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Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
Bloomsbury Publishing
March 2008
On Sale: March 4, 2008
304 pages
ISBN: 1596913924
EAN: 9781596913929
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
How the earth’s previous global warming phase, from the
tenth to the fifteenth centuries, reshaped human societies
from the Arctic to the Sahara—a wide-ranging history with
sobering lessons for our own time.
From the
tenth to the fifteenth centuries the earth experienced a
rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide—a
preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including
Western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests
and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the
Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections
across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron
goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were
able to settle the remotest islands on earth. But in many
parts of the world, the warm centuries brought drought and
famine. Elaborate societies in western and central America
collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon
and the Mayan Yucatan were left empty.
As he did in
his bestselling The Little Ice Age, anthropologist
and historian Brian Fagan reveals how subtle changes in the
environment had far-reaching effects on human life, in a
narrative that sweeps from the Arctic ice cap to the Sahara
to the Indian Ocean. The history of the Great Warming of a
half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be
underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our
lives today—and our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan,
is the “silent elephant in the room.”
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