In his new book, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Fagan does not engage in secular or religious ponderances. An anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the British-born author sees harvest seasons and weather patterns of the past as providing vital prologue for a fast approaching, water-challenged future.
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As polar icecaps melt and glaciers disappear, thus causing seas to rise, low-lying coastal areas may indeed be inundated, creating millions of environmental refugees. But it is the inland agricultural breadbasket regions that feed the world that stand to suffer the greatest upheaval if reliable precipitation patterns vanish.
Such a scenario is not speculative, Fagan insists; it's based upon not only sophisticated computer models, but also the precedent of what's already happened during episodes of climate change half a millennium ago – in the Arctic, Europe, China, the Southern Hemisphere, and in America's own backyard. By taking readers back to the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, Fagan argues that history "shows how drought can destabilize a society and lead to its collapse."
Amid disturbances to growing seasons, humans suffered mightily, though our ancestors proved their resilience by adjusting opportunistically to changes that manifested over generations. That's the good news.
But the difference between then and now is that climate is changing faster today and the corresponding effects of drought over the next century have implications for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people, some living in the wealthiest of nations, who Fagan believes are unprepared to cope with severe water shortages.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0304/p13s02-bogn.htm
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