Climate is decisive for life. Literally Between the 12th and 18th centuries, the drop in 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, didn't just produce plenty of snowy pictures: in 1640, more wars were fought around the world than at any other time until 1940. And thousands of witches These are some of the stories told by Oxford professor Peter Frankopan in La Tierra transformada (Critique), a history of humanity with climate change as a thread. A book that tries to give clues to a current world that is experiencing a climate emergency with indicators on the edge of the abyss.
He explains that the myth of the flood was already 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 expelled from 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 of history, it's no wonder we think it's the first time we've experienced it. All the warnings we've had... Why don't we heed the idea that we're fragile? And now for every 20 questions you ask ChatGPT, 500 milliliters of water are required to cool it. By 2027, the amount of water used to cool chatbots will be higher than the UK's water consumption.
Why do we not act to the necessary extent?
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 that have almost a billion people. Add India and China... We are stuck in that romantic idea of progress, liberalism, democracy, freedoms, without thinking about what we really need to protect them. And there is a disenchantment with democracy. I am often asked if an autocrat would not plan the necessary policies with more time.
Is it not 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 drinking a cup of coffee, but storms in the Caribbean or typhoons in Taiwan affect the price of semiconductors, of wheat, and this is transferred to insurance premiums, to the difficulty in attending to the payments and earn a living. We lack the 360-degree view of the world, as it really is.
If I had to choose a period when climate has been most influential to mankind…
I would choose the medieval warm period, when the climate was stable. That period between the years 800 and 1200 was one of real globalization. The great empires united 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, it is they spread many different ideas. And the high level of centralization and competition of bureaucracies and the high levels of capacity 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 accused of witches all over Europe, tens of thousands, to whom the cold weather or bad harvests are attributed. And with the Jews the levels of persecution increased enormously for every third of a degree minus the temperature.
Do we already have climate scapegoats today?
It's too early to tell, but I guess polarization and anti-elite movements in democracies are part of it.
Does our instability have to do with climate change?
It is the stage in which everything unfolds. It is one of a series of revolutions that are unfortunately taking place at the same time. And we know from all the studies that environmental shocks lead to centralization of government. In developing countries climate crises and extreme weather events are closely related to the fact that they are more autocratic. It will also be the case in our world.
Are there winners and losers?
Belgian tourism office says Belgium will be the new Costa del Sol... The obvious winners are places with permafrost that will melt, such as Russia or Canada, but huge methane holes have opened up in the permafrost of Siberia and the explosions are heard a thousand kilometers away. Afterwards, the central belt of Africa has experienced a khaki revolution of militarized autocratic states, often endorsed by Russia and highly incentivized to stimulate migration to escape war or intentionally to destabilize Europe. And this past summer, due to the unusual heat, we have had diseases such as Zika, dengue and hemorrhagic fever that have established themselves in the Mediterranean. The areas where we have been protected are beginning to change. Today, most of my colleagues at the university no longer think about slowing climate change, but about how we can 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.
