The climate debate is consumed by arguments over causes and proposed solutions while largely missing the question that matters:
Can civilization survive a much warmer world?
Temperatures have already reached levels not seen for at least 100,000 years. Civilization—and the agriculture that supports it—emerged only after the last ice age, during the Holocene’s unusual period of low temperature variability (Figure 1). Whether climate change is natural or human-driven doesn’t alter the reality of extreme warming—or what it may mean for civilization.
Figure 1. Agriculture and civilization emerged during a period of low temperature variability. That regime followed the large temperature changes at the end of the last glacial period.
Source: NASA and 2degrees Institute.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Climate has always changed, and humans survived earlier periods warmer than today. But civilization has never experienced a climate shift like this—and never with a population that has grown from roughly 0.5 million to 8 billion in the last 10,000 years (Figure 2). It’s one thing for humans to survive a hotter world. It’s another to maintain a complex, interconnected civilization whose agriculture and infrastructure were built for this climate—not a very different one.
Figure 2. The Climate Always Changed. Human Civilization Is the New Variable.
Source: modified from Patzek (2025). Click on the image to enlarge.
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No one wants to think about that. It contradicts our deepest narratives about progress and the promise of a better world. So we pick the problem apart and argue over the pieces. Climate change is a hoax. The data can’t be trusted. A warmer world will be better for agriculture. Or we can fix everything by abandoning fossil fuels and running civilization on renewables or nuclear power. Technology will find a solution.
These arguments offer refuge from a more disturbing possibility: climate change may be only a symptom of something much more fundamental. What if the economic growth and technological progress we celebrate as our greatest achievements are also creating the conditions that could undermine our future? And what if warming is already far enough along that meaningful mitigation is no longer feasible?
What if we stopped arguing about what to do and tried to understand the reality of the present?
By the same author:
Oil Markets Are Adaptive Systems:
Complex Order Without Equilibrium
The Present We Cannot Bear: Modernity, Progress,
and the Stories We Tell to Escape Reality
A Climate for Civilization: What
Was Special About the Holocene?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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