Peter Francopan is a greatly esteemed historian, Professor of World History at Cambridge University, no less. I didn’t realise just how esteemed he was until I went on his website, which lists all the prizes his books have won.

I got halfway through “The Silk Roads” and then lost it. I’ve found it again and mean to finish it. I found it very informative, but hard going. I put this down to it being in French, but having sampled Professor Francopan in English, I’m not sure that the French translator was entirely to blame.

I just came across the French translation of his 2023 book “The Earth Transformed – An Untold History” which “looks at how human history has been shaped by climate, geography and natural disasters.” This has received rave reviews and been chosen as a Book of the Year by just about every serious newspaper in the UK.

Gerard DeGroot in the Times says it has : “the intellectual weight and dramatic force of a tsunami.” The Financial Times claims: “Frankopan transforms our understanding of history,” while Dan Jones in the Sunday Times calls it “vast, learned and timely” and adds “… The Earth Transformed … holds lessons for a world grappling with rapid climate change caused by human industry.”

Well, they’re wrong. I’ve read the first eleven pages available free on Amazon, and on that basis I can assure you that it’s bollocks, and badly written bollocks at that, with several errors on every page.

Actually, page eleven is OK. It’s a rundown on the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and whatnot, which is difficult to get wrong since the science (unlike the history) is settled. So perhaps the following 700 pages are OK too, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Take the title for a start: “..an Untold History.” I scanned the index of the French edition to see how much already told climate history gets quoted. Hubert Lamb gets a mention for discovering the Mediæval Warm Period, but I could find no mention of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose massive “Histoire du Climat” appeared in 1967. Le Roy Ladurie’s study is as long as Francopan’s book, but much more limited in scope, since it’s based on original historical research, instead of on looking stuff up on Google Scholar. Professor Francopan’s History of “how human history has been shaped by climate, geography and natural disasters” is not so much Untold as “Uncompiled (until now) into one indigestible mass of facts referenced from peer reviewed sources.”

Page one already contains one dodgy claim: that Milton’s Paradise Lost retells the story in Genesis “explaining how humans came to be the architects of their own demise.” As I remember it, Satan gets a lot of the blame.

To be fair, the subject of climate is introduced with admirable reticence:

In today’s world, the ways that our species works the land, exploits natural resources, and treats sustainability are subjects of vehement discussion – not least since many believe human activities to be so extensive and so damaging that they are changing the climate.

That’s fair enough. I couldn’t put it better myself. Well, actually I could. I’d avoid talking about “our species” for a start, since it raises questions about how someone else’s species might go about working the land or “treating sustainability,” whatever that means. But fair dos, he’s accepting that human-induced climate change is a subject of belief, and up for discussion.

This book sets out to look at how our planet .. has changed since the beginning of time, sometimes as a result of human endeavours, calculations and miscalculation..

Well maybe sometimes as a result of human endeavours, but not often, not on the scale of “..since the beginning of time”. I’m being pernickety here, but time is what historians study, isn’t it? I’d expect them to be careful about any general statements about it, at least on page one.

Pages two and three are largely taken up with listing his childhood fears, mainly provoked by John Craven’s Newsround. I’ve never seen it, but the fact that a TV news programme specifically aimed at the young should lead an intelligent child to keep the necessities of life (chocolate, a Swiss Army penknife) in a little bag by his bed “for when (not if) changes to the world’s climate would demand adaptation” makes one wonder if edulcorating the news to make it suitable for children was a good idea.

The young Francopan was worried about acid rain and nuclear winter, and these worries seems to have morphed painlessly into fear of global warming, without him having noticed a certain lack of consistency:

To be sure, there were many other things that scared me growing up: the 1970s and 1980s were a time of injustice, hatred, instability, terrorism, famine and genocide. But ecological devastation, climate and climate change were constantly in the background as current problems that would get worse in the future.

Really? In the 70s and ‘80s? There was some media concern about global cooling in the 70s, but global warming barely made the news until James Hansen’s testimony before the US Senate in 1986, which I doubt made John Craven’s Newsround. Climate Change was hardly “constantly in the background” until Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” film in 2006, by which time Professor Francopan was 25 and presumably past keeping chocolate in a little bag beside his bed.

He mentions the importance of not confusing correlation with causation, so it’s surprising to read this (page 4):

It did not cross my mind that the end of the Cold War would lead to an age of ecologies being placed under ever greater stress, or that increased global economic co-operation would result in massive rises in levels of carbon emissions and a warming world.

I don’t thing it crossed anyone’s mind that the end of the Cold War would lead to ecological stress, or that economic co-operation is a cause of global warming, not even in the overheated brains of the most obsessive climate doomer.

One thing was clear: we were all guaranteed to live on a planet more hostile, more unstable and more dangerous than the one we had grown up in.

This claim, and the two previous ones quoted above, are three of the rare statements of “fact” that don’t have a footnote with a reference to an academic source – a sure sign that Professor Francopan is either still subject to fears inculcated by John Craven’s news for children, or is making stuff up.

We live in a world teetering on the brink of disaster because of climate change.

Here, at last, the footnotes & references begin in earnest. The authorities quoted in support of this claim are none other than Antonio Guterres, Barack Obama, Pope Francis, President Xi, and Greta Thunberg.

Professor Francopan is a historian. He knows all about the importance of quoting reliable sources.

Which is perhaps why he changes the subject to his own researches, which taught him that in the Sasanian and Abbasid empires:

“.. the success and stability of the state were closely linked to the irrigation of fields that enabled a rise in agricultural yields” [..] in China “ the rises falls and replacements of imperial dynasties .. are closely correlated with changes in temperature [..] Likewise, reading poetry [..] made clear how the monsoons [..] play a fundamental role in the literature, culture and histories of South Asia.”

These discoveries – interesting, though hardly surprising – are provided with references, while this one:

..we seem to have arrived at the edge of a precipice where the future of our species [..] is at risk

is not.

Lots of people have looked over the edge of this particular precipice, and Professor Francopan tells us why a historian has something special to offer:

Historians are living in something of a golden age thanks to a rash of new evidence and new types of materials that help improve understanding of the past.

And he gives four examples of the new evidence from the current Golden Age of History. Here are two of them:

Advances in cost-effective laboratory visible-near infrared/shortwave infrared spectroscopy data have enabled groundbreaking work to reach conclusions about the social change in the Mapungubwe landscape at the confluence of the Shashi and Limpopo rivers during the twelfth century. Isotope data from human burials and from pig teeth in what is now Papua New Guinea help shed light not only on element patterns but on proportions of marine foods that people were eating more than 2,000 years ago.

I don’t have access to the footnotes, so I don’t know if Professor Francopan is responsible for the “cost-effective laboratory visible-near infrared/shortwave infrared spectroscopy data” or it’s just careless copy-and-paste from someone else’s Summary of Conclusions, but I do know that anyone inflicting a paragraph like that on the reader on page six is asking for a prize for AI slop.

Even when a causal link is established between climate change and an important historical event, one’s natural reaction is not so much “Wow!” as: “Well, yes. And?” Take the claim that Genghis Khan’s conquests were facilitated by wet weather conditions that increased the pasture available for his horses. Maybe so. But let’s indulge in a little counterfactual rumination. Suppose the climate had got drier in central Asia at the time. Would we be reading about how lack of grazing for his horses forced Genghis Khan to conquer Asia in the search for new pasture land? Of course we would.

There’s more.

Some of the most exciting advances have come in the way we understand the climate. These include inventive ways of using written sources that have been ignored or poorly utilised in the past. For example, clam shells from the coast of Peru enable climate reconstructions through changes in the chemistry of shells that allow researchers to identify yearly, monthly and even weekly ocean temperatures.

I’m willing to believe that Peruvian clams have been hiding records of weekly temperature changes in their shells, but doubtful about the claim that they left written sources. (“Bit chilly in here today. Must fix the seaweed insulation on the upper shell.”) He’s probably confusing them with the Incas.

He goes on to talk about dates of cherry blossom festivals in Japan, the first spring arrival of ships in the harbour in Tallin, Estonia, etc. so the Peruvian clams have obviously got detached from their moorings and intruded into the discussion of written sources by mistake. This is just evidence of bad proof reading, one hopes, as is the mention of “phylogenetic trees of plague in Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan and Cambridgeshire.” (Yes, I know what he means, but you have to ask: What sort of editor would let pass “trees of plague”?) It does make me wonder if anyone has actually read this except me (and the dozens of critics who made this a Book of the Year, of course.)

Sales and prizes indicate that many people find Francopan’s breathless “Hey-did-you-know?” style interesting. I find what people find interesting interesting. It’s part of a long-term social trend in our societies, in which prestige and success pass from those who do things to those who know things; and among those who know things, from those who discover things to those who know how to find stuff on the internet and present it in a tsunami of impressive “facts.” Fame that once belonged to the man who makes a better mousetrap has passed to the man who finds a better way of selling the same, or even an inferior, mousetrap. It may be good for sales, but not for catching mice.

Some rare geniuses manage to do stuff and write about it. Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill both won wars and wrote books about how to win wars. You can learn a lot from their books, but nothing as intriguing as the link between pig’s teeth and the amount of seafood consumed in Papua New Guinea at the time of the Roman Empire – nothing, in other words, to liven up a dinner party conversation in NW3, or boost the childhood fears of a ruling élite that no longer knows what it’s doing, or even why it exists in the first place.