After the Great Oxidation Event four billion years ago, when oxygen levels began to rapidly accelerate leading to dramatic changes in climate on Earth (don’t worry, there’s plenty more dramatic climate changes to come), it ultimately led to the first signs of life. Admittedly, life not as we know it: tiny microorganisms that could survive the cold seas on a frozen planet.
The species from which humans evolved only emerged about seven million years ago. For The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Peter Frankopan, writer of the bestselling and equally imposing volume of “big” history, Silk Roads, asks how we’ve caused so much trouble to the climate in such a relatively short period of time. It’s a lively, absorbing account of not only how humans have potentially shaped but also been shaped by the climate. Expect floods, droughts, a fair share of pandemics, and a surprising amount of volcanic eruptions too.
In fact, Frankopan lays a significant number of climatic events at the door of the volcano. For instance, in 43BC, when the Okmok volcano erupted in Alaska, the eruption spewed volcanic gases into the atmosphere which led to warming because of all the trapped CO2. But volcanic eruptions can lead to global cooling due to the way particles from the eruption deflect radiation and heat from the sun. Cleopatra, contending with a 7 degree drop, had to deal with the ensuing decline in crop yields, water shortages, famine, plagues and depopulation. Frankopan thinks that the resulting social and political pressure contributed to the fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty and annexation of Egypt by the Roman empire.
Instead of somebody like Genghis Khan, The Earth Transformed rides the timeline with the ‘humble potato’ for a brief period
This, largely, typifies how Frankopan structures The Earth Transformed: selecting a period of months, sometimes years, when a climatic event might have happened, and speculating on how it might have shaped history. So, while it felt like Silk Roads was constructed around a series of historical protagonists, instead of somebody like Genghis Khan, The Earth Transformed rides the timeline with the “humble potato” for a brief period. We see the potato getting shipped to Europe by the colonists after they take it from the Andes. Several pages later, Frankopan concludes how the potato could have been responsible, according to the military records of the French army, for an eventual 1cm height increase because of all the extra calories. Turns out they didn’t need the height anyway: the cheap crop increased agricultural activity, driving down land values, and “lower land values typically lessen the probability of violent conflict because incentives to arm are lower, as are the probabilities of winning a war”.
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Frankopan’s many and fascinating hypotheses mean that The Earth Transformed is a robust scholarly tome, as well as an engaging and sustaining read over its 650-plus pages (and a more palatable length than the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that clocks in at more than 3,000 pages). However, some of the writing is clumsy. He occasionally lacks nuance, and his arguments can sometimes be reductive to fit his claims.
Describing the drowning of Doggerland, a stretch of land that once connected Britain to Europe, he concludes this separation from “Continental Europe was crucial in everything ranging from the development and dominance of British sea power to the military outcomes of the Second World War to the exceptionalism that helped drive the Brexit vote to leave the European Union in 2016″. This a sweeping over-generalisation and arguably a separate thesis entirely.
All of this builds up to a rather dismal conclusion: a ‘globally coherent pattern of warming’
I also found the reliance on calling Earth some kind of “paradise”, or “Eden”, jolting. Frankopan frames this book with quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost, so perhaps he does see climate change as a retribution for our disobedience, or as a moral transgression. This kind of narrative is at odds with his stringently empirical approach, though. Because, either way, all of this builds up to a rather dismal conclusion: a “globally coherent pattern of warming”. Timid sounding on the face of it, Frankopan details the litany of issues this will likely, or has already resulted in.
But even with all the “morphostratigraphic data”, “evidence from mammal faeces”, “ice-core evidence” and “moss analyses”, Frankopan might have trouble convincing science denialists or sceptics of climate change who reject or don’t trust this kind of discourse. That’s not his problem to deal with though; that will be ours as a collective species.
