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Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations
Simon and Schuster
February 2006
320 pages ISBN: 0684863529 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The Winds of Change places the horrifying carnage
unleashed on New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama by
Hurricane Katrina in context. Climate has been
humanity's constant, if moody, companion. At times
benefactor or tormentor, climate nurtured the first
stirrings of civilization and then repeatedly visited ruin
on empires and peoples. Eugene Linden reveals a recurring
pattern in which civilizations become prosperous and
complacent during good weather, only to collapse when
climate changes -- either through its direct effects, such
as floods or drought, or indirect consequences, such
as disease, blight, and civil
disorder. The science of climate change is
still young, and the interactions of climate with other
historical forces are much debated, but the evidence mounts
that climate loomed over the fate of societies from
arctic Greenland to the Fertile Crescent and from the lost
cities of the Mayans in Central America to the rain forests
of Central Africa. Taking into account the uncertainties in
both science and the historical record, Linden explores the
evidence indicating that climate has been a serial killer of
civilizations. The Winds of Change looks at the
present and then to the future to determine whether the
accused killer is on the prowl, and what it will do in the
future. The tragedy of New Orleans is but the
latest instance in which a region prepared for weather
disasters experienced in the past finds itself helpless when
nature ups the ante. In the closing chapters, Linden
explores why warnings about the dangers of climate change
have gone unheeded and what is happening with climate today,
and he offers perhaps the most explicit look yet at what a
haywire climate might do to us. He shows how even a society
prepared to absorb such threshold-crossing events as
Katrina, the killer heat wave in Europe in 2003, or the
floods in the American Midwest in the 1990s can spiral into
precipitous decline should such events intensify and become
more frequent. The Winds of Change places
climate change, global warming, and the resulting
instability in historical context and sounds an urgent
warning for the future.
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