It is well-established science that the cooling of the earth has been in the past and would be in the future more disruptive to human existence than atmospheric warming. If we are quite quiet, we may yet hear the sound of extreme irony laughing its head off at our efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions and, thus, initiating or strengthening cooler weather conditions that would bring massive hunger and movements of populations, precisely the opposite condition wished for by the anthropogenic global warming crowd. However, no one may be able to spend their waking hours smirking if it turns out that inevitable global cooling could have been ameliorated by burning the fuel that we are using today that would have helped us to warm the planet and our sorrowful bodies tomorrow. We are so not prescient:

TAU Study Links Empire Collapse, Climate Change

A study of fossil pollen particles in sediments extracted from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee has revealed evidence of a climate crisis that traumatized the Near East from the middle of the 13th to the late 12th century BCE, scientists say. The crisis brought about the collapse of the great empires of the Bronze Age.

The findings, by Dr. Dafna Langgut and Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University and Prof. Thomas Litt of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn, Germany, are based on new discoveries from underneath the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret Lake).

The researchers drilled through 300 meters of water in the heart of the Sea of Galilee and retrieved a core of sediments 20 meters long from the bottom of the lake. The goal was to extract from the sediments fossil pollen grains.

"Pollen is the most enduring organic material in nature," explains palynologist Dr. Dafna Langgut, who carried out the actual work of sampling. "...These particles tell us about the vegetation that grew in the vicinity of the lake in the past and therefore testify to the climatic conditions in the region."

The counting and the identification of the pollen grains revealed a period of severe droughts between ca. 1250 and 1100 BCE. A core of sediments from the western shore of the Dead Sea... provided similar results.

Professor Finkelstein noted that other researchers have also looked at pollen, but explained that this study has an "unprecedented" resolution of 40 years, compared to a norm of several hundred years.

The study is also the first to link pollen results to other historic records, particularly the destruction of Eastern Mediterranean cities, and reports of famine, in the same period. Langgut, Finkelstein and Litt propose that cold spells in the northern parts of the ancient Near East, coupled with low participation (sic. Should read 'precipitation'), led to reduced crop yield....