Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge, 2015). Abrégé d’Histoire du Climat: du Moyen Âge à Nos Jours (Fayard, 2007).īrooke, J. This edited volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of scholarship in palaeoclimatology, historical climatology and climate history, a field that partly overlaps with HCS.
(eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Climate Change in Human History: Prehistory to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2018). 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. 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. 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.
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. Nature volume 591, pages 539–550 ( 2021) Cite this articleĪ 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. Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change