History and Climate Change: A Eurocentric Perspective (review)

The process of global warming has created several mini-industries to model climate change and to project likely impacts upon human society. The outcomes of both projects are raising concerns around the world. If ever a set of problems required an interdisciplinary approach, this one is it. Historians, too, have contributed to this research. Unlike the massive, well-funded interdisciplinary teams of researchers that model global warming, however, the historians who work in this area tend to be lone scholars who have to master the science of climate change and other environmental sciences, as well as the intricacies of explaining change. It is a daunting interdisciplinary task, and few historians have ventured too far into it.

Brown is not a trained historian but a British international strategic security analyst who apparently had climate and weather in his portfolio of intelligence responsibilities, giving him competence in at least one half of the tools necessary to examine the relationship between "history and climate change." Brown provides an interesting thesis—that until about 1350 (the bulk of the book concerns the period from 211 C.E., which Brown considers to mark the height of the Roman empire, to 1350), climate played "a salient role in shaping our historical experience." Afterward (at least in Europe), it moved "more toward the periphery of causation as a factor liable to come critically into play as and when a society or a political regime is delicately poised for other reasons" (289).

Unfortunately, the book is fundamentally flawed, first and foremost because Brown is not clear about what he is trying to explain. "History" to him apparently means everything from events or processes—like thefall of the Roman empire, the 1066 invasion of England, and the thirteenth-century Mongol outburst—to grand patterns (China's dynastic cycles), demographic patterns, agronomy and food prices, and premodern industry. Curiously, despite the subtitle, Brown covers a good portion of the northern hemisphere, including China and Japan and the Islamic world (but omitting India, Africa, and the southern hemisphere). The methodological problem, even with great clarity about what constitutes "history," is formidible. The two slippery factors involved are evocative of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: Both "history" and "climate" are changing, and when one attempts (or assumes) to hold one constant, the other moves, rendering certainty illusory. Because he is an amateur historian, Brown mistakenly assumes that "history" is the known and fixed variable, whereas knowledge about past climates and their changes is less certain. Even with such a (mistaken) simplifying assumption, his analysis is replete with cautionary language. This book contains little about the relationship between history and climate change that seems secure, despite Brown's (unproven) thesis.