The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis
2011/10/03 by David Zhang, Harry F. Lee, Cong Wang +4 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Tree-ring climate responses #Climate variability and models #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Climate change #Northern Hemisphere #Causality (physics) #Socioeconomic status #Geography #Climatology #Scale (ratio) #Development economics #Economics #Ecology #Demography #Sociology #Population #Biology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1104268108
openalex publication_date 2011/10/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract
Recent studies have shown strong temporal correlations between past climate changes and societal crises. However, the specific causal mechanisms underlying this relation have not been addressed. We explored quantitative responses of 14 fine-grained agro-ecological, socioeconomic, and demographic variables to climate fluctuations from A.D. 1500-1800 in Europe. Results show that cooling from A.D. 1560-1660 caused successive agro-ecological, socioeconomic, and demographic catastrophes, leading to the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. We identified a set of causal linkages between climate change and human crisis. Using temperature data and climate-driven economic variables, we simulated the alternation of defined "golden" and "dark" ages in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere during the past millennium. Our findings indicate that climate change was the ultimate cause, and climate-driven economic downturn was the direct cause, of large-scale human crises in preindustrial Europe and the Northern Hemisphere.
Citations
- What Drives Societal Collapse?
- The Evolution of Climate Over the Last Millennium
- Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries
- New Light on the “Dark Ages”
- Low‐frequency temperature variations from a northern tree ring density network
- Sun, climate, hunger, and mass migration
- Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution
- Proxy-Based Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Reconstructions: Sensitivity to Method, Predictor Network, Target Season, and Target Domain
- Large-scale temperature inferences from tree rings: a review
- Central England temperatures: Monthly means 1659 to 1973
- Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability
- Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia
- Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees
- Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data
- Extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere land temperature variability over the past 1000 years
- On the long‐term context for late twentieth century warming
- A 5000-yr Record of Climate Change in Varved Sediments from the Oxygen Minimum Zone off Pakistan, Northeastern Arabian Sea
- High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last millennium: interpretation, integration and comparison with General Circulation Model control-run temperatures
- Social and ecological resilience: are they related?
- The biological standard of living in Europe during the last two millennia
- The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War
- The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years
- Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records
- Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations
- Borehole climate reconstructions: Spatial structure and hemispheric averages
- A new look at the statistical model identification
- Cultural Responses to Climate Change During the Late Holocene
- Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history
Cited by