STEAM Approaches to Climate Change, Extreme Weather and Social-Political Conflict

Climate history and historical climatology are closely evolving fields that aim (1) to reconstruct past climatic conditions and (2) examine the societal impacts of climatic changes. Such research can be characterized as a multi-disciplinary STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Humanities and Mathematics) frontier that thrives under multidisciplinary collaboration. This chapter presents two case studies pertaining to each aim, linking palaeoenvironmental data from ice-cores and tree-rings with climatic and societal information preserved by the long Irish tradition of annalistic record keeping between the fifth or sixth to seventeenth centuries. The product of this recording survives today in texts known collectively as the “Irish Annals”, which provide detailed time series of extreme weather experienced in Ireland. The first case study revisits work that employs the Irish medieval record of severe cold weather together with Greenland ice core sulphate records to reveal a persistent winter-season climatic impact from explosive volcanism at Ireland’s climatically sensitive northeast Atlantic location. This result complements evidence of spring-summer (i.e., growing season) volcanic climatic impacts identified from tree-rings, and furthers our understanding of the potential impacts of the next big eruption or of geoengineering implemented via the stratospheric injection of sulphur dioxide. The second case study compares Irish annalistic evidence of violence to evidence of drought gleaned from Irish oak tree-ring growth widths. This exercise reveals suggestive linkages between extreme weather and violence, operating most obviously (but likely not solely) via the pressures of scarcity induced resource competition. This comparison also shows that medieval Irish society was not a passive victim of extreme weather, with a range of coping strategies available to restore order. Such knowledge is critical at a time when an increased risk of conflict arising from anthropogenic climatic change is regarded by many scholars and policymakers as a key security issue. Suggestions that human-induced climate change may act to catalyze contemporary or future violence and conflict remain controversial, however, with data shortages and the complexity of societal “pathways” that may connect climate to conflict presenting major research barriers. STEAM approaches that combine different methodologies and evidentiary bases to facilitate the examination of multiple historical climate parameters and a broad range of conflict typologies are thus essential to identifying the range of possible correlations between climate, violence, and conflict, and to resolving the complex pathways underlying observed correlations. Both case studies presented here illustrate how multidisciplinary STEAM approaches, well represented by climate history and historical climatology, can meaningfully inform contemporary debates by revealing how humanity has been influenced by past environments.