Well, according to Emmett Scott's application of archeological data to Henri Pirenne's thesis that the rise of Islam was the actual cause of the Western Dark Ages (nope, wasn't the Germanic barbarian invasion, Visigothic Spain was a fully literate society), there is a historical case in which her thesis is correct: the trampling of the rights of the indigenous Christian population of North Africa and the Levant by Muslim invaders caused the desertification (a type of climate change) of what had been the bread-basket of the ancient world, and resulted in the top-soil eroding into the Mediterranean (a layer of sediment known to archaeologists as the Younger Fill).