A team of U.S. and Israeli geologists will publish a paper asserting that climate change could have contributed to the downfall of both halves of the Roman Empire. Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, they pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. The results found increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. It was particularly dry from 100 A.D. to 400 A.D. The Roman Republic transformed into the Empire around 44 B.C. (see Caesar, Julius) and expanded across Europe, Africa and the Middle East until exhausting itself centuries later. "Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn't known, but it is an interesting correlation," said University of Wisconsin Professor John W. Valley. "These things were certainly going on at the time that those historic changes occurred." Personally, I don't buy this one. There were a lot of causes: ineptitude, untenable expansion, greed, failed cultural assimilation, and people like Alaric, King of the Visigoths (not to be confused with Bob of the Ostrogoths), who came through and sacked the city in 410 A.D. Romans weren't starving. They were overpowered by circumstances. As Edward Gibbon, author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," wrote: "The seven first centuries were filled with a rapid succession of triumphs; but it was reserved for Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to introduce a spirit of moderation into the public councils. Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial." But an interesting study nonetheless.