Chairman Bruce quoting Kevin Kelly at a Long Term Thinking event

This warming up of agriculture initiated the first vast clear-cutting of European forests. In the short 200 years between 1100 and 1300, from one-third to one-half of European wooded wilderness was deforested to make way for fields and pastures — shaping the lovely farm scenes we now associate with Europe. (Today only Poland has any remaining virgin forests).

Faber says the myth of the medieval warm period is that it was warm. There was all kinds of weather extremes. In 1315 it started to rain for seven years. The newly cleared and naked hills eroded, dams burst, disease spread, and prolonged drought followed.

And not just in Europe. Mesoamerica was jolted by long droughts. The Mayan pyramids at Tikal were engineered to act as water collection reservoirs. The collapse of their empire, and others in South America such as the Inca in Peru, are correlated to prolonged droughts.

Indeed, says Faber, the elephant in the climate room is drought. As recently as the 1800s, prolonged droughts killed 20-30 million people in India during the British Raj period. We have a tendency to believe that modern technology has alleviated our susceptibility to drought, and it has — except for the billions of people on earth today who are living as subsistence farmers.

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Now, remind me again how certain we are that the current warming trend is CO2? I just… I know the urge is to DO SOMETHING but just how sure are we. The poor fit between strong events like the one described here and ambient CO2 levels… you know?

I need to hear a climate change story that really talks about this stuff honestly and in detail. “This is what we know, this is what we don’t know. Yes there were warming events, no we don’t know what caused them, and this is why the current warming trends are different.”

I’d just be more comfy. I grew up in the age of the New Ice Age being the big fear, so I have an inborn skepticism about these kinds of claims. We are basically ignoring most of the rest of the environmental catastrophe – biodiversity loss being top of my list of problems – worrying about something that may, when all is figured out, turn out to be completely outside of our control.

(this is, I’m aware, a contrarian position to take and, if I wasn’t in a massive minority on this, I’d feel duty bound to switch sides and start worrying about carbon dioxide. It’s probably the problem, at the end of the day.)