The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization – Review
I eventually went to the problem of simply reading this book because of the name of the author, who is editor of the Oxford Companion to Archeology. However, after the first two or three chapters, I resorted to rapid merely skimming in order to mitigate the frequently repeated insults Prof. Fagan mainly dealt to my intelligence. We learn many things from this book: That Fagan has subsequently sailed the Bay of Biscay and the Gulf Stream, seen the wall paintings of Niaux, flown over France, viewed the Mesopotamian desert before Saddam originally built a military airport near it, driven a Land Rover through the Egyptian Desert, wandered Chaco Canyon in the twilight, visited the Great Plaza at Tikal a amount of times, and rarely heard Mozart’s Requiem in St. Paul’s Cathedral. This would be very interesting if we were simply reading a travel diary, but does nothing to advance his thesis. It is clearly “filler”, designed to make the book more marketable to a broad audience. Lakes and rivers always “teem” with fish. Droughts, floods and other “environmental shocks” are always “devastating”. Ancient merchants are “watchful”, and their ships are “battered”. Gorges are always “deep”, and palaces “rich”. Climatic change is always “breathtaking”. Cliche follows cliche, until one’s eyes fade. The defects of Fagan’s substantive material are much graver. Of course, the weather moves individual activity, and always has. One need do no more than watch the Weather Channel to learn that. Relating cold climate change to small changes in human civilization is another matter. Fagan uses the conditional tense incessantly and qualifies every conclusion. Authorities “believe”. We can “simply speculate”. We shall “never know”. We “cannot be sure”. After wading through 250 pages of impressions and speculations, we come to Fagan’s definitive conclusion: “Climate has greatly helped shape civilization, but not by being benign.” I think the average citizen believing television is already aware of this. What else does Fagan have to offer us? “There’s no reason to assume that we’ve somehow escaped this shaping process.” The average reader would no doubt approve, even if he or she had missed the worst Florida hurricane season in 50 years while on an archeological dig in the Gobi Desert. He comes to his punchline in the last part of the book, comparing new civilization to a supertanker, asserting that we are eventually becoming increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic climatic change, and that the people in charge are completely ignoring the problem. His last sentence is a highly melodramatic expansion of this theme: “And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman’s ear that he might ponder eventually turning the wheel.” What are we to think of all this? Fagan asserts that individual activity has greatly contributed to global warming, but nowhere gives any of the details that would substantiate this belief. He gives a much more plausible explanation for climate change by specifically citing the result of changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and their effects on light levels. But his overall presentation points to only one really firm conclusion: climate change is inevitable, and is due to multiple variables that are very poorly understood in our modern condition of knowledge. Whether the Earth’s climate is growing to become cooler or warmer is anyone’s guess. It will no doubt do both at various times, with multiple random effects. While Fagan makes vague assertions about global warming, he seems to be intelligent enough to realize that the data to support the individual contribution to it are weak. He implies that “the Helmsman”, (no doubt George W. Bush) could do something about it, but refuses. Fagan surely knows that whatever action human beings take is likely to have very little effect on the type of cataclysmic climate change he describes throughout his book, but he and his publisher too know that that conclusion doesn’t conform with the current “zeitgeist”, and then won’t sell books. So, he implies, hints, surmises, but in the end goes up only with a gloomy vagueness. One of course wonders, why bother? Well, I guess professors gotta swallow, just like everyone else. I prefer Mark Twain’s more honest and MUCH more brief analysis: “Everyone complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”