Are we at a low point in civilization?

Socrates and Plato maybe important now, but not as much then.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Are we at a low point in civilization?

Compared with where we were from 1900-1950, we're without question doing better. We still have genocides and pogroms, but we don't have Auschwitz, Kolyma, Nanking. We still have battles, but we don't have the Somme or Stalingrad.

The world is rife with problems, asymmetries, and suffering, but by many measures they are less superlative than they were in the first half of the 20th century.

We also have gotten to the point where social justice is a more commonly held value than it has ever been in history (on a global scale).

I don't think thats what we mean by low point. Political and sociological changes are not directly influenced by climate.

I would even make the argument that we become "worse" as humans in times of plenty.

Political and social changes are most definitely influenced by climate, though one can just as easily argue that there are political and social substrates that make a certain society more vulnerable to climate change.

Well, the point is that movements towards "good" and "bad" do not occur uniformly throughout the globe at the same time, and extremes of good and bad don't correlate with some other "natural" extreme.

I don't think that the holocaust or the war in Iraq had much to do with climate.

What is meant by high point, is that societies thrive because of changes in climate, crops grow better, and warmer weather creates opportunities, change and progress.

I'm saying that this does not discredit the theory, because it does not make the assumption that climate does have to influence good and bad behavior of humans.

But it would be a wild oversimplification to even say that Hitler caused the Holocaust. For instance Stalin caused a famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people in the 1930s, but his propaganda machine blamed the Jews for the famine. When the Nazis invaded the Ukraine in 1941, the Ukrainian population was already so anti-Stalin and anti-Jew that many of them participated in the enormous massacres of Jews (and many went so far as to become guards in the camps in Poland). So while Hitler bears supreme and central responsibility for the Holocaust, it was a near infinitude of complementary conditions that made it happen -- it wasn't him alone.

Without taking a good look at it academically, though, (I don't pretend to know the answer to this), I can at least entertain that the popular uprisings and revolutions of the late 1910s-1930s had to do with poverty and marginalization, and these may well have had to do with environmental conditions (and one can accept this without ignoring all the other influences, i.e. the rise of fascism and communism, the global depression, etc). That doesn't make them directly causal, but that's not really the question here.

But the difficulty here is in deciding what is really a high point. If Islamic civilization and Mayan civilization had their high points at the low point of Christian civilization, then how do you possibly label that historical era? West Africa had a high point of its civilization in the 12th-14th century, and it's probably having a low point now... but are we even counting places like Africa, the Pacific Islands, the peoples of the Arctic, etc when we judge high and low points?

Climate almost certainly influences behavior. Climate change led to a westward migration of rats in Asia during the 14th century, and this coincided with seafaring commerce on the Mediterranean -- and this led directly to the Black Death. Human migrations and political upheavals and economic transitions certainly are influenced by climactic conditions.

But it's probably not fair to blame a warm or a cold climate on a good or bad 'point' in civilization, as if there is some direct correlation between global temperature and human social sophistication.

It's change (of any kind) that leads to low points, because that's what creates dysequilibrium. And you CAN blame the crises of the 20th century on dysequilibrium. Read "War of the World" by Niall Fergusson for much on this.

See, I find the whole concept of these cycles so interesting because of the recent "green" movement and the notion of global warming. Like Carpenter asserts, the primary reason why Greek civilization fails is because of these periodic climate shifts. The Mycenaean civilization essentially falls because of rampant drought and fires which destroyed a majority of the palatial system the civilization depended on. And the same can be said for the upside, during the Doric "invasion" or the invasion of the "sea peoples."