The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization

by Brian Fagan (Author)

• New

  Illustrated
  2005

  $18.93

  Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the Holocene-the long summer of the human species. In The Long Summer , Brian Fagan brings us the first detailed record of climate change during these 15,000 years of warming, and shows how this climate change gave rise to civilization. A thousand-year chill led people in the Near East to take up the cultivation of plant foods a catastrophic flood drove settlers to inhabit Europe the drying of the Sahara forced its inhabitants to live along the banks of the Nile and increased rainfall in East Africa provoked the bubonic plague. The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate-challenges that are still with us today.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.75

  The Earth's climate has always been in flux: glacial periods and warm ones have slowly and relentlessly alternated for millennia. But the period of global warming of the last 15,000 years is without precedent, and it set the conditions which enabled civilization to arise. It is our 'long summer'. From the almost unimaginably hostile climate of the late Ice to the onset of 'Little Ice Age', which began in 1315 and lasted half a millennium, this book tells the remarkable story of how human history has been influenced by the planet's ever-changing climate. Confronted with such challenges as severe droughts in southwestern Asia and the ripple effects of the Medieval Warm Period, our ancestors have proved themselves to be at their most resilient and adaptable. Deploying all the resources of new climatology from the past century, from tree rings to deep cores from glaciers, Fagan provides us, for the first time, with an historical context in which to understand the unprecedented global warming of today, as we try to anticipate an uncertain climatic future.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.23

  The Earth's climate has always been in flux: glacial periods and warm ones have slowly and relentlessly alternated for millennia. But the period of global warming of the last 15,000 years is without precedent, and it set the conditions which enabled civilization to arise. It is our 'long summer'. From the almost unimaginably hostile climate of the late Ice to the onset of 'Little Ice Age', which began in 1315 and lasted half a millennium, this book tells the remarkable story of how human history has been influenced by the planet's ever-changing climate. Brian Fagan deploys all the resources of the new climatology to reveal the complex interplay between human development and the weather. He shows that human beings have proved themselves to be at their most resilient and adaptable when the Earth's volatile climate has posed the greatest challenges: severe droughts in southwestern Asia, the drying of the Sahara brought cattle people to the Nile Valley with their distinctive ideas of leadership, and the ripple effects of the Medieval Warm Period had very different and profound impacts in Europe and the Americas. Confronted with such challenges, our ancestors time and again rose to meet them. Besides allowing us an previously unattainable understanding of the forces which shaped the lives of our distant ancestors, the revolutionary advances in climatology of the past quarter century provide us, for the first time, with a historical context in which to understand the unprecedented global warming of today, as we try to anticipate an uncertain climatic future.