Why starting position/map conditionws matter IRL

[Cutlass]

Plant a million square miles of new trees.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I was thinking Pinatubo. :3

Think bigger. What you need is a Laki.

 

[Dachs]

To address the OP: the problem with a narrative of history that overemphasises the dictates of geography or climate (eg Jared D.) is that it risks overlooking human agency. Sure, a warmer climate may have provided richer grazing; but then, nomadic invasions have also been explained by the opposite cause (that is, poor grazing forcing nomads to migrate). And let's not forget the human actors and the various contingencies; Genghis Khan being injured at one point and not killed, for instance. And the way it is usually reported in the media doesn't help, with their obsession for a single, decisive factor in anything, which is rarely the case.

Furthermore, the timing isn't quite right. The warming period itself doesn't even start until after the Mongol run of conquest had already gathered a head of steam, and then you have to factor in a few years' worth of offset for horses to grow to maturity. What you end up with, in terms of timing, is basically "the timing is appropriate for the warming period's potentially increased grazing yields to have improved the supply of horses for the Khwarizmian campaign, but there's no actual causative link that we can find there, just a vaguely interesting coincidence, and there are plenty of other probable sources for the horses anyway so we can't even begin to claim that it was a necessary condition - let alone the sole necessary condition - of even that campaign".

Which honestly isn't very interesting at all. Something they probably would've known if they'd had a historian on staff before making these sorts of announcements.