The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations Paperback – March 10, 2009

Of the many causes that have resulted in the collapse of most ancient cultures and civilizations, Brian Fagan in THE GREAT WARMING points a finger of blame at the fickleness of climate. It is quite true, he adds, that these prior cultures ended because of military conquest, disease, famine, and the like, but the driving force behind all of them was climate change. It has been only in the last few decades that climatologists like Fagan have had access to modern means to ascertain why past civilizations went under. Thanks to radio carbon dating, ice core sampling, and silt analysis, he has been able to draw a reasonably accurate map of world weather stretching back many thousands of years. His conclusions are many. First, climate change is a still imperfectly understood mixture of wind patterns, ice flow growth, volcanic eruptions, galloping desertification, and human intervention. Second, over the last few thousand years, the major culprit has been drought caused mostly by inadequate rain. We have not experienced any serious general global cooling for a dozen millenia. Third, human beings are capable of the most amazing blends of sheer lunacy with regard to self-destructive tampering with nature combined with an almost infinite capacity to adjust to the short term rhythms of a volatile climate.Fagan cites numerous cultures as examples of those that thrived for centuries--like the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Pueblo--but then in a seeming geological blink of an eye collapsed, mostly due to prolong drought. Along the way, Fagan notes what seems to be a consistent pattern of human beings that cuts across all cultures and ages. When a culture just gets going, it tends to do so when it encounters favorable conditions for growth. There is ample rain, ample vegetation, and ample space to grow crops. The population grows quickly--too quickly. It reaches a tipping point when the previous subsistence level of water and food are now no longer adequate to feed this burgeoning population. Sometimes if the drought is severe and lengthy, the civil authorities do not have time to adjust and their civilization goes under. Other times, when the drought is less severe and less lengthy, these authorities possess enough acumen and foresight to prepare even haltingly a way to preserve water and horde food stuffs to wait out the drought. Fagan notes that even under the best of circumstance, human beings have showed only a limited capacity to withstand a fickle nature. The lessons that he draws for humanity in the twentieth century are cause for the deepest of concern. The potential for catastrophic famine and culture collapse is higher now than in the past if for no other reason than the same conditions which destroyed populations of much fewer numbers than today are still here, only our populations are much higher than those of the past. He is not optimistic that humanity in this century can avoid the same unhappy fates of our ancestors. The best that he can hope for is for all cultures today to look to the past so that we can view ourselves as partners with the earth rather than its master.

The Medieval Warming Period resulted in significant developments for farming yields, which resulted in the development of governmental sophistication (taxation), theology and religion, and farming technology, which allowed for keeping of seeds and more reliable planting through the use of beast-drawn plows. The book makes more than slight inferences that none of this would be possible without the Medieval Warming Period, while downplaying the other factors that allowed European culture to develop and prosper globally.The Great Warming is a fantastic combination between history and science, providing an excellent background for elementary climatologists and readers wanting to further understand how global climate can affect daily life and food sources. While the Medieval Warming Period was beneficial for the European agricultural model, in many other areas of the globe, drought, famine, and failed crop yields resulted in migratory populations. While western history will downplay these impacts because they were mostly on indigent and native populations, it is important to note that the Aztecs, Mayans, and many other North American native populations were greatly impacted (or even eliminated) due to droughts that lasted decades or centuries.Critiquing this book is fairly easy. The drawings and maps are absolutely horrible. It's almost like a post-writing editor threw darts at a wall to decide where to put the maps and drawings rather than the author, because they are literally placed in the middle of paragraphs or thoughts without any (or very little) relevance to the current discussion. The biggest point of critique must be the glaring lack of alternative methods theory. The author gave little or no credit to other developments in society for improvements in the quality of life. In other words, the author credits the improvement in living standards almost entirely on the climate change, while ignoring all the other modern European factors. The church, technology, and government were all developing at the same time, which may or may not have led to these quality of life improvements for the average citizen. The author downplays these other factors and enhances the atmospheric and climate changes to make his point. While this approach is perfectly acceptable in an editorial piece, this book is passed off as “science”, which requires an honest evaluation of all plausible theories. The author performs a great disservice to the reader by failing to address these several shortcomings.I highly recommend this book if you're into history and you want to understand how climate change affected the development of medieval society or at least hear theories on it. If you're really into climate change, this book will be an elementary review and makes inferences that may or may not be correct and require some theatrical license for complete and understanding. Overall, while the author does an exceptional job of bringing climate change and its effect upon society, the inferences leave too much to be readily acceptable and only allow for continued “climate debate” on Fox gnu’s.

The book gives us the history of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) in several places around the world. The great variation in climate is emphasized. Sometimes, the warming leads to drought, and he seems to want us to believe that this makes the MWP worse than the Little Ice Age. Drought does not always accompany warming, or cooling. Further, the disasters of the Little Ice Age were much worse than those during the MWP.The history is worth the cost of the book, but the conclusions are best ignored.

A well written book that I plan to read again - contains a lot of historical events over the years including the Medieval Warming Period that we need to educate ourselves on. What is happening now in our climate phase has happened many times before in our history. I disagree with the author somewhat as we cannot change our weather patterns - climate change is not caused by man - we might be responsible for a mere 5% or less - ask yourself, how did the 5,000 feet of ice that covered most of the northern hemisphere 15,000 years ago melt - certainly not because of fossil fuels. Mother Nature has a mind of its own.

前著のLong Summerが良すぎたのか、それから見れば多少見劣りはしますが、相変わらず文章はおもしろい。今回、主義に反し距離はマイル表記です、出版社からクレームがついたらしく、もとはメートル表記だったらしいと思われます。時節柄CO2に関しても「因果関係は明白」としながらその根拠を示せないのも前作同様です。そう書くなら前著に掲載の過去の気温と二酸化炭素の表において、１３万年前の方が今より気温が高く、二酸化炭素量は工場も車もない昔であっても今と同程度という理由を書いてほしかった。違った説明もしています。海水が気温によって二酸化炭素を吸収したり解放したりするとか、前著では太陽活動が気温上昇に関係していることは炭素１４の寡多と気温が連動しているので明白だとか。気温の上昇は今に始まったことではなく、２万年前から連綿として継続していることなのでとってつけたような説明は読んでいてがっかりさせられます。今回もおもしろい話がありました。バクダットに雪が降ったとか黒海がハドソン湾と同様氷床の跡だとか。そう言われてみれば楼蘭のあったタクラマカン砂漠も氷床だったのかなと、今は消えてしまったロプノールに合点がいった次第です。文章が巧みで、半分ジォークでしょうが語呂合わせの言い回しに笑ってしまいます。

Challenging

This book is not exactly what I expected, viz., a historically factual and scientific description of a time between about 800 and 1300AD when the global temperatures were higher than previously and have not been as high again until recent times. There are a lot of very interesting correlations described between evidence of times of calmer, warmer weather and the rise of various civilizations around the world and the aiding of exploration across the oceans. Also the coincidence of adverse changes in climate as a consequence of warming, for example, droughts and the collapse of formerly highly organized and successful communities. What was a surprise for me in this book are the lengthly pieces of imaginative writing about life in different communities often using a fictitious person going about their daily tasks. I can see the merit of this as it gives a human touch to history that may make it more accessible and understandable to the reader. It was, at times, a bit too fanciful and florid in style of writing and made me feel the author is a frustrated novelist. Overall, though, it's a fascinating book that really brings home to one how climatic change can really change history,

The Great Warming is an excellent - and very readable - account of the correlation between civilizations and the consequences of climate changes within the past 4,000 years. From the Sumerans to the Egyptians, over to the Aztecs and Mayans, Brian Fagan gives a fascinating account of the circumstances that ultimately led to the collapse of these civilizations. The Little Ice Age in Europe is also mentioned.The book is restricted to pre-modern civilizations which, for the most part, depended on subsistence farming, which fact was disastrous when populations that had already grown so much as to be unsustainable faced shifts in rainfall, overexploitation of natural resources, deforestation.I would suggest this book as an excellent source of information about a situation we may be facing someday, in spite of our highly-evolved methods of agriculture and globalization, as it vividly shows the catastrophes we may be headed towards if our population continues exploding and our agricultural landes are depleted.