The Ultimate Climate Warming Heresy Is That It Might Be ...Good... For Humans, Actually?
Because the history of climate warming is correlated with human flourishing, actually
You would not know it from the climate science we have all learned together, but periods of climate warming are consistently associated with the success of the human species, while periods of climate cooling are associated with human suffering. Contrary to the expectations of doomsday, the more likely outcome of anthropogenic climate warming would seem to be a more successful human race, just based on this history. Climate alarmists tell us that we need to rapidly cool the planet to save ourselves, but the historical record suggests this would in fact create enormous human suffering.
This thesis is bound to be controversial, and I am not a climate scientist, nor am I going to argue this topic with scientists. Rather, the climate heresy posed here has illustrates why ‘the science’ is so distrusted on this topic. Public perceptions of climate risk generally track the economic times — it is a classic ‘virtue signal’ reflecting our anxieties during times of plenty — while ‘net zero’ carbon policies have earned widespread opposition by destroying industrial bases, impoverishing ratepayers, and immiserating politics. Thus ‘scientists’ as a class now risk a catastrophe of their own making by allowing activists to speak for ‘the consensus of scientists’.
What follows is not an academic thesis or a scientific paper. It is merely an illustration of the history, a narrative for the reader to consider. What risks do we create by associating ‘science’ in the public mind with expensive public policy disasters? Americans no longer trust ‘the experts’ like they used to. What is the fallout of expertise being politicized to failing ends? I am just describing a heresy that already exists, that is bound to grow more popular. If you are adamantly in favor of climate mitigation, then ignoring this problem will not make it go away. Consider this fair warning of what you face.
It gets hot
Homo sapiens left Africa during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS 5), an interglacial period characterized by warmer temperatures 130,000-80,000 years ago. Fossils appear in the Levant and Arabia during this period as wetter conditions likely created green corridors of vegetation and water resources, facilitating movement through arid regions like the Sahara and Arabian Peninsula. Humans also likely floated along the coasts on primitive watercraft as sea levels rose. Warming even seems to have increased intergroup communication. Our original success as a species took place in a period of warming.
It gets cold
Then around 70,000-50,000 years ago, a period of global climate cooling accelerated the pace of human migration out of Africa. It also produced a DNA bottleneck, that is, mass death, followed by a rebound in human population as the climate warmed again. Put simply, humanity suffered during the cold spell and recovered when the planet warmed again. Cooling is consistently associated with the suffering of the human species.
It gets hot
We currently live in the Holocene interglacial, a warm period that is now about 11,700 years old. The so-called Holocene Climatic Optimum, also called Holocene Thermal Maximum or Hypsithermal, roughly 9,000–5,000 years ago, peaking around 6,000–7,000 years ago, made the Neolithic revolution possible. Everything that followed — the transition to agriculture, settled villages, and the rise of early civilizations along the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow Rivers — took place in a period of comparatively warm, wet weather compared to previous human history. Warmer, more stable climates made it possible to grow crops every year. Population grew and urbanism followed. Food surpluses freed up people for specialization, leading to advancements in technology, art, and governance. We have succeeded in evolving as a species during this long-term warm period.
It gets cold a couple of times (probably volcanoes)
During this warmer period of prehistory, there were two cooling spells. The 8.2 kiloyear event (~8200–7600 years ago, ~6200 BC) was an major abrupt drop (~1–3°C), possibly caused by freshwater outflow from North American glacial lakes disrupting Atlantic ocean circulation. This created drier conditions, weakened the Indian Ocean monsoons, and made parts of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia arid. Neolithic settlements were abandoned. Archaeology has discerned cultural shifts and population disruptions in early agricultural societies such as Mesopotamia. Societies migrated and adopted new lifeways to survive, abandoning early urbanism, so the stress on humanity is visible to science.
The 4.2 kiloyear event (~4200–3900 years ago, ~2200 BC) was a megadrought that dried up Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for centuries. The Akkadian Empire fell to famine and invasion by hungry hordes of displaced people. The Old Kingdom of Egypt saw a drastic decline and near-collapse due to low Nile floods, famine, and resulting instability. The entire Harappan civilization ended its urban phase, abandoned their cities, and migrated southeastwards. In China, the Liangzhu culture collapsed from drought, migration, and upheaval. Cities shrank or disappeared. Social complexity was reduced everywhere.
It gets hot and then cold and then hot again (volcanoes)
The Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum (300 BC to 300 AD), was a prolonged period of relatively warm and stable conditions in the Mediterranean, Europe, and parts of the North Atlantic that is correlated with the rise and success of the Roman Empire, while the cooling spell that followed is correlated with its decline. This was the ‘Little Ice Age’ from ~450–700 CE, including the ‘Year of Darkness’ in 536 that resulted from a volcanic eruption. Western European decline gave us the term ‘dark age’. Similar stresses appear across Eurasia.
The Medieval Warm Period, also called Medieval Climate Optimum or Medieval Climatic Anomaly, from around 950 to 1250 AD, raised temperatures in North America and Eurasia to levels they would not reach again until the 20th century. This period is associated with vineyards in England, Norse settlements in Iceland and then Greenland, broad population growth, stronger centralized governments, reduced need for fortifications in some areas, bustling international trade, and architectural innovation. Food surpluses and milder winters supported prosperity and made exploration feasible.
This period ended with the ‘Little Ice Age’, roughly 1300 to 1850 AD. This was the most recent major cooling period, with temperatures ~0.6°C cooler on average across the northern hemisphere. First, the Great Famine, 1315–1317, killed millions of Europeans. North American cities like Cahokia were abandoned. The cold snap peaked during the so-called ‘Iron Century’ associated with wars of religion, crop failures, famines, and plagues in Europe that reduced the population of some parts of Germany by 70%. In China, the Ming Dynasty fell, and the Chinese population plummeted more than 40% in many regions. Skeletons from this period show global reductions in height.
One side effect of this climate change was European exploration and empire building. The Dutch Golden Age of the late 16th and 17th centuries was a time of economic boom, global trade dominance, scientific and cultural advances, population growth, and urbanization through successful adaptation to the stress. Innovations in whaling, shipbuilding, and agriculture helped the Netherlands adapt and prosper by claiming faraway lands and islands. Climate cooling is therefore associated with colonization and empire, which are allegedly the greatest crimes in human history.
This is not climate change denial, it is the opposite
First, to accept this hypothesis — that climate warming is good for humanity and climate cooling is bad for humanity — we must believe climate scientists when they tell us the climate history of the planet. Second, it requires accepting as true and given the scientific consensus that the global climate is currently warming, as well as the separate consensus that this warming is anthropogenic, i.e. man-made. What I have done here is simply ask whether anthropogenic climate warming is really a death sentence for humanity and assemble a substantive argument that the answer is no. Feel free to take issue with that conclusion if you want to. My entire point is that it is easy to make this argument.
Taken on its own terms, with hindsight, we can see that our scientific understanding of the history of the climate in human times correlates warming periods with our success, and cooling periods with our suffering. This is a historical view, however. It regards the past instead of projecting into the future, which is what climate activism has always done. Al Gore warned us that the Statue of Liberty would be under rising seas by now. Eight years ago, Greta Thunberg was autistically upset that the world would be dead in five years. Science is poorly served by such prophets. Public policy prescriptions that annoy and impoverish Americans to avoid imaginary future catastrophes are bound to backfire on the people who imposed them.
Moral scolding is also a losing strategy, in the end. People do not become evil by noticing that the catastrophic predictions of climate alarmists are not coming true, that change is not necessarily bad. The climate is indeed changing, as it always does. These are slow, aggregate changes, however, and they are not necessarily bad for us. They might even herald a golden age for humanity, brought on by the heretics who adapted to climate change with the greatest success. Anyway, that would be consistent with human history.