What the article fails to mention is some recent evidence of climatic differences at that time. If we presume the Trojan war to be around 3200 BC, there is recent evidence that prior to that time there was significantly more rainfall in and around Anatolia, which would have resulted in much more vegetation. Historians looking at events leading up to the Bronze Age Collapse now believe that rainfall-driven agriculture was much more widespread and relied-upon due to the greater rainfall at that time.
From sediment cores in the Mediterranean, there’s also recent evidence of a sharp cooling trend right before the Bronze Age Collapse, which would have resulted in a sudden drop in rainfall due to much lower evaporation from the seas. There are Cuneiform tablets detailing pleas for food shipments from places in Anatolia (i.e. Hittite Empire) because of crop failures. It’s now thought that famines from that cooling trend might have precipitated the warfare that led to the collapse. Only the Egyptians managed to survive it, mainly because they had the Nile river to rely upon, but there’s evidence that even the Nile was affected by the sudden drop in rainfall and it resulted in Egyptian civil unrest. The Egyptians never fully recovered.
As for the Trojan War, my thinking is that if it actually happened, perhaps it was one of the first symptoms of the impending Bronze Age Collapse. If the cooling trend had already begun and rainfall had dropped off, it’s not a great stretch to envision Myceneans warring with one another when lack of food began to stress their civilization, the first ripples in a tide that eventually consumed nearly everyone in the eastern Mediterranean.
Correction: 1200 BC, 3200 years ago.
King David (around 1000 BC) used the famed cedar trees of Lebanon to build the temple. I just read that some king in 200AD noticed the depletion of the trees and decreed a ban on cutting them. (It didn’t last long). The forests were huge at one time.