Did Climate Change Cause the Fall of the Roman Empire?
11 hours ago
News Brief by Kip Hansen — 30 January 2024
Did Climate Change cause the Fall of the Roman Empire? No, but, hey, it makes a great story in these times of climate confusion.
The entertainment magazine, NewScientist, carried a story on 26 January 2024 penned by Alec Luhn, titled: “Plagues that shook the Roman Empire linked to cold, dry periods” with a subtitle of “A study reconstructing the climate of Italy during the Roman Empire based on marine sediments shows that three pandemics coincided with cooler, drier conditions”.
The NewScientist piece is discussing a ScienceAdvances journal paper:
Karin A. F. Zonneveld et al., ”Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE”.
Kyle Harper, of the co-authors, is quoted:
“The Roman Empire rises and falls and rises and falls,” says Harper. “There’s a series of episodes of very extreme crises in some cases. And I think the case is now overwhelmingly clear that both climate change and pandemic disease had a role in many of those episodes.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/01/29/did-climate-change-cause-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire/
