---
product_id: 60882461
title: "The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations"
brand: "brian fagan"
price: "S$74"
currency: SGD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.sg/products/60882461-the-great-warming-climate-change-and-the-rise-and-fall
store_origin: SG
region: Singapore
---

# The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

**Brand:** brian fagan
**Price:** S$74
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by brian fagan
- **How much does it cost?** S$74 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sg](https://www.desertcart.sg/products/60882461-the-great-warming-climate-change-and-the-rise-and-fall)

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## Description

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

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![The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51sr-RcAqNL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Drought is the Great Evil
  

*by M***R on Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2009*

Of the many causes that have resulted in the collapse of most ancient cultures and civilizations, Brian Fagan in THE GREAT WARMING points a finger of blame at the fickleness of climate.  It is quite true, he adds, that these prior cultures ended because of military conquest, disease, famine, and the like, but the driving force behind all of them was climate change.  It has been only in the last few decades that climatologists like Fagan have had access to modern means to ascertain why past civilizations went under.  Thanks to radio carbon dating, ice core sampling, and silt analysis, he has been able to draw a reasonably accurate map of world weather stretching back many thousands of years. His conclusions are many.  First, climate change is a still imperfectly understood mixture of wind patterns, ice flow growth, volcanic eruptions, galloping desertification, and human intervention.  Second, over the last few thousand years, the major culprit has been drought caused mostly by inadequate rain.  We have not experienced any serious general global cooling for a dozen millenia.  Third, human beings are capable of the most amazing blends of sheer lunacy with regard to self-destructive tampering with nature combined with an almost infinite capacity to adjust to the short term rhythms of a volatile climate.Fagan cites numerous cultures as examples of those that thrived for centuries--like the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Pueblo--but then in a seeming geological blink of an eye collapsed, mostly due to prolong drought.  Along the way, Fagan notes what seems to be a consistent pattern of human beings that cuts across all cultures and ages.  When a culture just gets going, it tends to do so when it encounters favorable conditions for growth.  There is ample rain, ample vegetation, and ample space to grow crops.  The population grows quickly--too quickly.  It reaches a tipping point when the previous subsistence level of water and food are now no longer adequate to feed this burgeoning population.  Sometimes if the drought is severe and lengthy, the civil authorities do not have time to adjust and their civilization goes under.  Other times, when the drought is less severe and less lengthy, these authorities possess enough acumen and foresight to prepare even haltingly a way to preserve water and horde food stuffs to wait out the drought.  Fagan notes that even under the best of circumstance, human beings have showed only a limited capacity to withstand a fickle nature.  The lessons that he draws for humanity in the twentieth century are cause for the deepest of concern.  The potential for catastrophic famine and culture collapse is higher now than in the past if for no other reason than the same conditions which destroyed populations of much fewer numbers than today are still here, only our populations are much higher than those of the past.  He is not optimistic that humanity in this century can avoid the same unhappy fates of our ancestors.  The best that he can hope for is for all cultures today to look to the past so that we can view ourselves as partners with the earth rather than its master.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Great for History; Facts- not so much...
  

*by S***N on Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2016*

The Medieval Warming Period resulted in significant developments for farming yields, which resulted in the development of governmental sophistication (taxation),  theology and religion, and farming technology, which allowed for keeping of seeds and more reliable planting through the use of beast-drawn plows.  The book makes more than slight inferences that none of this would be possible without the Medieval Warming Period, while downplaying the other factors that allowed European culture to develop and prosper globally.The Great Warming is a fantastic combination between history and science, providing an excellent background for elementary climatologists and readers wanting to further understand how global climate can affect daily life and food sources.  While the Medieval Warming Period was beneficial for the European agricultural model, in many other areas of the globe, drought, famine, and failed crop yields resulted in migratory populations.  While western history will downplay these impacts because they were mostly on indigent and native populations, it is important to note that the Aztecs, Mayans, and many other North American native populations were greatly impacted (or even eliminated) due to droughts that lasted decades or centuries.Critiquing this book is fairly easy. The drawings and maps are absolutely horrible.  It's almost like a post-writing editor threw darts at a wall to decide where to put the maps and drawings rather than the author, because they are literally placed in the middle of paragraphs or thoughts without any (or very little) relevance to the current discussion.  The biggest point of critique must be the glaring lack of alternative methods theory.  The author gave little or no credit to other developments in society for improvements in the quality of life.  In other words, the author credits the improvement in living standards almost entirely on the climate change, while ignoring all the other modern European factors. The church, technology, and government were all developing at the same time, which may or may not have led to these quality of life improvements for the average citizen. The author downplays these other factors and enhances the atmospheric and climate changes to make his point. While this approach is perfectly acceptable in an editorial piece, this book is passed off as “science”, which requires an honest evaluation of all plausible theories.  The author performs a great disservice to the reader by failing to address these several shortcomings.I highly recommend this book if you're into history and you want to understand how climate change affected the development of medieval society or at least hear theories on it. If you're really into climate change, this book will be an elementary review and makes inferences that may or may not be correct and require some theatrical license for complete and understanding.  Overall, while the author does an exceptional job of bringing climate change and its effect upon society, the inferences leave too much to be readily acceptable and only allow for continued “climate debate” on Fox gnu’s.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 3.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Interesting overview of the Medieval Warm Period
  

*by J***Y on Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2023*

The book gives us the history of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) in several places around the world. The great variation in climate is emphasized. Sometimes, the warming leads to drought, and he seems to want us to believe that this makes the MWP worse than the Little Ice Age. Drought does not always accompany warming, or cooling. Further, the disasters of the Little Ice Age were much worse than those during the MWP.The history is worth the cost of the book, but the conclusions are best ignored.

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*Store origin: SG*
*Last updated: 2026-03-05*