16. Quoted from Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 105.
17. Annette S. Beveridge, ed., Babur Nama (“Memoirs of Babur”) (Delhi: Oriental Books, 1970), p. 488. Babur, who reigned as Mughal emperor from 1526 to 1530, was known as the Master of Hindustan. He was a Timurid prince, who defeated the last of the Delhi Mongol sultans. “Mughal” is the Persian word for Mongol.
18. The general descriptions in this section are based on Michael Coe, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), and Charles Higham, The Civilization of Angkor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
19. This section is based on Roland Fletcher, “Seeing Angkor: New Views on an Old City,” JOSA, vols. 32–33 (2000–2001), pp. 1–27. Also: Richard Stone, “The End of Angkor,” Science, vol. 311 (2006), pp. 1364–68.
Chapter 12: China’s Sorrow
1. Confucius, Analects, book 18. Translation at http://classics.mit.edu/Confucius/analects.html.
2. Loess, from the German word lö’ss or lösch, meaning “loose,” is windblown dust of glacial origin, which formed huge deposits in areas far from retreating ice sheets in parts of the central and northwestern United States, in central and eastern Europe, and in northeastern China. For northern Chinese agriculture, see Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
3. Q.-S. Ge, J.-Y. Zheng, and P.-Y. Zhang, “Centennial Changes of Drought/ Flood Spatial Pattern for Eastern China over the Last 2,000 Years,” Progress in Natural Science, vol. 11, no. 4 (2001), pp. 280–87. See also discussion in National Research Council, Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2006). p. 41.
4. Wei-Chyung Wang and Kerang Li, “Precipitation Fluctuation over a Semiarid Region in Northern China and the Relationship with El Niño/Southern Oscillation,” Journal of Climate, vol. 3 (1990), pp. 769–83.
5. George Cressey, China’s Geographic Foundations: A Survey of the Land and Its People (New York: McGraw-Hill), pp. 84–85.
6. Guoqiang Chu et al., “The ‘Mediaeval Warm Period’ Drought Recorded in Lake Huguangyan, Tropical South China,” The Holocene, vol. 12, no. 5 (2002), pp. 511–16.
7. Lonnie G. Thompson, “Climatic Changes for the Past 2000 Years Inferred from Ice-Core Evidence in Tropical Ice Cores.” In Philip D. Jones, Raymond S. Bradley, and Jean Jouzel, Climatic Variations and Forcing Mechanisms of the Last 2000 Years (New York: Springer, 1996), pp. 281–96.
8. Gergana Yancheva et al., “Influence of the Intertropical Convergence Zone on the East Asian Monsoon,” Nature, vol. 445 (2007), pp. 74–77.
9. Cheng-Bang An et al., “Climate Change and Cultural Response around 4000 cal yr b.p. in the Western Part of Chinese Loess Plateau,” Quaternary Research, vol. 63, no. 3 (2005), pp. 347–52.
10. Francis H. Nichols, Through Hidden Shensi (New York: Scribners, 1902).
11. Quotes in this paragraph from ibid., pp. 229, 231.
12. Quotes in this paragraph from ibid., pp. 242, 245.
13. Scenario based on a generalized description by Morris Rossabi, introduction to Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 2.
14. On the T’ang, see introduction to Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 6 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–42.
15. On Khitan, see Denis Twitchett and Klaus-Peter Tietze, “The Liao.” In Franke and Twitchett, The Cambridge History, vol. 6, pp. 43–153.
16. Figures from Herbert Franke, “The Chin Dynasty.” In Franke and Twitchett, The Cambridge History, vol. 6, p. 292.
Chapter 13: The Silent Elephant
1. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Out of Africa (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 15.
2. D. C. Pederson et al., “Medieval Warming: Little Ice Age, and European Impact on the Environment During the Last Millennium in the Lower Hudson Valley, New York,” Quaternary Research, vol. 63, no. 2 (2005), pp. 238–49.
3. Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Books, 2006).
4. George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936); available at http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/.
5. http://www.ita.org contains full information, including archives.
6. The Hadley study uses the widely accepted Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) to measure drought levels. “Modelling the Recent Evolution of Global Drought and Projections for the 21st Century with the Hadley Center Climate Model,” Journal of Hydrometeorology, vol. 7, no. 5 (2006), pp. 1113–25.
7. http://www.unep.org is the home page of the United Nations Environment Program, on whose Web site the latest, and constantly changing, statistics can be found.
8. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2001), preface.
9. Figures from UNESCO Second World Water Development Report, 2005.
10. Brian Fagan, The Long Summer (New York: Basic Books), p. 252.
Also by Brian Fagan
Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting,
and the Discovery of the New World
From Stonehenge to Samarkand (editor)
Chaco Canyon: Archaeologists Explore
the Lives of an Ancient Society
Before California
The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850
Egypt of the Pharaohs
Floods, Famines and Emperors
Into the Unknown
From Black Land to Fifth Sun
Eyewitness to Discovery (editor)
Oxford Companion to Archaeology (editor)
Time Detectives
Kingdoms of Jade, Kingdoms of Gold
Ancient North America
The Great Journey
The Adventure of Archaeology
The Aztecs
Clash of Cultures
Return to Babylon
Quest for the Past
Elusive Treasure
The Rape of the Nile
A Note on the Author
Brian Fagan is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California–Santa Barbara. Born in England, he did fieldwork in Africa and has written about North American and world archaeology, and many other topics. His books on the interaction of climate and human society have established him as a leading authority on the subject; he lectures frequently around the world. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology and the author of Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World; The Little Ice Age; and The Long Summer, among many other titles.
Copyright © 2008 by Brian Fagan
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ART CREDITS
Maps by Steve Brown; Wharram Percy medieval village reconstruction, p. 2, © by
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2006 by the National Academy of Sciences; Mande Hunter and Snake Avatar, p. 84,
from The Way the Wind Blows, ed. Roderick J. McIntosh et al., © 2000 by
Columbia University Press; Double-hulled Tahitian canoe, p. 192, © by Corbis;
Temperature curve for eastern China, p. 215, reprinted with permission from the
National Academies Press, © 2006 by the National Academy of Sciences.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fagan, Brian M.
The great warming : climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations / Brian Fagan.—1st
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p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59691-392-9 (hardcover)
1. Global warming—History—To 1500. 2. Human beings—Effect of climate on. 3. Climatic
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First published by Bloomsbury Press in 2008
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