Drought and famine: what the past teaches us to fear most about global climage change.(The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations)(Book review)

THE GREAT WARMING: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations By Brian Fagan Bloomsbury | $26.95

You can hear it under the breath of grudging half-converts now sighing about inconvenient truths. In response to reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences which confirm that humans are causing global climate to change, they concede this fact and yet mutter: so what? Most people recognize an unsettling future when they see it, but some still wonder if climate change will be that bad. A vocal minority even trumpets the potential benefits of longer corn-growing seasons in the temperate Great Plains. So long as subsidized ethanol keeps prices up, expect a rush on Canadian real estate.

Brian Fagan, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offers a unique contribution to this discussion. Dismissing the "chatterers and doomsday sayers," Fagan notes that "almost none of these self-proclaimed prophets bother to look back at climate change in earlier centuries and millennia, except for politically charged discussions as to whether the world was warmer a thousand years ago than it is today." The Great Warming escapes this tired debate. The globe is warming, Fagan assures us, and the primary cause of …