-------- A HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR OUR OBSESSION WITH THE FEAR OF GLOBAL WARMING -------- -------- THE LATE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE -------- -------- The Late Bronze Age (LBA) was the ultimate expression of the settled agricultural civilization that got started in the Neolithic Revolution. The macro economy of agricultural wealth creation and its control had evolved such that the farmers themselves became pawns (peasants) in a power game among individuals who could raise armies to control agricultural lands. With further developments such as language both spoken and written and artisan and engineering innovations such as pottery, copper mining, metal works, and making of tools for agriculture and warfare, the controlled agricultural lands evolved into large and powerful kingdoms ruled by the king with his army in a palatial sub-economy and worked by peasants and artisans in a rural agricultural sub-economy. . --------- -------- In the LBA, this agricultural macro-system had grown into a large, sophisticated, and interconnected global economy similar to what we have today. The major kingdom nation states in this global economy were The Egyptian New Kingdom (where Egypt is today), the Assyrian Empire (where Syria is today), the Hittite Empire (where Turkey is today), and the Mycenaeans (where Greece is today). Trade, travel, shipping, cooperation, global policy making, and warfare among these states were common much like things are today but without those big fat good-for-nothing UN bureaucrats. The America of the day was Egypt, in economic, diplomatic, and military power as well as in terms of attracting the best and brightest writers, philosophers, and artisans from around the Late Bronze Age world. Many smaller kingdoms existed such as the Biblical states in the Levant but they were vassals of the large and powerful kingdoms. This global economy was extremely successful and the powerful kingdoms and empires enjoyed enormous wealth and advancements in technology, transportation, infrastructure, the arts, and in learning and knowledge. The pyramids of Egypt are a product of this civilization. -------- -------- Then, around 1200 BC or so give or take 50 years, the archaeological and textual data show that the lights went out on the LBA. A long gap of more than a 200 years of a Dark Age followed with no evidence of the great LBA global economy until the Early Iron Age-1 when an entirely new kind of global economy grew from the ashes of the LBAC. -------- -------- The big question is “what happened?”. The honest answer is that we don’t know and we will likely never know. But it is possible to construct theories that are consistent with the available archaeological, textual, and paleo-climate data. The two most popular theories are the Sea Peoples theory (Drews 1993) and the climate change theory (Finkelstein, Weiss, Kaniewski, Drake,). The paleo data show that one of the many warming events of the Holocene had occurred in the Late Bronze Age -------- -------- The current alarm about catastrophic climate change that is expected to bring about the collapse of civilization bears a close resemblance to what had happened in the Late Bronze Age Collapse. In this context, it is noted that religions prior to the LBAC do not contain a Judgement Day “end of the world” of any kind but religions that got started in the Early Iron Age right after the Dark Ages of the LBAC do contain a catastrophic end of the world of some kind and so It is likely that the existence of doomology in our time in the form of an obsession with collapse of civilization similar to the LBAC framed in terms of the industrial economy or population growth may derive from a distant genetic memory of the LBAC. Modern iron age humans may carry a doomsday gene that wa created by the LBAC. -------- -------- of course back in the LBAC there were no fossil fuels but there was climate change anyway that was just like the kind of thing that scientists tell us are caused by fossil fuels and somethiing that will not happen without fossil fuels which is why we are all supposed to stop using fossil fuels ------ .