MOTHER NATURE (AKA ZEUS) HAS A VOTE: 4/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover by Peter Frankopan (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
MOTHER NATURE (AKA ZEUS) HAS A VOTE: 4/8: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Hardcover 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.
1899 BARCELONA
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Royal London, the UK's largest mutual life, pensions and investment company. |
| 0:08.0 | What even is a mutual anyway? |
| 0:10.0 | Well, Royal London is customer owned. |
| 0:12.0 | It has been since 1861. They work to support |
| 0:15.2 | customers and wider society to help build financial resilience while investing |
| 0:20.0 | responsibly to help build a future worth retiring into. |
| 0:23.4 | It really is everyone's business. |
| 0:25.8 | Learn more at Royal London.com slash mutuality. I'm John Bachelor visiting with Professor Peter Francopan who of Oxford University |
| 0:40.7 | his new book is The Earth Transformed, an Untold History. And we now go to a period that |
| 0:47.4 | is striking in that the Scandinavians now take a role as does climate because of the cooling of some temperatures |
| 1:00.2 | before the medieval warm period and then suddenly the warming that was created in the dates |
| 1:06.3 | especially between 9.50 and 12.50. |
| 1:10.6 | And again, Peter, I circled in my notes, low volcanism, correct? |
| 1:16.0 | That is the explanation for why this period is so stable. |
| 1:20.0 | That's one of the, that's of that's that's a prime reason but the natural cycles are also important in that but also the ability to be successful so that those changes provide motivations and incentives and rewards to look out for new pastures. |
| 1:38.0 | Either because, for example, changes of wind direction or intensity or because of resource shortage, there are pressures and pools and pushes to look at new worlds. |
| 1:49.3 | And in fact, those expansions of the Vikings out into the North Atlantic towards first Iceland, then Greenland and then Newfoundland are mirrored at this about the same time, the same process by peoples in the southern oceans of the South Pacific where there's a whole series of |
| 2:05.7 | colonizations of new areas and new islands that have never seen humans before. |
| 2:10.0 | And again we can date some of this because of new scientific data and technologies. |
| 2:14.3 | But in the case of the North Atlantic, some of the drivers towards, because was to do with movements of |
| 2:20.5 | shoals of fish further northwards into cooler waters as a result of the warming patterns. |
| 2:26.0 | Some to do with the fact that these new lands that were discovered offered new |
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