"Societies adjust to climatic shocks when they are internally coherent and social cooperation is high, and therefore they can find solutions, but when such climate shocks happen when the elites are divided, essentially different factions of elites start using the climate shocks as a weapon in internecine struggle. We see this in the United States where one party denies... there is quite a large fraction of climate deniers, and so it has become part of the political infighting, rather than trying to find a collective decision, collective action that would address this issue."
Peter Valentinovich Turchin is a Russian-American scientist who specializes in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies.
"The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks."
"Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected... the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability."
"Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom."
"Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability..."
"All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020."
"How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks?"