by David Keys
Climatic change also triggers disease outbreaks. The Red Cross report says that current climate change is “already extending the range of infectious tropical diseases such as river blindness, malaria, schistosomiasis, dengue and yellow fevers to areas where they are not currently endemic and where the local population has no immunity.”
By 2100, 60 percent of the world’s population will be living in potential malaria zones, according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Current climatic change, involving hotter and longer heat waves, is massively increasing death rates from heart and lung disease.
Air pollution and mold spore and pollen problems will all get worse. Predictions by Paul Epstein of the Harvard Medical School (referred to in World Disasters Report 1999) suggest that total heat-related deaths worldwide are likely to double by 2020.
Other diseases that are likely to spread more rapidly as a result of current climate change include encephalitis (which spread to New York in summer 1999), leishmaniasis, Lyme disease, and rickettsiosis (boutonnense fever). These last three illnesses are spread by mosquitoes, sand flies, and dog fleas respectively.
El Niño–triggered medical problems have hit both South America and Asia.
In Peru’s Piura region, malaria contraction rates trebled in 1997/1998 with 30,000 people becoming ill. At the same time 10 percent of Peru’s medical infrastructure was adversely affected by the El Niño storms themselves. The Red Cross report says that in Bolivia “cholera reportedly broke out near La Paz, Cochabamba, and Oruro,” and that in Ecuador “outbreaks of leptospirosis and cholera were reported near the southern city of Guayaquil.”
Climate change is also likely to cause diseases to jump species. Already, in early 1998, when northeast Kenya was hit by unusually heavy rains, a cattle condition called Rift Valley fever spread to humans and killed over 1,000 people.
The IPCC says that climate change “could create a serious [financial] burden for developing countries.”
However, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says that it’s just as likely that “countries will fail to adapt and will pay the price in increasing numbers of ‘natural’ disasters.”
Just as coastal areas are likely to experience greater extreme rainfall events, so continental interiors are likely to experience more droughts. “As some nations succumb to rising waters, others will become parched and increasingly at risk from catastrophic drought and famine,” says the Red Cross report.
“Current climate change will cause the hot deserts of continental interiors to expand as evaporation rates increase,” it says. Central Africa; South, Southeast, and East Asia; and Latin America will be most affected. Some rivers will run dry or be substantially reduced in size. According to the Red Cross report (quoting the Journal of Geophysical Research), the Indus will loose 43 percent of its volume, the Niger 31 percent, and the Nile 11 percent. At some stage there will be a significant danger of military conflicts over water resources.
“There is little doubt that climatic change is a major contributory factor in making natural disasters nightly television news. The rising incidence and increased severity of windstorms, fires, and floods seems to have its roots in disrupted weather patterns,” says the United Nations Environment Programme (Global Environmental Outlook 2000, September 1999).
Of course, current climate change is also causing sea-level rise (a particular problem that did not occur in the sixth century).
Coastal zones make up a tiny percentage of the Earth’s land surface—but three-quarters of the world’s population live in them (i.e., around 4.5 billion people). Coastal populations are increasing at twice the global average. The tides have risen 20 centimeters over the past century. Three million people are now made homeless by flooding every year. Ten million people live under constant threat of flood. Forty-six million are threatened by storm surges. By 2080, sea levels will have risen by at least a further 44 centimeters. Indeed, it could easily be a meter or more. Rising sea levels threaten many of the world’s largest and most famous cities: Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Lagos, Alexandria, Recife, Jakarta, Sydney, Bangkok, Saint Petersburg, Hamburg, and Venice.
Nobody actually knows how high sea levels will rise or indeed how quickly. A total meltdown of polar ice, though not the likeliest option, is certainly not an impossibility in the long term and would cause a worldwide sea level rise of 70 meters. It should be remembered that, for at least 90 percent of its history, planet Earth has existed without polar ice caps. In the event of a total meltdown, much of the U.S. eastern seaboard would be inundated—including New York and Washington. Ten percent of South America would be under water. Also inundated would be much of Holland, Denmark, Pakistan, Bangladesh, northeast India, Egypt, Iraq, the Arabian gulf states, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma as well as large areas of eastern England, Finland, Belgium, northern Germany, northern Poland, northern Italy, north central Siberia, eastern China, and southern Australia.
Displacement of populations due to constant flooding and limited land loss—not to mention much greater territorial losses due to any total meltdown—would cause huge refugee flows and potential conflict.
The sixth-century period of climatic chaos—the worst dose of global climate change of the past 2,000 years, gives us an indication as to the scale of political transformation that climate change and its epidemiological, demographic, and other consequences can trigger. This book is the only case study of a past global climatic catastrophe and the long-term political changes it engendered.
APPENDIX
Text of John of Ephesus as recorded in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian. 9.296. Chabot quoted in an article entitled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before A.D. 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino, Journal of Geophysical Research 88, pages 6357–6371, 1983.
Procopius, Wars, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard. 4. 14.5 (H. B. Dewing).
Chronicle of Zachariah of Mitylene, F. J. Hamilton and E. W. Brooks, London, 1899. Quoted in an article entitled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before A.D. 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino, Journal of Geophysical Research 88, pages 6357–6371, 1983.
De Ostentis by John Lydus (John the Lydian), edited by C. Wachsmuth, Leipzig, 1897. Quoted in an article entitled “Volcanic Eruptions in the Mediterranean Before A.D. 630 from Written and Archaeological Sources” by R. B. Stothers and M. R. Rampino, Journal of Geophysical Research 88, pages 6357–6371, 1983.
The only full account of the surviving works of Cassiodorus Senator was published in Germany in the late nineteenth century as Cassiodorus, Variae XII, edited by Mommsen. This passage is quoted from an article entitled “Volcanic Winters” by M. R. Rampino, S. Self, and R. B. Stothers in Annual Review of Earth Planet Science 16, pages 73–99, 1988.
K. Briffa et al, “Fennoscandian Summers from A.D. 500. Temperature Changes on Short and Long Timescales,” Climatic Dynamics 7, pages 111–119, 1992.
Personal communication to Mike Baillie, Queen’s University, Belfast, from Don Graybill, late of the University of Arizona, using data collected by Valmore C. La Marche and Wes Ferguson.
L. A. Scuderi, “A 2,000-Year Tree-Ring Record of Annual Temperatures in the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” Science 259, pages 1433–1436, 1993. Two thousand three hundred miles to the east in the eastern United States, dendrochronologists have obtained a 1,600-year-long chronology from cypress trees and published it in Science 240, pages 1517–1519. (North Carolina climate changes reconstructed from tree rings: A.D. 372 to 1985, by D. W. Stahle et al. Their data reveal that North Carolina’s worst drought of the sixth century took place between A.D. 539 and A.D. 544.
A. Lara and R. Villalba, “A 3,620-Year Temperature Record from Fitzroya cupressoides Tree Rings in Southern South America,” Science 260, pages 1104–1106, 1993.
According to as-yet-unpublished data gathered in 1997 and 1998 in the
Rio Cisne area of southern Argentina by dendrochronologists from the Laboratorio de Dendrocronologia in Mendoza, Argentina.
Data collected by Ed Cook of Columbia University, New York.
Data from Stepan Shiyatov et al of Ekaterinburg Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Russia.
Information from dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, Queen’s University, Belfast. He says that he found in reviewing the mean values for a set of eight filtered oak chronologies, covering the geographical region from Ireland to Poland, that the value for A.D. 540 is one of the three lowest-growth values in 1,500 years. In a selected subset of four of these oak chronologies, the filtered growth value for the year A.D. 539 is the lowest value in 1,500 years.
The 540 record cold year is the first of a series of such cold years in southern South America in the mid–sixth century. Two other ultracold years, both among the coldest of the past 1,600 years, were 557 and 561. What is more, twenty-seven out of the forty-three years (62 percent) between 540 and 583 were below average in temperature compared to just fourteen out of forty (35 percent) in the previous four decades. These conclusions are based on the tree-ring data from Lenca in Chile supplied to me by the Laboratorio de Dendrocronologia in Mendoza, Argentina.
Plazas et al, Bulletin of the Gold Museum, Bogota, 1988.
Other information on the Ohio University expedition is provided in Chapter 23. The original 563–594 data and other relevant material were published in “A 1,500 Year Record of Tropical Precipitation Recorded in Ice Cores from the Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru,” which appeared in Science 229 (4717), pages 971–973; and “Pre-Incan Agricultural Activity Recorded in Dust Layers in Two Tropical Ice Cores” in Nature 336, pages 763–765. Another Andean source also provides dramatic evidence of the sixth-century drought. Work by Alex Chepstow-Lusty et al, published in Mountain Research and Development 18/2, 1998, shows that there was a massive and abrupt surge in sedge growth around the margins of Lake Marcacocha in the Peruvian Andes in around the mid–sixth century A.D. The data suggest that as the lake shrank, sedge began to flourish on those parts of the former lake bottom that had been exposed. It was the highest sedge growth peak experienced at the site in the 1,500-year-period A.D. 100 to A.D. 1600.
Fitzroya conifers.
RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
THE LATE-ROMAN WORLD
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by A. P. Kazhdan, Oxford University Press, 1991.
A Biographical Dictionary of the Byzantine Empire by D. M. Nicol, Seaby, London, 1991.
Justinian by J. Moorhead, Longman, London, 1994.
The Early Byzantine Churches of Cilicia and Isauria by S. Hill, Variorum (Ashgate Publishing), Aldershot, UK, 1996.
Die ‘Toten Städte’, Stadt und Land in Nordsyrien während der Spätantike by C. Strube, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rheim, 1996.
The Sixth Century, End or Beginning, edited by P. Allen and E. Jeffreys, Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, University of Sydney, 1996.
Procopius. History of the Wars, translated by H. B. Dewing, Harvard University Press, 1914.
Procopius. The Anecdota or Secret History, translated by H. B. Dewing, Harvard University Press, 1935.
The Emperor Maurice and his Historian by Michael Whitby, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens (volume 1) by Jean-Noël Biraben, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Mouton, France, 1975.
ARABIA
The Life of Muhammad, a translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, translated by A. Guillaume, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1967, 1996.
The History of al-Tabari by al-Tabari, volume 7, translated and annotated by W. M. Watt and M. V. McDonald, State University of New York, 1988.
Muhammad at Mecca by W. M. Watt, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1979 and 1993.
Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman by W. M. Watt, Oxford University Press, 1961.
A Chronology of Islamic History 570–1000 CE by H. U. Rahman, Ta-Ha Publishers, London, 1995.
The Koran, translated by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, and published by HarperCollins.
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam by P. Crone, Princeton University Press, 1987.
Hagarism, the Making of the Islamic World by P. Crone and M. Cook, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests by W. E. Kaegi, CUP, 1992.
The Early Islamic Conquests by F. M. Donner, Princeton University Press, 1981.
The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates by H. Kennedy, Longman, London, 1986.
Encyclopedia of Islam (New Edition), published by E. J. Brill, Leiden.
History of the Jews of Arabia from Ancient Times to their Eclipse under Islam by G. D. Newby, University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
AVARS AND TURKS
The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage by A. Koestler, Hutchinson, 1976.
Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the 10th Century by Golb and Pritsak, Cornell University Press, 1982.
Geschichte und Kultur eines Volkerwanderungszeitlichen Nomadenvolkes (2 volumes), Klagenfurt, Austria, 1970.
BRITISH ISLES
Civitas to Kingdom: British Political Continuity 300–800 by K. R. Dark, Leicester University Press, 1994.
Lords of Battle: Image and Reality of the Comitatus in Dark-Age Britain by S. S. Evans, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1997.
An English Empire: Bede and the Early Anglo-Saxon Kings by N. Higham, Manchester University Press, 1995.
The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century, edited by J. Hines, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1997.
An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons AD 400–600 by C. A. Snyder, Sutton, Stroud, 1998.
Anglo-Saxon England by M. Welch, Batsford, London, 1992.
Wroxeter: The Life and Death of a Roman City by R. White and P. Barker, Tempus, Stroud, 1998.
The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland by N. Edwards, Batsford, London, 1990.
The Irish Ringfort by M. Stout, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997.
The Annals of Ulster, edited by S. Mac Airt and G. Mac Niocaill, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983.
Wales in the Early Middle Ages by W. Davies, Leicester University Press, 1982.
A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain: England, Scotland and Wales c.500–c.1050 by A. Williams, A. P. Smyth, and D. P. Kirby, Seaby, London, 1991.
The Age of Arthur. A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 by J. Morris, Phillimore, Chichester, UK, 1977.
Nennius. British History and the Welsh Annals, edited and translated by J. Morris, Phillimore, Chichester, 1980.
The Mabinogion, translated by J. Gantz, Penguin, London, 1976.
The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, translated by L. Thorpe, Penguin, London, 1966.
A History of the English Church and People, by Bede, translated by L. Sherley-Price, Penguin, London, 1955.
Sources of the Grail: An Anthology, selected and introduced by J. Matthews. Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1996.
Celtic Britain by C. Thomas, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986.
The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, edited by S. Bassett, Leicester University Press, 1989.
EUROPE
The Early Slavs by P. M. Dolukhanov, Longman, London, 1996.
The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 by I. Wood, Longman, London, 1994.
The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, translated by L. Thorpe, Penguin, London, 1974.
The Goths in Spain by E. A. Thompson, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom by D. King, Cambridge University Press, 1972.
The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History by C. McEvedy, Penguin, 1998.
FAR EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
A New History of Korea by Ki-baik Lee, translated by E. W. Wagner with E. J. Shultz, Harvard University
Press, 1984.
The Emergence of Japanese Kingship by J. R. Piggott, Stanford University Press, 1997.
Nihongi. Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to AD 697, translated by W. G. Aston, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo, 1972, 1993.
The Sui Dynasty by A. Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978.
