Climate Change and the Fall of the Roman Empire

[Iskander 3.1]

From NPR:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/22/133143...e-fall-of-rome

I found this to be very interesting and I hope that other armchair scholars of Roman history think so too. Any thoughts/ideas are welcome but PLEASE don't turn this into an argument about global warming ().

[-42-]

Doubtful, Rome had quite a few nails in her coffin aside from any percieved climatalogical issues. And tree ring data has been shown to be unreliable at best.

[Vaginacles]

If it is the case, poor agricultural productivity merely exacerbated the already declining tax base due to an overtaxed military industrial state. I don't think its even a major cause of the fall of rome, though more important than the claim of civic "decadence".

[Blxz]

Even so, the medieval warm period and the little ice age showed a similar rise and fall (i use the term loosely here) of civilizations and the like. Climate plays a big role in many things. Such a broad topic. Having said that I didn't read your link so I could be way off. I did write a paper about this late last year though and there is some evidence to suggest that broad scale climate change affects nations worldwide with warming being beneficial and cooling having negative effects.

Lets all go fire up our SUV's and reap the benefits of a warmer earth =)

[abou]

It's something that I'll listen to later. My degree in undergrad was evolutionary biology -- which of course includes a bit of ecology -- so I'm curious as to what is said. Hopefully they aren't confusing bad weather with climate: the latter being an aggregate of weather.

[Kuningaz]

Well, I've read about a theroy that claimed the germanic migration was mostly caused by a harsher climate in northern europe and less by pressure from the steppe peoples. So you could say that climate change accelerated Rome's fall quite a bit... However I think that corruption, 'decadence' and especially the reliance on foreign (germanic) soldiers and generals were the main cause of the end of the Western Empire.

[abou]

Doubtful, Rome had quite a few nails in her coffin aside from any percieved climatalogical issues. And tree ring data has been shown to be unreliable at best.

Actually, tree rings are pretty good. The only place tree rings are worthless is in environments where there is not a winter to cease growth -- e.g. the tropics. Furthermore, as any good experiment, the researchers pooled data from other sources such as peat bogs to corroborate findings.

What I am taking away from this is that issues with climate change or El Nino/La Nina events could have been the hair on the camel's back. If you live in the west, food isn't so much of a problem. The agriculture industry is pretty good at taking care of things. Still, even in the UK when the snows hit in December, you can get food shortages. Go back 2,000 years, add in everything that was going on that we are familiar with it looks bad. But even then consider such things as decreased tax revenues from poor harvests for the Romans. Even further, consider being a Germanic tribe when you yourself have a poor harvest. The relatively prosperous regions of the south under the control of Rome look very tempting.

In the end, does climate change -- or maybe the better term for that specific era would be variability -- have a role to play? I'd say very possibly so; especially considering the confounding factors that we are more familiar with.

[Ibrahim]

Doubtful, Rome had quite a few nails in her coffin aside from any percieved climatalogical issues. And tree ring data has been shown to be unreliable at best.

trees tend to add rings of growth every year (the borders are, as abou said, due to winter); these rings tend to vary in thickness, according to precitpitation and soil fertility. the thicker the ring, the better the condition. bear in mind, the technique is most accurate when a tree ring sample is used to look at conditions that the tree lived in (i.e., the place/region where it lived); you can't se a ring in Arizona to construct models for data in Germany.

and as abou said: it is pretty good. for example, it was used in Virginia to confirm the existence of a drought in the first few years of Jamestown colony (which exacerbated problems between the Natives and Jamestown); the same being the case for the Anasazi tribes (apparently, there was a long drought, or series of droughts, starting in IIRC 1250). it is also why we have strativarius violins: the cooler, drier conditions in the norther hemisphere generally meant thinner rings; oddly, this means a (supposedly) better violin (have no clue why-I'm a paleontology/geoscience student).

and since abou is right, and scientists were smart enough to pool data together accurately, a chronology of tree ring data has been assembled for various localities in the northern hemisphere, going back IIRC to ~10,000 Bp. the Southern Hemisphere unfortunately is not as well catalogued (for example, almost all the data for the "little ice age", comes fromt he Northern Hemisphere. It doesn't mean it didn't really exist, just that we only have data for the Northern Hemisphere.)