“Towards a Rigorous Understanding of Societal Responses to Climate Change”

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In this article, the team of researchers that includes Timothy Newfield and Jakob Burnham looks at the scholarship that they term the ‘history of climate and society’, which holds that before the anthropogenic global warming, natural climatic changes provoked subsistence crises and even civilizational collapses. They argue that such field suffers from numerous biases, and often does not account for the local effects and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of past climate changes or the challenges of interpreting historical sources. Instead, they propose an interdisciplinary framework for uncovering climate–society interactions that emphasizes the mechanics by which climate change has influenced human history, and the uncertainties of discerning that influence across spatiotemporal scales.

Read the journal article.