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The John Batchelor Show

4/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 18, 2023 by Peter Frankopan (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

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4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

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4/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 18, 2023 by Peter Frankopan (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Earth-Transformed-Untold-History/dp/0525659161/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us.

Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, The Earth Transformedwill radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm John Batch for visiting with Professor Peter Frankapan, who are a Voxford University.

0:10.8

His new book is the Earth-Transformed and untold history.

0:14.7

We now go to a period that is striking in that Scandinavians now take a role as does climate

0:26.0

because of the cooling of some temperatures before the medieval war period and then suddenly

0:33.5

the warming that was created in the dates, especially between 950 and 1250.

0:40.9

And again, Peter, I circled in my notes, low volcanism.

0:46.1

Correct?

0:47.1

That is the explanation for why this period is so stable.

0:52.3

That's a prime reason, but the natural cycles are also important in that, but also the

1:00.0

ability to be successful.

1:01.3

So those changes provide motivations and incentives and rewards to look out for new

1:07.6

pastures, either because, for example, changes of wind direction or intensity or because

1:13.9

of resource shortage.

1:16.0

There are pressures and pools and pushes to look at new worlds.

1:20.1

And in fact, those expansions of the Vikings out into the North Atlantic towards first

1:25.1

Iceland and Greenland and their Newfoundland are mirrored at the same time, the same process

1:30.6

by people in the southern oceans of the South Pacific, where there's a whole series of colonizations

1:37.4

of new areas and new islands that have never seen humans before.

1:41.2

And again, we can date some of this because of new scientific data and technologies, but

1:45.6

in the case of the North Atlantic, some of the drive was towards, because it was to do

1:49.8

with movements of sholes of fish further northwards into cooler waters as a result of the warming

1:56.2

patterns.

...

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