THE LONG SUMMER: HOW CLIMATE CHANGED CIVILISATION

Brian Fagan tells the story surrounding the development of human societies since the end of the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago. Information from the earth sciences, archaeology and history provides the remarkable wealth of data on which the story is based. Ice cores from polar regions, sediment cores from beneath the ocean, human and other remains, nuts, seeds and pollen grains from archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East and North and Central America have yielded secrets showing how times of success, growth and expansion for human communities have been interspersed with leaner periods of stress, failure and dispersal. Dominant in the story of ebb and flow is the influence of the planet's ever-changing climate. The impacts of droughts, floods, heat and cold have tested human ingenuity to the limit – sometimes beyond the limit of what has been possible. From the hostile climate as the ice age finally began to lose its grip, through the warmer millennia that followed to periods of successive droughts in different regions, the book provides a gripping read of the ways in which different civilisations have faced the challenge to adapt and survive. The vulnerability of human societies throughout the ages to the vagaries of climate changes is the book's most consistent theme. Fagan's book concludes with a salutary message to our modern western civilisation where this theme of vulnerability is one that fails to make contact. We imagine that there is nothing that nature can throw at us that we cannot take in our stride. Yet, because of human action in burning growing quantities of fossil fuels, we are entering a period of climate change on a scale unprecedented for millennia. Quite soon our climate could be seriously affected by weakening of the ocean's thermohaline circulation that is so important to the benign climate of much of northern Europe. Fagan relates the devastating consequences of a switch in this circulation in much earlier times. He likens our situation to being on board a super tanker where 'those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed' and where 'no one dares to whisper in the helmsman's ear that he might consider turning the wheel'. Fagan clearly hopes – and so do I – that his readers will recognise the lessons of millennia of human history and be spurned to take action while there is still time to do so.