Drought not Deluge. Beware of Reverse Metaphors. Save the World.

by Richard Seltzer

(first published on Medium June 30, 2025)

Around 2200 BCE, climate change shifted ocean currents, leading to a global drought that lasted for a hundred years and toppled empires. Geologists and archaeologists, who have uncovered abundant physical evidence, refer to this disaster as “the 4.2 k-year BP event,” meaning that it happened 4200 years before the present. But there is no mention of such a devasting drought in myth or legend. Rather, there are many dramatic religion-based stories of a great flood that nearly wiped out mankind.

As we approach another potentially disastrous climate change, perhaps we should reinterpret those ancient stories and teach future generations (if there are future generations) what really happened and could happen again.

Scholars have uncovered flood myths around the world, among cultures that had no known contact with one another. This wasn’t a single isolated event the story of which spread like a meme. But there is no evidence of a deluge so vast that it could have affected so many disparate populations. Nor is there a scientific theory that could explain a global flood in historical times. And why is there no mention of the great drought that probably happened around the same time as the much-storied flood?

Perhaps, by what I would call “reverse metaphor,” the flood was the drought.

Magical beliefs that are found in cultures around the world prohibit talking about terrible events for fear of triggering a recurrence. There has been and may still be widespread belief in “apotropaic” magic — practices meant to avoid awakening forces of evil and misfortune.

Today’s deniers of climate change and of large-scale medical disasters may be tapping into a pattern of magical belief which is latent yet powerful in many of us.

When the drought struck and lingered for a hundred years, killing millions and irreparably changing the course of history, subsequent generations dared not talk about it, but could not forget it. So myths supported by the religions of that time told instead of its direct opposite — a great flood.

This realization is important for understanding irrational beliefs and behavior that threaten to tear our nation and the world apart. We need to recognize and combat this innate tendency of our species to flee from facts that have horrendous implications and to believe in and talk about their opposite, despite all evidence to the contrary.

There was no god-inflicted global flood, and there will be no god-inflicted fire next time. There was a great drought caused by natural forces, and there will be another such global climate-induced disaster soon, unless we wake up and work together rationally and scientifically to avert it.