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Paper short abstract:

Global warming has provided ample material for social science research on current climate impacts and adaptations, especially migration and conflict. This paper considers how this research may contribute to climate history scholarship, particularly qualitative and quantitative analysis of causation.

Paper long abstract:

Environmental historians often propose lessons or parables from the past to guide present politics, policy, or decision-making. Yet sometimes it is environmental historians who have much to learn from research on the present. A generation of accelerating global warming has produced abundant information on climate change, extreme weather, and human responses—more than we could find in historical periods. Sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and demographers have parsed this data, particularly regarding mobility and immobility, conflict and cooperation. Research has moved beyond simple linear models and the alarmist projections often found in media. Work has begun to identify robust, compelling, and counterintuitive patterns, as well as interesting contingencies and divergences in outcomes. For example, effects of climate on conflict are predominately indirect, delayed, and displaced. Climate-related disasters may lead to less long-distance migration rather than more—but outcomes depend whether disasters are fast- or slow-onset, on socioeconomic conditions, and sometimes on gender. This paper argues for similar patterns in the past. Thus, current perspectives can be a guide to historical research, offering better ways to frame research questions and guidance for quantitative methods to identify historical impacts and adaptations. History will have other kinds of insights for present policy, such long-term patterns absent in present-focused research, understanding of contingencies and divergences in climate effects, and ways to narrate change to different audiences. This paper draws on discussions and projects from the 2023 Oslo workshop “Climate and Conflict: Past and Present Perspectives,” which brought together historians and researchers in current peace and conflict studies.