At times, Fagan’s writing is annoying and seems like it was vying for a PBS Nova Documentary that it would never get. Most of the time, it is terrifying:
The Medieval Warm Period was a period where Europe was warmer, but most of the rest of the world was drier, and therefore more prone to drought, and therefore more deadly. We are rapidly approaching that world.
Fagan’s book is a section of world history, a kind of hypercut that Tim Urban calls “horizontal history”. We get to see every continent, a wide range of different societies, all at the same time period. The thing that connects them all is that the sky is changing, and often changing too slowly for them to notice until it's too late.
The thread that connects every society affected by the Warm Period isn’t warming itself- some societies did not find their geography warming at all. No, the thread is Water. The overabundance or lack of water, combined with regional climatic unpredictability, is what caused multiple societies to collapse. The Mayans, California Indigenous peoples, and multiple African peoples fell to endemic drought. South China and the Khmer Empire fell to devastating climatological switchbacks as droughts gave way to torrential flooding. Fagan’s list goes on.
12 years after the publication of the Great Warming, we’re seeing the droughts of climate change that humanity already faced 1000 years ago rear their heads. Droughts clamp down on water in developing countries, and cities like Cape Town and Chennai have stunning reductions in their local water sources. We see floods threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people in China. The once-in-a-millennium droughts and floods come on a regular basis. Countries fight wars over food.
The Greater Warming marches on.
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