"Climate change may be behind fall of ancient empire, say researchers"

From The Guardian:

The [Neo-Assyrian] empire emerged in about 912BC and grew to stretch from the Mediterranean down to Egypt and out to the Persian Gulf.

But shortly after the death of the king Ashurbanipal around 630BC, the empire began to crumble, with the grand city of Nineveh sacked in 612BC. By the end of the seventh century BC, the empire’s fall was complete. Now scientists say the reversal in the empire’s fortunes appears to coincide with a dramatic shift in its climate from wet to dry – a potentially crucial change in an empire reliant on crops...

Baldini added that the past can hold important lessons for the present – where fossil fuel use drives climate change.

That's hardly a blinding new insight. There are loads of examples of this happening in history, individual civilisations rising - and falling - as the weather became more - and then less - suitable for food production. The end of the Roman Warm Period ended the Roman Empire (probably).

Food production was the cornerstone of any empire until modern times, because if a few people can grow enough food for everybody, it frees up labour for empire-building (soldiers, administrators etc). Their downfall was usually a fall in food production in the areas they ruled over.

We note that:

a. That's not such a problem with a global economy, as it all evens out. Vikings in Greenland couldn't just export electronic components and then import food from somewhere else, they had to grow the food themselves or die.

b. The climate has always been changing, for better or for worse, independently of CO2 emissions, and we have muddled through somehow. Quite why "man-made climate change" (to the extent it even exists) is somehow worse than natural climate change (which clearly does exist) is never made clear.

c. What if it turns out - not that the Alarmists would ever admit it - that modest changes in global average temperatures have entirely natural causes, which are far beyond our control? Would it be panic over? Which strategies would scientists and economists be recommending then? Probably "muddle along and wait and see".