The Price of Collapse

This fascinating study drawing on contemporary records explains how the demise of Ming China was brought about more through drastic cooling in a deadly phase of the Little Ice Age rather than through the Manchu invasion. Plummeting temperatures and rainfall led to failed harvests, sharply increased prices and consequent economic collapse, enhanced by global trade networks moving silver into China. Significantly, this was correlated with a decrease in sunspot activity, while conventional contemporary computer analyses play down this factor, highlighting carbon emissions instead. In this case, climate history is correlated with price history, certainly a factor in our time, but one needs to add commodity speculation and war into the current mix; or, in the case of energy, the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline. A cultural difference is that we no longer draw moral lessons from misfortune. And an overall factor then and now is our relationship with nature alongside policies for supply and therefore price stabilisation in the context of social capacity for adaptation. It is a telling historical parable.