Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history’s mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.
The challenges are no less great today. As the planet faces hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more, there is one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. The knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade. It provides a perspective to the point that now seasonal weather can be reconstructed going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead.
Climate Chaos is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future.
Fagan is one of the world’s leading archaeological writers and an internationally recognized authority on world prehistory. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of several widely read books on ancient climate change. He has lectured about the subject to audiences large and small throughout the world.
Durrani is a Cambridge University-trained archaeologist and writer, with a PhD from University College London, in Arabian archaeology.
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