Climate Chaos Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors

A thirty-thousand-year history of the relationship between climate and civilization that teaches powerful lessons about how humankind can survive.  Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history’s mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.

The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead.

Climate Chaos is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future.

Brian Fagan is one of the world's leading archaeological writers and an internationally recognized authority on world prehistory. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of several widely read books on ancient climate change. He has lectured about the subject to audiences large and small throughout the world. His latest book is Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization (Yale University Press, 2018).
Nadia Durrani is a Cambridge University-trained archaeologist and writer, with a PhD from University College, London, in Arabian archaeology. She is the former editor of Current Archaeology and Current World Archaeology magazines and has a very wide experience in writing about archaeology for wider audiences. She is co-author of several text books with Brian, and the forthcoming trade books What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History (Yale University Press, 2019) and Bigger Than History: Why Archaeology Matters (Thames and Hudson, 2019).