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Future of the human climate niche |
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| At the same time, while some regions may face declining conditions for human thriving, conditions in other places will improve. Therefore, despite the formidable psychological, social, and political barriers to migration, a change in the geographical distribution of human populations and agricultural production is another likely part of the spontaneous or managed adaptive response of humanity to a changing climate. Clearly there is a need to understand the climatic conditions needed for human thriving. Despite a long and turbulent history of studies on the role of climate, and environment at large, on society in geography and beyond (6), causal links have remained difficult to establish, and deterministic claims largely refuted, given the complexities of the relationships in question (7). Rather than reentering the murky waters of environmental determinism, here we take a fresh look at this complex and contentious issue. We mine the massive sets of demographic, land use, and climate information that have become available in recent years to ask what the climatic conditions for human life have been across the past millennia, and then examine where those conditions are projected to occur in the future. |
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