A World on Fire? What Modern Climate News Misses About the Past

On July 16, 2023, the BBC’s homepage blared a headline that felt like it had been pulled straight from a disaster movie: “Global Heatwave Breaks All Records, 2 Billion People Under Extreme Heat Alerts.” The accompanying video showed melted asphalt in Phoenix, dried-up rice paddies in southern China, and elderly residents in Rome huddling under misted fans outside nursing homes. The tone of the coverage was unambiguous: this was a crisis of our own making, a direct product of two centuries of coal burning, car exhaust, and deforestation, a problem that did not exist before the steam engine changed the world. For weeks, the same narrative dominated every news outlet, social media feed, and dinner table conversation: climate change is a modern, industrial-era emergency, a break from the stable, mild climate that humanity enjoyed for thousands of years before the 19th century.

It is a compelling story. It is also almost entirely wrong. Not the part about human activity driving modern warming—every rigorous line of scientific evidence confirms that fossil fuel emissions are the dominant cause of the 1.1°C of global warming we have experienced since the late 19th century. But the part about a stable, unchanging climate before the Industrial Revolution? That is a myth, one that has been repeated so often it has come to be treated as fact, even by many of the people who are most vocal about the need to act on climate change. The truth is far more interesting, and far more useful, than the simple narrative we have been sold. For the 10,000 years that anatomically modern humans have built cities, invented writing, domesticated crops and animals, and created the complex global civilization we live in today, the climate has never been stable. It has swung from warm periods that allowed grapes to grow in southern England and olive trees to flourish in the hills of northern China, to cold periods that froze the Thames River solid for months at a time, turned the Canadian prairies into near-deserts, and drove the collapse of some of the world’s most advanced ancient civilizations. Human societies have not just survived these shifts—they have adapted to them, shaped them, and built their identities around them.

Understanding this 10,000-year story is not an academic exercise, a diversion for paleoclimatologists with too much time on their hands. It is the single most important tool we have for making sense of the climate crisis we face today, and for building the resilience we will need to navigate the changes that are already locked in for the next century, no matter how quickly we cut emissions. This book is that story. It will take you from the melting ice sheets that retreated at the end of the last ice age, to the grape harvests of 12th-century England, to the frozen markets of the Little Ice Age in London, to the drought-stricken cities of the Maya lowlands, to the coal-fired factories of the 19th century that kicked off the modern era of rapid warming. It will avoid the dense jargon that plagues so much climate writing, explaining every technical term in plain language, and grounding every scientific finding in the stories of real people who lived through the climate shifts we will describe. It will not tell you that the past is a perfect blueprint for the present—our current rate of warming is 5 to 10 times faster than any natural climate shift of the last 10,000 years, a speed that no human society in history has ever had to contend with. But it will show you that humanity has faced severe climate challenges before, and that the solutions our ancestors developed—from drought-resistant crop varieties to communal flood defense systems to flexible food distribution networks—are still relevant today.

To start, let’s travel back 800 years, to a small farm in the county of Kent, in the southeast of England, to meet a man named Thomas Miller.

The Grape Harvest of 1150 CE

Thomas was 32 years old in the autumn of 1150, the year King Stephen of England died and Henry II took the throne, kicking off the Plantagenet dynasty. He lived in a wattle-and-daub cottage with his wife, two young children, and his elderly father, on a 30-acre farm that had been in his family for three generations. His father had taught him to plow the heavy clay soil of Kent with a team of two oxen, to shear sheep in the spring before the lambs were born, and to harvest the half-acre of vines they grew in the sunny south-facing slope of their land, a gift from a Norman lord who had granted the land to Thomas’s grandfather after the Conquest of 1066.

Those vines were not the kind of hardy, sour eating grapes that grew wild in English hedgerows. They were *Vitis vinifera*, the same species of wine grape grown in the vineyards of Bordeaux and Champagne, brought over by Norman monks who had discovered that Kent’s warm, sunny summers and mild, frost-free autumns were perfect for ripening wine grapes. Thomas’s grandfather had planted the first cuttings in 1080, and by Thomas’s time, the family was producing enough wine each year to fill 20 large ceramic amphorae: enough for the family to drink, enough to trade