Weiss believes this climate change initiated a mass migration away from dry-land farming to the creation of irrigated fields along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, allowing the people to build some of the earliest institutions of civilization.

CNN: Past may hold clues to climate's future

Starting in the 1960s, the Soviet bureaucracy irrigated cotton fields in Uzbekistan by diverting Himalayan rivers that used to feed the Aral Sea.

FORBES: The Story Of Eau