Brian Fagan's "The Great Warming" tells of elites sleepwalking to disaster

Several reviews have appeared of Brian Fagan's The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Andrew Nikiforuk's discussion in the Globe and Mail (Toronto) struck me as the best: ...In a book that reads like climate déjà vu, well-known University of California anthropologist Brian Fagan shows that the Medieval Warm Period humbled political elites and demolished their well-engineered empires with equanimity.

Fagan says we're now entering another era of extreme aridity, and that the challenges of adapting to water shortages and crop failures won't be easy. Although elites can ignore the climate, Fagan says, the climate won't ignore them. It never has....

Fagan, a veteran chronicler of how climate can undo a society's best-laid plans, cements his lucid and often surprising observations on this climate event with much scientific data collected from ice cores and tree rings. He admits that there is still much debate about what caused the great warming, and nobody really knows how hot it actually got. But no one doubts that the dramatic event turned a grape-like bunch of civilizations into raisins....

In his final chapter, Fagan explains why climate history matters, and it's not inspiring reading. Britain's esteemed Hadley Centre for Climate Change recently documented a 25-per-cent increase in global drought since the 1990s. Right now, about 3 per cent of the planet is drying up. Global warming will soon place a third of the Earth in extreme drought and force another half of the world's land mass to taste "moderate drought." Such abiding dryness will "challenge even small cities, to say nothing of thirsty metropolises like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson." Even Las Vegas could lose a craps game or two.

But history in a virtual age remains an impoverished teacher, much like truth speaking. The good news, Fagan says, is that highly nomadic communities with diverse food supplies often read the weather signs and move. The bad news is that elites try to super-manage their way out of droughts, with disastrous results for ordinary people....