Quantitative Analysis of Climate Change and Human Crises in History - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 230

Chapter 14
Quantitative Analysis of Climate Change
and Human Crises in History

Harry F. Lee and David D. Zhang

14.1 Introduction

A climate-crisis relationship has long been conceived: Ellsworth Huntington's
( 1907 ) The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographic
Basis of History is believed to be the first scholarly work mentioning the
climate-crisis relationship. 1 Unfortunately, research in this area stagnated after
Huntington. The stagnation was, in part, attributable to the absence of accurate
and high-resolution paleo-climate reconstructions. Moreover, most of the related
studies about the topic were qualitative and based on selective historical cases
(e.g., Utterström 1955 ; Le Roy Ladurie 1972 ; Bryson and Murray 1977 ; Gribbin
1978 ;Hinsch 1988 ). Although they provide evidence that climatic factors can
contribute to human crises in some parts of the world, the evidence itself is anecdotal
and it remains unclear to what extent these case-specific findings can be generalized.
There was a lack of compelling evidence to confirm the climate-crisis relationship.
Research about the climate-crisis relationship also fell from favor because the topic
smacked of environmental determinism. In extreme cases during the early twentieth
century, some historians actually ruled out investigating natural phenomena
altogether, regarding them as purely accidental facts unrelated to human history
(Pfister 2007 ).

1 Huntington ( 1907 ) suggests that in historical China, the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth
century and Manchu conquests in the seventeenth century were primarily triggered by climate
change.