The Great Warming
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE RISE AND FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS
How climate transformed—and sometimes destroyed—human societies during the earth’s last global warming phase, the 9th to 13th centuries, which reshaped human societies from the Arctic ice cap to the Sahara and beyond. The Great Warming, the final book in my quartet about the history of climate change, which briefly became a New York Times non-fiction bestseller, is a journey back to the world of a thousand years ago, to what is commonly called the Medieval Warm Period. Five centuries of irregular warming from 800 to 1250 had beneficial effects in Europe and the North Atlantic, but brought prolonged droughts to much of the Americas and lands affected by the South Asian monsoon. The book describes these impacts of warming on medieval European societies, as well as the Norse and the Inuit of the far north, then analyzes the impact of harsh, lengthy droughts on hunting societies in western North America and the Ancestral Pueblo farmers of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. These peoples reacted to drought by relocating entire communities. The Maya civilization was much more vulnerable that small-scale hunter-gatherer societies and subsistence farmers in North America. Maya rulers created huge water storage facilities, but their civilization partially collapsed under the stress of repeated multiyear droughts, while the Chimu lords of coastal Peru adapted with sophisticated irrigation works. The climatic villain was prolonged, cool La Niñalike conditions in the Pacific, which caused droughts from Venezuela to East Asia, and as far west as East Africa. The Great Warming argues that the warm centuries brought savage drought to much of humanity, from China to Peru. It also argues that drought is the hidden, most dangerous element in today’s humanly created global warming, often ignored by preoccupied commentators, but with the potential to cause over a billion people to starve.