"The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilization," by Eugene Linden. Simon and Schuster, 2006.

Linden has spent the last thirty years studying and writing about nature and the environment. In this book, he assembles his own and others' research into a timeline of global climate change cycles. He compares historical events like the disappearances of the Norse settlement in Greenland, the Akkadian community in North Africa, and the Maya in Central America with the climatological record recovered from icecap and ocean floor core samples. He claims there is strong evidence for a model of sudden catastrophic climate changes, rather than for the older model of gradual change over a long time.

Because this is a relatively new field of study, the evidence is still anecdotal. Linden shows that, although global warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate, the United States and other nations are refusing to acknowledge this or to take seriously the potentially disastrous consequenses. The compelling correlations he draws between historical events and global climate change, however, will soon lead you to agree with his conclusion that a major climate change is imminent - and has already begun.