The Empire of Climate – A History of an Idea

This magisterial study discusses how the spectre of climate has been used to explain history since antiquity, and its title comes from remarks made by Montesquieu in 1748: ‘since ancient times, the idea that the climate exerts a determining influence on minds and bodies, war and wealth has attracted a long line of committed followers. Recent concerns over climate change have stimulated a renewed fascination with the role of climate in shaping human affairs and a penchant for forecasting the apocalyptic consequences of global warming.’ (p. ix) The author addresses four axes in considering the limits of the explanatory power of climate as related to health, mind, wealth and war. He makes it clear that he accepts the mainstream narrative relating to anthropogenic climate change, although in specific areas he covers dissident voices.

A central theme is climate determinism, of which a leading and influential exponent was Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947); Allied to this is climate reductionism, especially in relation to CO2, as Charles Eisenstein has argued. Mike Hulme (p. 9) highlights what he calls the epistemological slippage of predictive authority, adding that ‘climate is first extracted from the matrix of interdependencies that shape human life within the physical world, and then elevated to the role of dominant predictor variable’ driven by eschatological and indeed apocalyptic rhetoric. The temptation is to attribute ‘causal powers of an overwhelming sort to the climate in the terms of violence, unrest, and civil war… independent of the social structure and political culture of the times.’ (p. 369) A chapter is devoted to the rise of climate as a security issue, informed by a neo-Malthusian mindset and characterising nature as a hostile power taking revenge on humanity.

Missing from this analysis is the role of weather manipulation developed since World War II. At present, it is unclear to what extent chaotic conditions in the US and elsewhere are due to such covert operations (see https://geoengineeringwatch.org), and there is evidence that such tactics may have been used to spark the war in Syria, although the whole topic of geo-engineering remains taboo. Another significant strand – see my review of a book about the Rockefellers above – is the systematic way in which climate research has been funded and subsequently politicised as a lever towards centralised global governance and control through the UN – keep an eye on The Summit of the Future in September. A parallel driver is biosecurity and the development of pandemic preparedness driven by gain of function (bioweapons) research and the commercial opportunities to produce corresponding vaccines. Having said this, the book is a brilliant and multifaceted analysis of unprecedented scope on the subject.