The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization – Review
In this book, Brian Fagan gives an overview of how constantly changing climate has adversely affected humanity, in pre-history and history. The book includes a very wide sweep, from the Ice Ages to the Medieval Warm Period, which ended in 1860. I commonly found it to be very well written, and a actually engaging page-turner of a book. It has many bits of information which were new to me and quite interesting. For example, what is now the Black Sea was once a large freshwater lake. It was linked to the sea, when sea levels rose after the result of the last Ice Age, and the course of seawater flooding into the lake was both very sudden and very traumatic for the humans who previously lived nearby. While the book is very well-written, extremely entertaining and contains many nuggets of information, the book’s superior thesis does not work for me. Fagan is originally going after two better points. First, while he denies that he is doing this, the book really is constantly arguing that climate drives history, and the argument does not work. Climate is only thread in history. It is often a very main thread, but it is seldom the important factor in any particular chronological development. Second, Fagan very consciously argues that, as individual societies become more sophisticated they become less vulnerable to little climatic changes but more vulnerable to big climatic changes. It is an attractive idea. The fundamental concept is that minor scale societies are better able to move to a different area, or radically change their aspect of life, than are international societies. The idea becomes a individual amount of sense, but I am not sure that I buy it as a common rule. The book is not very concerned with the contemporary debate over global warming. Fagan says that he accepts the scientific concensus that the globe is warming and that the warming is usually caused by individual activity. Fagan also accepts without question –and indeed, documents in some detail — the Medieval Warming Period. As I have commented in other places, the supports of the global warming theory — possibly including the IPCC — deny that the Medieval Warming Period occurred. They do so, because, if you know about the Medieval Warming Period, the 20th century warming seems less unusual and less in need of some particular explanation. The fact that the IPCC denies historical facts, such as the Medieval Warming Period, shows its bias and dents its credibility. A order of this sort, by effectively making the history better known, stops to reveal this less than likely side of the IPCC.