HOMO SAPIENS & THE PLANET: 4/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batch for visiting with Professor Peter Francopan, who of Oxford University, |
| 0:10.8 | his new book is The Earth Transformed, an Untold History. And we now go to a period that |
| 0:17.4 | is striking in that the Scandinavians now take a role as does climate because of the cooling of some temperatures |
| 0:30.4 | before the medieval warm period and then suddenly the warming that was created in the |
| 0:36.2 | dates especially between 9.50 and 12.50. And again Peter I circled in my notes, low volcanism, correct? |
| 0:46.8 | That is the explanation for why this period is so stable. |
| 0:52.0 | That's one of the, that's one of, that's one of that's one of that's that's a prime reason but the |
| 0:56.2 | natural cycles are also important in that but also the ability to be successful so that |
| 1:01.7 | those changes provide motivations and |
| 1:05.3 | incentives and rewards to look out for new pastures. |
| 1:08.5 | Either because for example changes of wind direction or intensity or because of resource shortage, there are |
| 1:16.3 | pressures and pools and pushes to look at new worlds and in fact those expansions |
| 1:21.0 | of the Vikings out into the North Atlantic towards |
| 1:24.8 | first Iceland and Greenland and Newfoundland are mirrored at this about the same time |
| 1:29.8 | and the same process by peoples in the southern oceans of the South Pacific where there's a |
| 1:36.1 | whole series of colonizations of new areas and new islands that have never |
| 1:39.2 | seen humans before and again we can date some of this because of new scientific data and technologies. But in the case of the North Atlantic, some of the drivers towards, because was to do with movements of shoals of fish further northwards into cooler waters as a result of the warming |
| 1:56.3 | patterns, some to do with the fact that these new lands that were discovered offered new new goods to trade, for example, walrus in large quantities that was very important |
| 2:08.6 | the walrus high to making high quality ropes or walrus tusks that were rival to elephant for ivory that was used in both |
| 2:16.8 | religious and secular art. And so suddenly sitting hitting a gold mine so to speak, prompted high levels of colonization. The challenge of course that the Vikings |
| 2:27.3 | then ran into or the Norse people ran into is that most of the colonizers were men because men want to take the rewards and think that they're brave and so then you need to be able to find women and to be able to reproduce with it. |
| 2:39.0 | So that's solved in a couple of ways. |
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