Climate and Society in History: A Research Agenda

Abstract

A historical component will be essential to any research plan which seeks to evaluate the likely impact of CO₂ -induced climatic changes on human society. Information from the past provides us with the only possible laboratory for generating and testing hypotheses about the effects of, and responses to, climatic or other large-scale physical shifts. The problems we face over the next fifty years will be unique primarily because they will be appearing at this particular juncture, the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. The attitudes, governmental structures, and economic and technical means that will be drawn on to confront the problems will be products of that period, and therefore are not available for study. But analogies, proxy data which can reveal how the processes of change and adaptation function, are abundant if we turn to the past. Here we can uncover the continuities, the general (perhaps even theoretical) relationships between variations in the environment, variations in behavior, and social vulnerability, that can help guide policymakers in the future.