This book gives a good basic survey of climate drivers and climate proxies, and then dives into pre-history and history of human interaction with climate.

Unfortunately, I didn't get far before finding statements of "fact" where my immediate reaction was "there's no way they could possibly *know* that". In particular there's no way short of a time machine that they could determine how small foraging bands in a preliterate world commonly made their decisions.

I've read several books by the first author, and appreciated all of them, and only once noted anything like "unclear how much is entirely substantiated". But this time he seems to have jumped the shark, possibly with the aid of his co-author.

It's not a bad book. It gives an interesting survey of human experience of changing climate. (Think of it as history and pre-history focused on climate.) This history is interesting, and includes much I didn't know, though perhaps nothing I'd never even heard of. But it fails to do what it claims it will - provide useful lessons on how past human societies have coped with climate changes, let alone apply those lessons to modern concerns. So it's not a good book either.

Instead, it provides a one-size-fits-all way of dealing with climate changes, and pretty much claims this was always used, at least when the adaptation was successful. In particular, local adaptations, designed by the subsistence farmers themselves (not non-local rulers), plus migrating elsewhere to places where they've carefully maintained kin ties so that they will be welcomed, or at least accepted. There is, IIRC, one exception where the rulers organized the ruled to build major irrigation works, but everything else mentioned is bottom-up and local, including in cases where I don't see how they had any evidence other than the authors' own certainties about human nature.

I'd love to read a better book, applying recent developments in paleo-climate research to history and pre-history, but clearly explaining how much is extrapolated, contested or simply still unknown. But this isn't it. ( )

This one disappointed me. I thought it would give real tips on things we could do, unfortunately it does not.
Starts and ends with a bit much hyperbole.
The writing is clearly designed for higher education rather than trying to reach the general public.
Much of the historical stories were quite interesting, there were several I hadn't heard of before. ( )