Climate Change Stories From the Past

Few things currently give me more food for thought than our current climate crisis.

I read the news (too much) as well as popular science (not enough) and follow conversations between thinkers and climate experts who believe that global warming — confirmed by the latest IPCC report as undeniably caused by us — might be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced since evolving hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The message has been crystal clear: we need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and do this fast — before the decade ends — to prevent the most terrible climate scenarios. We also need to find ways to adapt to the warmer temperatures and more extreme weather events that have already arrived. That will require an enormous amount of energy and effort — and belief that we can push through.

As an Archaeology student, researching the past and uncovering past lessons can be both comforting and inspiring when the future feels uncertain, and climate change has not been an exception. Luckily, our current emergency has motivated more research into how past humans have adapted to climate catastrophy, unveiling fascinating stories that reveal our species’ resilience — as well as vulnerability — in the face of climate change.

The lessons are many and offer both encouragement and ominous warnings.

An ever-changing planet

Palaeo-climate data has shown that the climate has varied over time, and that the human species are no strangers to planet Earth changing — both gradually and suddenly. We have had Ice Ages and warm periods and seen mysterious dark clouds block the sun, and though dinosaurs and prehistoric megafauna likely buckled under climate pressure and disappeared, humans have remained. Time and time again throughout history we have had to climatically adapt to survive and collectively we have succeeded. But we have also often paid a substantial price for our overcoming the challenges of climate change.

Lots of archaeological evidence exists for climate change, but I will mention just some of my favourite stories.

Winter is coming

In 536, a so-called Dust Veil occurred when an erupting volcano released ash and dust into the atmosphere, darkening the sky and causing populations from Europe to parts of Asia to go hungry as less sunlight reached the ground.

The effect was dystopian. Forests grew slow and crops failed. Written accounts from China and Mesopotamia observe how harvests were poor enough to cause starvation, and Northern Europe appears to have suffered its most horrible year ever recorded, with one historian calling the year of 536 even worse than 1349 (the Black Death) and 1918 (the Spanish Flu) for European populations.

The dropping temperatures may have lasted as long as 18 months, and in parts of Sweden, three out of four farms were abandoned — an event that was perhaps harrowing enough to inspire the Norse myth of Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, and the Fimbulvetr — the eternal winter that will come and get us all before time ends.

The cloud eventually did what our global warming cannot do — it dissipated — and typical climate conditions came back. Decades must have been needed before population levels were restored, however, and the horrors of the Dust Veil lived on long inside collective memory.

Resilience and vulnerability

The 536 CE Dust Veil showed how even singular weather events can give people all over the world hardships almost overnight, but not all climate change led to immediate disaster. Some instead brought out the resilient and innovative spirit that humans often show when needed, though adaptation often brought its own challenges down the road.

Recent research from the University of Glasgow combined historical and archaeological evidence with palaeoenvironmental data to show that human adaptation to climate change has been successful. 2,500 years ago in Ancient Anatolia, strange dry spells fell over the land, but any prophesying about failure was defied as human populations adapted, enjoyed unprecedented agricultural success, and grew in numbers.

The trend, however, sadly did not last — and what happened to ancient societies in the region we know call Türkiye can serve as lessons for modern society as we look to curb the effects of climate change.

Whilst populations may have adapted and grown, the dry conditions that lingered appears to have made the larger societies more vulnerable to other disasters, such as disease, earthquakes, and wars. Such acute, additional problems put the ancient Anatolians under intense pressure that led to steady decline in human populations — which manifests archaeologically in the disappearance of evidence over the next centuries.

The Ice Age returns

The Little Ice Age was the last such stressful climate change event to reveal human weakness and resilience, beginning as the gentler Medieval Warm Period ended in the 1300s, and intensifying around 1570.

Though it may have begun with another volcanic eruption, this climatic cold spell may have been made worse by European colonial settlers who, upon their arrival in South America around 1490, brought with them a certain smallpox virus that went on to kill an estimated 55 million Indigenous people by 1600. As the continent was gradually emptied of its Indigenous populations, carbon-uptaking forests regrew on abandoned farmland — leading to lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and thereby a drop in global temperatures.

Hunters in the Snow (Winter) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565.

These colder years lasted several hundred years and presented an enormous challenge to societies around the world. Historian Philipp Blom has described how European waters freezing and Chinese crops failing triggered enormous political change and widescale human migration. Even the toughest Viking descandants — those on arid Greenland — may have gradually abandoned the land after several hundred years of settlement, likely due to the freezing winters. Agricultural crises around Europe intensified dislike for the feudal system and encouraged trade from further abroad, which boosted markets and led to big economic developments that may have been unthinkable before the dramatic climate shift. As the New Yorker article says, climate change brings about societal change, and without the Little Ice Age, the world might have looked very different today.

Optimism, cynicism…

History and archaeology teaches us that humans have been through climate change before, and we know what lessons to draw from them.

Though the human species has survived for millennia on this changing planet, and though we should feel optimistic that we have ingenuity and drive to see us through changing seasons, when I read about them, I feel that these stories should make current climate action all the more urgent.

The fate of the Ancient Anatolians have shown us that we may be more vulnerable to diseases and war should we allow our planet to become much hotter, and the societal shifts tha happened during the Dust Veil and the Little Ice Age demonstrates how huge change can be triggered by seemingly small temperature drops. What happens this decade might have ripples for centuries to come.

But I feel that something important to remember is that the climate change stories I have included here were beyond our control (with the exception of the terrible colonial exploits and its contribution to the Little Ice Age), yet humanity still survived.

On this occasion, we are the cause — which means that we also have some control. And, importantly, we still have time. We should therefore remind each other that the power to pull the plug on all those emissions is one that we have: an absurd but thrillingly encouraging upside to having caused the crisis in the first place.