000 years then there is an excellent benchmark for what happened at least in Asia if not globally. There was an excellent article, published just before the Copenhagen COP in December 2009, in the SCMP (see link – http://www.scmp.com/article/700638/china-gives-history-lesson-warming) that described the Chinese Climate history and the influence on the longevity of the various Dynasties.
rocdoc ==> Thanks for the interesting link!