The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
By Brian Fagan
Bloomsbury $26.95, 282 pages

Now that global warming and climate change are established facts, however inconvenient, we are all starting to ponder what will happen to our particular corner of the planet in the next few decades. One approach is through the computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their influential scientific reports. Another is to consider how conditions changed in warmer historical periods, notably AD800-1300, often known as the Medieval Warm Period. This is what the prolific writer and archaeologist Brian Fagan does in The Great Warming, a follow-up to his earlier study, The Little Ice Age, covering the global cooling from about 1430 to 1850.