There has been a series of articles in the foreign policy journals recently that have tied the Arab spring and the rise of ISIS to global warming. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have officially stated, many times, that climate change is the major national security threat facing the world and the U.S. Obviously, that puts the distant threat of climate change above those of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, China’s hegemony in southeast Asia or Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions. How about a global financial collapse triggered by the unsustainably high sovereign debts of many nations, including the U.S.?
In a recent Department of Defense (DoD) response (July 2015) to a Congressional inquiry about climate-induced national security threats, DoD asserted that climate change is a security risk because it degrades living conditions, human security and the ability of governments to meet the basic needs of their populations. Communities and states that are already fragile and have limited resources are significantly more vulnerable to disruption and far less likely to respond effectively and be resilient to new challenges. This might have been true in the Middle Ages, but not today.
That got me thinking about the conditions under which global warming (or cooling, as happened during the 17th century), can become a national security threat. Certainly, during the 9th and 10th centuries, when the world was about 2 degrees Celsius warmer, the Vikings burst out of their defrosted fjords and posed a major existential threat to European and Slavic settlements, as they pillaged and slaughtered their way to Constantinople, creating the feudal systems that became the basis for modern nation-states. Neither the Siveryiany, Duliby nor Derevliany, the early Slavic tribes of the Dnipro River basin, were thinking that climate change caused this plague of Varangians.
Clearly, for Holland, Bangladesh and many of the low-lying Pacific atoll nations, sea-level rise poses an existential threat. But one-third of Holland has been below sea level for centuries, so for the Dutch, global warming is a direct national security threat, which they seem to be handling quite well. Schiphol airport, near Amsterdam, is one of the busiest airports in Europe. It is 12 feet below sea level, and is able to handle 55 million passengers each year without much of a problem.
In 1846, the Army Corps of Engineers built a huge Fort Jefferson, 70 miles west of the Florida Keys in the Dry Tortugas, to monitor the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, the sea level has risen two and a half feet (well before global warming), and the fort has withstood countless hurricanes and severe erosion during its 170-year existence. Today, it is a National Park and a prime tourist attraction. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy is fretting about a potential three-foot sea-level rise in Norfolk about 100 years from now.
Recently, I gave a series of lectures at the National Defense University and Naval War College on the subject of national security and climate change, outlining ideas on what roles DoD should be playing in adapting to climate change, in response to executive orders by President Obama. In doing some research, I came across an interesting book by a noted historian, Geoffrey Parker (2013), linking climate change in the 17th century to the numerous revolutions, uprisings and wars that plagued that century in Europe and Asia, including Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s uprising against the Poles in 1648.
It is an accepted fact – based on tree ring data of the past 4,000-5,000 years, along with countless ice cores and sediment cores from numerous lakes around the globe, and 5,000 years of Nile River records – that climate has changed dramatically in the past. The data have clearly shown long sequences of warm and cold cycles, dry and wet, as well as volcanic eruptions. There have been numerous multi-decadal periods of floods and droughts that are correlated with the rise and fall of civilizations, and the migration of pastoral, nomadic tribes from Asia to Europe. That’s why we are known as Indo-Europeans.
Eight thousand years ago the Sahara desert was green. Four thousand years ago there were major climatic changes that caused many nomadic civilizations to move over great distances from Central Asia to Europe. A drought lasting between 1020 and 1100 A.D. occurred in the midst of the population collapse, which marked the end of the Mayan civilization. The decline of Chaco Canyon Pueblo Indians coincided with a prolonged drought between 1130 and 1180. The Khmer civilization centered in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, fell during a multi-decadal period of minimal monsoons in the 13-15th centuries.
The ancient nomadic civilizations of Cimmerians, Scythians, Alans, Sarmatians, etc. all migrated across the Pontic steppes of Ukraine in search of food and fodder for their herds due to changing climatic conditions in their home territories. They invaded the territories of existing tribes and civilizations, for whom climate change became a direct national security threat.
It is well-documented that beginning early in the 17th century the climate became noticeably cooler, with shorter growing seasons, severe winters, interspersed with a highly variable climatic regime of droughts and floods. This was also a century of numerous revolutions, famine, diseases and plagues, and lengthy religious wars. The century became known to climatologists as the “Little Ice Age,” which coincided roughly with a century of minimal sunspot activity, termed the “Maunder Minimum.” It’s still not clear what the causal relationship is between sunspot activity and climate change.
An inscription was found in the Old Sambir Cathedral, dated 1648, which said “there was great hunger throughout the Christian world.” Similar expressions were found throughout Europe, Asia and the New World during that century: “Among all the past occurrences of disaster and rebellion, there had never been anything worse than this” (1641, Yizhou, China). “The times are so miserable that never in the memory of man has the like famine and mortality happened” (1631, East India Company, Surat, India).
We should all recall Thomas Hobbes’ celebrated description of the impacts of continuous wars and natural disasters during that period; in his 1651 book “Leviathan,” he famously stated that there is “…continual fear and danger of violent death; and life of man, solitary, poor, nasty; brutish and short.” Voltaire, in 1740, in one of his “Essays” noted that “three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of men: climate, government and religion.” The same factors hold true today, and contributed directly to Khmelnytsky’s uprising against the Poles.
It’s somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, though – climate and/or oppressive, despotic regimes. Let’s just say there was a fatal synergy developed between natural and human factors in Ukraine during the period leading up to Khmelnytsky’s uprising, which contributed to a catastrophe that played out over the next two generations.
We can extrapolate backwards in time and see how climate-induced famines and diseases, propagated through a populace that was already in a weakened state, could be the cause of social upheavals and political unrest. In 1620-1621, all of Europe experienced an unusually cold winter. Most of the major rivers froze over and, most spectacularly, the Bosporus, so that people could walk over from Europe to Asia. There were 12 known volcanic eruptions in the Pacific during the period 1638-1644. The volcanic dust in the atmosphere was enough to further depress average summertime temperatures at least another 1-20 C.
Climatic reconstructions show cooler and drier conditions in Ukraine during the 1640s, with a severe drought in 1639-1642, and a drought and plague of locusts in 1645-1646, with early frosts and poor harvests in 1647-1648. The Poles called this period “Potop” (Deluge) and “Ruina,” as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpopolita) and most of Europe faced the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” – pestilence, famine, war and death.
Of course, many of the underlying problems were created by the Polish Sejm. One of the important destabilizing events was that the Polish Crown granted huge estates to a few great nobles, so that by 1640 one-tenth of the landholders controlled two-thirds of the population. To maximize the yield of their estates, they appointed very aggressive estate managers who taxed their subjects mercilessly during years-long famine and pestilence. This was, perhaps, one of the first of many man-made famines suffered by Ukrainians, exacerbated by disastrous climatic conditions.
Khmelnytsky was caught in the middle of this Polish oppression, as his estates were taken and sons murdered. He fled to the stronghold of unregistered Kozaks in 1647, a year that saw torrential rains during the harvest season, followed by drought and locusts the following year. In 1648 the Tatar Khan of Crimea joined Khmelnytsky because his people were starving, as their harvest had failed in 1647. A few weeks later, in May 1648, several thousand Kozaks joined Khmelnytsky – and he moved towards Kyiv, where they ambushed a Polish army. The rest is history.
It’s a lot harder to make the case today that climate change can cause fragile states to collapse and become failed states. That’s because there are many international institutions spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on countless humanitarian missions and construction of water-based infrastructure to withstand climate variability. Today, are the people of North Korea starving because of climate change or their oppressive political system? One only has to compare the economic and political evolution of North and South Korea to answer that question.
The reason we are familiar with the few ancient civilizations that flourished and left behind a record of cultural development was because Egypt, Mesopotamia and China were able to effectively manage a part of the climate cycle through the development of irrigation systems and flood control. These were the ancient “hydraulic civilizations” that survived the repeated cycle of floods and droughts throughout the millennia. California is a contemporary hydraulic civilization that exports half of its $50 billion per year agricultural production. California’s agricultural sector alone is larger than the GDP of 120 countries.
Iraq has an even more sophisticated hydraulic system than California, developed over several millennia of trial and error. Ukraine has an old and degraded, but largely functioning, system that can readily be adapted to future climate variability. There’s no reason why Ukraine could not have as robust an agricultural economy as California’s – they just need to begin to start making smarter decisions.