The climate is decisive for life. Literally. Between the 12th and 18th centuries, falling temperatures during the growing season increased the likelihood that Jews would be persecuted in the following five years. And Europe's Little Ice Age, between 1550 and 1800, not only produced plenty of snowy pictures: in 1640 there were more wars being fought around the world than at any other time until 1940. And thousands of witches were executed. These are some of the stories Oxford professor Peter Frankopan tells in The Transformed Earth (Criticism), a story of humanity with climate change as its thread. A book that tries to give clues to a current world that is experiencing a climate emergency with indicators on the verge of collapse.
He says that the myth of the flood was born in the Babylonians as a warning against the risks of crossing ecological limits.
All global religions have an environmental and ecological element. God punishes bad behavior with floods, as with Noah, or with being thrown out of the Garden of Eden and having to worry about drought and famine. And the warnings in all those periods and regions were that if you behave selfishly and stupidly the punishment will always be the same. But if you don't learn any of the lessons from history, it's no wonder we think this is the first time we've been through this. All those warnings we've had... Why don't we pay attention to the idea that we are fragile? And now every 20 questions you ask ChapGPT requires 500 milliliters of water to cool it. By 2027, water to cool chatbots will be greater than the UK's water consumption.
Why don't we act to the extent necessary?
We are nostalgic, we want time to stop, to return to other worlds where everything seemed less complicated. We can not. And we don't change things because we don't understand the world in front of us. We don't spend time thinking about Pakistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh or Indonesia, four countries with almost a billion people. Add India and China... We are trapped in that romantic idea of progress, liberalism, democracy, freedoms, without thinking about what we really need to protect them. And there is disenchantment with democracy. I get asked a lot if an autocrat wouldn't plan the necessary policies ahead of time.
Isn't it possible to think long term in our system?
The imposition of clean energy development in Europe in recent years has been really good. But we're not going fast enough. 18 days ago an extreme weather event cost more than a billion dollars. And we don't think about it sitting in Madrid having a cup of coffee, but the storms in the Caribbean or the typhoons in Taiwan affect the price of semiconductors, of wheat, and that translates to insurance premiums, to the difficulty of making payments. and earn a living. We lack that 360-degree view of the world, of what it really is.
If I had to choose a period where climate has been most influential to humanity...
I would choose the medieval warm period, where the climate was stable. That period between 800 and 1200 was one of real globalization. The great empires linked the Mediterranean with the Pacific. The Byzantine, the Eastern Roman, the great Ethiopian kingdoms, the Caliphate of Baghdad, the Khmer world, the Tang dynasty in China, the Pagan in South Asia and Burma... There is cooperation, trade, planning, many ideas are spread different. And the high level of centralization and competition of bureaucracies and the high levels of ability to innovate and invest in connections paid dividends. Obviously history books sell more if they deal with disasters. In the Little Ice Age there were women burned as witches across Europe, tens of thousands, blamed for cold weather or poor harvests. And with the Jews the levels of persecution increased enormously for every third of a degree less temperature.
Today we already have scapegoats for the climate?
It's early to see, but I suppose polarization and anti-elite movements in democracies are part of that.
Does our instability have to do with climate change?
It is the stage in which everything develops. It is one of a series of revolutions that unfortunately occur at the same time. And we know from all studies that environmental shocks lead to centralization of government. In developing countries, climate crises and extreme weather events are closely related to them being more autocratic. It will also be the case in our world.
Are there winners and losers?
The Belgian tourist office says that Belgium will be the new Costa del Sol... The obvious winner is the places that have permafrost that will melt, like Russia or Canada, but huge methane holes have opened in the permafrost of Siberia and the explosions can be heard a thousand kilometers away. Then, the middle belt of Africa has seen a khaki revolution of militarized autocratic states, often supported by Russia and highly incentivized to stimulate migration to flee war or intentionally destabilize Europe. And this last summer, due to the unusual heat we have had diseases such as Zika, dengue and hemorrhagic fever establish themselves in the Mediterranean. The areas in which we have been protected are beginning to change. Today most of my colleagues at the university no longer think about stopping climate change, but rather about how to reverse it. And in the least harmful way possible, because the scale of what is coming is so great that we cannot afford to wait for some of these changes to affect us.
