Play Audiobook Sample
Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
A thirty-thousand-year history of the relationship between climate and civilization that teaches powerful lessons about how humankind can survive.
Man-made climate change may have began in the last two hundred years, but humankind has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty: once-mighty civilizations felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.
But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: history. The study of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the past ten years, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years, and see just how civilizations and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are the ones that plan ahead.
Climate Chaos is thus 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 safer and healthier future.
Download and start listening now!
""Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors by Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani is a tour de force because of its relevance to deal with global climate change. The authors ask, what can we learn from past successes and failures? The takeaway are six major lessons critical for our survival. Their clearly written and concise book includes [hi]stories beginning 30,000 years ago up through the Anthropocene. Case studies cover the cold (Ice Age) and the hot and dry (ancient Egypt) and hot and humid (the Maya), from nomadic hunters (early Africa and Europe) to empires (Rome), from megadroughts (American Southwest) to monsoons (Angkor)."
— Lisa Lucero, professor of anthropology, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Quotes
-
Climate change is happening right now—but has happened many times before, too. Climate Chaos tells an astonishing story of thousands of years of wildfires, megadroughts, cataclysmic cyclones and floods, decades-long heat waves and sudden regional ice ages. As we respond to contemporary climate change, our great advantage over our ancestors is scientific knowledge. Will we use that knowledge wisely? Climate Chaos shows how.
— Gregg Easterbrook, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and author of The Blue Age -
It is often said that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. Human-caused climate change constitutes the greatest challenge we have yet faced as a civilization, and we must learn from our past if we are to meet that challenge. I can think of no better source than Climate Chaos by Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, which explores how our ancestors coped with the challenges of natural climate instability, offering some lessons along the way for how we can avert a climate crisis.
— Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University and author of The New Climate War
Climate Chaos Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About the Authors
Brian Fagan is America’s leading writer on archaeology. Professor Emeritus of archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he is the author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors, The Great Journey, and many other popular works, and he is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Michael Langan works as a freelance editor, writing mentor, and teacher and also facilitates creative writing and critical reading workshops. He taught creative writing and English literature at Greenwich University, London, for ten years before giving it up to focus on his writing career. He was arts editor of the online LGBTQ arts and culture journal Polari Magazine, during which time he wrote on visual art, cinema, and books. For the past three years, he has joined forces with The Literary Consultancy (TLC), London, to offer manuscript assessments to emerging LGBTQ writers as part of TLC’s Free Reads scheme, sponsored by the Arts Council England.
About Alex Hyde-White
Alex Hyde-White is an actor and a producer of two films and hundreds of audiobooks thru his label Punch Audio.