Actually, this whole climate catastrophe stuff reminds of the awe-inspiring Helliconia books by Brian Aldiss, where despite the best efforts of the smartest people, an entire civilisation waxes and wanes with terrible inevitability because of a planet’s 20Kyear climate oscillations.
How is it that we happen to live in this, climatologically speaking, best of all possible times? On statistical grounds, it certainly seems improbable that the only period in the climate record as stable as our own is our own. And it seems, if anything, even more improbable that climatologists should make the discovery that we are living in this period of exceptional stability at the very moment when, by their own calculations, it is likely nearing an end.
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“Now you’re able to put human evolution into a climatic framework. You can ask, Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial�ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture.
If you look at it, it’s amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable.”
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