More Tabloid Climatology – now 'extreme weather' killed the Mayans

There is nothing new in this research – the drought that brought about the demise of the Maya has been in the climate literature for years.
Besides how could they deduce drought from stalactites (memory help “c” is for ceiling) and stalagmites (“g” is for ground) – weren’t they used to determine temperature in the 2007 IPCC attempt to salvage the hockey stick?

Magic Melting Mauled Mayan MesoaMerican Metropolitan Members’ Making Money Mechanisms.
Whereas mountainous jungle civil war involving human hearts being cut out and human flesh being consumed in front of said humans’ closest relatives,
didn’t faze em…
the outbreak of more, or less rain, ruined their whole civilization. Yah..YEAH!
Surrounded by local climate buffered by oceans large and warm, on from two, to three sides, while engaging in farming, animal husbandry, FISHING, MINING, and other environmentally intensive activities,
the temperatures rising or falling a few degrees
made everybody go insane.
It was bad weather made war break out.
Yeah, THAT’s thuh TICKeT!

As above no new info, there is a TV special on the topic I have seen several times.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/cultures/maya_01.shtml
Just regurgitation of Dick Gill’s research it looks like to me.
Larry

Those Mayans and their gas guzzling V8s!
Serves them right…

Tim Ball: …stalactites (memory help “c” is for ceiling) and stalagmites (“g” is for ground)
Need more help? It’s like ants in the pants–the mites go up and the tites go down.
: > )

When did weather become the climate? First we have:

Extreme weather preceded collapse of Maya civilization

Then we have:

This was followed by an extended drought between 1020 and 1100 AD that likely corresponded with crop failures, death, famine, migration and, ultimately, the collapse of the Maya population.
“It has long been suspected that weather events can cause a lot of political unrest and subject societies to disease and invasion,” Macri said…………

The IPCC and the WMO say climate is 30 years or more of data yet these alleged researchers have decided that 80 years of climate is the weather. Which is it? The climate or the weather?

Is it any wonder how “Extreme weather” existed at a time of such low atmospheric co2. If exactly the same drought happened in exactly the same place today you know what to blame: co2.
Below are a few acknowledgments and examples of low Co2 ‘induced’ abrupt climate changes. 😉 NB they sometimes speculate about the future of man’s increased co2 using models.
http://tinyurl.com/c5swtzh
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/299/5615/2005.short
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30081147?uid=3738096&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101351963891
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291099-1417%28199611/12%2911:6%3C451::AID-JQS275%3E3.0.CO;2-9/abstract
http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?requester=gs&collection=ENV&recid=13760252&q=&uid=791805140&setcookie=yes

Rhoda Ramirez says: November 8, 2012 at 3:42 pm
One of the things that the Mayan’s also had was a command economy.

+1
Good point!

Not sure exactly what point the authors wanted to convey, but the idea that large and abrupt changes in climate occurred prior to increases in CO2 comes through loud & clear.

How much did this Toilet paper cost? Look at all the so called ‘Scientific Papers’ and ask yourself, was this value for money?
Maybe a site like this should have a two box system of ‘Science Fiction’ and ‘Science Fact’ and let the ‘Expert’ readers decide where to dump them.
P.S.
Just a thought from a layman In a drunken state(ment).

in addition to relieving the lower classes of enough heads to appease The Snake gods, the Mayan elite also taxed the peasants.
Now, the elites have the tax part down, let’s hope they don’t get any ideas about heads.

Actually, if I remember correctly, Michael Harner wrote an analysis about the Aztecs. The concept was they exceeded their ‘carrying capacity’ (too many people locally and not enough food) so they started sacrificing members of the group and threw their bodies in large kettles and meat for dinner. Flesh, it’s what’s for dinner. Cahokia also exceeded their carrying capacity and they just split.

>>> Tim Ball says:
November 8, 2012 at 2:37 pm
“There is nothing new in this research – the drought that brought about the demise of the Maya has been in the climate literature for years.” <<<
+1

As far as I know the Maya are still around.

D Caldwell says:
November 8, 2012 at 4:02 pm
Not sure exactly what point the authors wanted to convey, but the idea that large and abrupt changes in climate occurred prior to increases in CO2 comes through loud & clear.
*****************
thats what I thought too, but I am probably the least versed person here so did not want to ask.

Good grief, I hope none of those tabloid types get a hold of ChiefIO’s Bond Event series! link and especially his Of Time and Temperatures

There are some Maya around, but they live in mainland Mexico and were a separate tribe from the ones on the Yucatan Peninsula. Deforestation likely didn’t help…
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/06oct_maya/

Socialism destroyed the Mayan civilization just like socialism is now destroying western civilization.

Bad weather and catastrophic sea level rise is definitely what killed the Egyptians chasing after Moses.

but, but… extreme weather can only happen when the CO2 level is over 350ppm. That’s right, isn’t it ???
They MUST prove that at the end of the Mayan empire there was over 350ppm atmospheric CO2.

/sarc on:
I don’t think it was the weather which crippled the Mayan civilisation. I think it was their ruling elite. The priests (who could foretell the future by the way), grew ever more enamoured of their own self importance and imposed heavier burdens on the populace in terms of taxation and human sacrifice. The plebs simply got jack of it and those that didn’t stick around to end up on he chopping block simply drifted away to more tax/sacrifice-friendly havens.
Be thankful Western governments only have their hands in your pocket and not in your thoracic cavity. /sarc off:

Well, that makes some sense: the drought(s) occurred at about the same
time as the Northern Hemisphere was suffering its Dark Ages which, while
not quite as bad as the Little Ice Age, were still unpleasant.
Dr Michael Hudson had a bit to say about that failure too: when a state’s
agriculture breaks down, the food supply stops. When it stops, people go
hungry. Hungry people either riot (see North Africa earlier this year) or walk
away into the jungle, which the Maya did. Hudson pointed at salted fields,
which also happened in Mesopotamia over a couple of thousand years ago.
Irrigatiing with river water without removing the salt is problematic. River
water is brackish—from the salt washed out of the country-side it’s flowing
through, which ends up in the ocean. During a long drought, their fields
would have been irrigated by more and more brackish river water. The
salt applied to the land won’t be dissolved and washed away by (salt-free)
rain water. After sufficient time, or rather, after sufficient river water, the
land loses its ability to crop—from the salt.
The Murray River valley has this problem. The locals there talk about the
“salt table rising.” It probably isn’t: the irrigation from the river is applying
it directly and the land is becoming saltier.

Maybe they just got board!

“But the monuments made no mention of ecological events, such as storms, drought or references to crop successes or failures.”
So it’s all just wild speculation from a political standpoint, as usual.

Christopher Hanley says:
November 8, 2012 at 9:51 pm

“” … Periods of high and increasing rainfall coincided with a rise in population and political centers between 300 and 660 AD … followed by an extended drought between 1020 and 1100 AD that likely corresponded with crop failures, death, famine, migration and, ultimately, the collapse of the Maya population … ”
===================================
Paradoxically the periods above roughly coincide with the opposite climate-driven effects in Europe, the (cold) Migration Period in Europe (c. 400 – c.800 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (c. 950 – c. 1250 AD):”

Temperature driven shift in the precipitation patterns / average cloudiness by latitude / Hadley cells?

Ric Werme says: November 9, 2012 at 5:58 am
I believe those droughts you mention are coincident with drought in the SW US and northern Mexico, attributed to the demise of the Anazasi at that same time. None of this seems like new information.
Reading upstream I see I am not alone in seeing the lack of new information being resented. Matt says:November 8, 2012 at 10:47 pm and Tim Ball says:November 8, 2012 at 2:37 pm

On the one hand, I’m perfectly comfortable believing that climate variations — hell, weather variations — can be extreme enough to topple a primitive, not terribly stable in the first place civilization. This is hardly the only example — in countries like India, the failure of the monsoon (or excesses in the monsoon) has been responsible for the weakening and collapse of countless principalities and more rarely larger states over its 6000 year history (one I’m fairly familiar with from living there when I was growing up). There is little doubt that a seven year drought in 1606-1612 wiped out Jamestown after a similarly severe but shorter drought wiped out the “The Lost Colony” in NC in 1589:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/drght_james.html
Note that the Jamestown drought occurred in rough coincidence with the beginning of the LIA, and had no conceivable anthropic cause.
The great Dust Bowl of the 30s was a “perfect storm” caused by a perfectly natural drought that lasted from 1931 to 1939 — eight long years — pushing a huge stretch of countryside that was borderline near-desert over the edge into desertification, at precisely the time that settlers had stripped the country of all of its natural protections against the worst effects of drought — removing all vegetation, cutting down all the trees that formed natural windbreaks — so that when the drought happened and the crops themselves withered, there was nothing to hold the soil, nothing to break the wind, and the great plains was covered by dust storms that blew away the topsoil and piled it up into spectacular dunes. As we have excellent historical and scientific records of the occurrence, we can be certain that it happened, we have a good idea why it happened (given the drought, which of course we can no more explain or predict now than then!), and we can be quite certain that if an eight year drought like that happened again the effects would be just as devastating.
Can it happen again? It may be happening right now, not because of global warming but because we are not warming at the moment. There is a strong correspondence in the paleo drought records between La Nina conditions in ENSO and drought in the western US. The cooler pacific ocean conditions seem to create alterations in the Rosby waves and polar circulation that diverts the subtropical jets poleward. This causes fewer of the tropical eddies that pull in oceanic moisture to flow over the southwestern US. We are currently into the third “aborted” El Nino in a row, where the ENSO meter started up into El Nino conditions only to fall back into neutral or La Nina conditions (it currently stands square at the top of neutral). It is possible that this has something to do with the solar cycle — it is in rough coincidence with the current hundred-plus-year minimum in solar cycle peak activity, just as the very strong El Ninos of the 80s and 90s were in rough coincidence with periods of robust solar activity (and according to Bob Tisdale’s data as well as the UAH records, each produced a “burst” of Hurst-Kolmogorov punctuated equilibrium global warming).
This is in and of itself rather curious. La Nina seems associated with (on average) neutral to global cooling conditions, El Nino seems associated with (on average) neutral to global warming conditions, El Nino domination provides the US with the warmth and moisture it needs not to be a desert, La Nina with colder, drier conditions that push borderline lands over the edge into desertification. But all of this is still a relatively weak and erratic association, because we are talking about chaotic phenomena — the probability of nucleating a large scale eddy that carries moisture up where it is needed, such that even modulating that probability does not guarantee extremes either way, assuming a slightly antibunched but still rather Poissonian distribution of randomly nucleated events.
That is, even in an absolutely perfect world with no modulation of the probabilities, every hundred years or so, pure Poissonian distributions of these events will produce trains of years of excess or deficit. I don’t think people really appreciate that. Climate scientists would do well to study things like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_process
to understand how large the natural variations of a Poissonian process are, how easy it is for simple coincidence to create long stretches of drought or excessive rainfall even without any modulation of the baseline probabilities. This is all by itself almost solely responsible for the pattern of droughts and excessive rainfall that we see, when one applies the statistic to things like the probability of a blocking high pressure center emerging, and again is associated with Hurst-Kolmogorov distributions of drought events and discussed and described by Koutsoyiannis (whose professional career has been advising Greece — a country that is almost entirely Mediterranean climate borderline desert where water is precious) in his extensive decade-spanning work on hydrology, work that mostly preceded any hint of the “CAGW” hypothesis and that continues to apply today.
Did we learn from the Great Dust Bowl? A bit. We planted trees and shrubbery and grasses to rebind the soil, but the only reason this “worked” is that the rains returned in 1939 to break the drought. We might avoid the “dust bowl” part of a modern era drought because we do grow winter crops to keep the soil bound, because we do have hedgerows and trees to break the wind, but we’ve committed a different sin this time, one that will very likely have an enormous impact should the current drought continue — as it very likely will — with continuing La Nina and/or global cooling conditions should the latter occur. We’ve exploited the water table itself, drilling wells to help irrigate the surface by pulling water up from the natural aquifers that are nature’s buffer against continuing drought.
Worse, we’ve taken the major rivers and waterways that drain the region and pulled water out of them all the way to the sea. The Colorado River is primary example:
http://www.sierraclub.org/rcc/southwest/coreport/
(don’t worry, this 2001 report doesn’t contain the words “global warming” — it recognized the danger from natural variability given the enormous pressure on the river’s water to support ever increasing populations that were — and continue to be — at ever increasing risk).
This problem is not confined to the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundwater#Overdraft
Note well that a primary region cited is the Punjab in India. This is literally next door to where I grew up (in New Delhi) and the land in question is all borderline desert. Groundwater in the region is replenished pretty much one time per year, during the monsoon (when it rains as much as inches per day and causes massive flooding) — the rest of the year rains are extremely infrequent, and the summer months leading up to the monsoon are hot and very, very dry. During this dry season, dust-bowl like dust storms are standard operating procedure in much of India — I used to climb a tree during dust storms and peer through the flying dust as it reduced visibility to less than 100 meters, similar to a heavy fog in the US, trying to keep the grit out of my mouth, nose and eyes.
During the years leading up to the Green Revolution (which my father was working for the Ford Foundation to bring about) the Punjab and many other neighboring Indian states were borderline desert that would step over the border and become real desert every few decades, then step back when the rains returned. Indeed, famine in India has its own Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India
This is a sobering read. Note well that the death figures in these articles are given in terms of millions of people, and that the last major famine discussed in the article occurred in the twentieth century across much of the same time frame as the Great Dust Bowl, killing a total of some five million people. Lesser famines occurred in the sixties (we lived in India in the famine of 1966). Most of these famines had drought as the proximate cause in territories that are always a few steps away from being desert, although (as the article points out) in most cases there was adequate food grown in the greater Indian subcontinent and political, economic, and transportation issues contributed to the final death tolls.
To return to the top article: it is absolutely plausible that a perfectly normal and not particularly improbable drought — a regional drought lasting a mere five to ten years — would be more than sufficient to trigger the collapse of a civilization such as that of the Mayans. Such a drought would kill many in the resulting famine and the plagues surrounding mass death, and would weaken both the social fabric of the society and make it vulnerable to the inevitable outside invaders (or internal ones) as armies defected in search of food and became little more than bands of wandering marauders themselves. Entire city populations might well pack up and move away in search of water, with most of the people dying en route before they ever found it in a vast, dry countryside where those fortunate enough to have some water source would defend it to the death rather than share it.
The United States is just as vulnerable to this as the ancient Mayans. We know that the probability of a 5 to 10 year drought in almost any part of the US is high enough that droughts of this magnitude occur almost everywhere with a frequency of once per century or thereabouts. Droughts like this have been occurring “forever”, are clearly visible in tree rings, and of course they confound the hell out of attempts to also use the tree rings as proxies for temperature, because the droughts are perhaps more likely than not to be associated with colder than average temperatures rather than warmer, as indeed is predicted by Greenhouse gas theory as humidity is a powerful greenhouse gas!
Are we prepared for this? Of course not. In fact, our government is almost as bad in this regard as the governments of ancient times, pretending that some particular climate pattern is normal and that extreme events do not occur, or if they do, that they are somehow our fault and can be avoided if we appease the gods.
That’s what is so very scary about both the catastrophic anthropogenic “climate change” hypothesis and the skeptical counter arguments. Let’s parse them into pieces, backwards.
Climate Change: There is absolutely no doubt that “climate change” occurs. Always. There is no such thing as “normal climate”, or “stable climate” — those terms are only the result of our natural tendency to infer that tomorrow will be like today because to our direct personal experience so far that’s the way it has worked out. I deal with this cognitive problem in physics all the time — students presented with a sheet of paper and a block, who are asked to pull the sheet of paper out from under the block and then explain the direction of the frictional force and acceleration almost invariably get the direction of both wrong, because they mentally jump onto the frame of the paper and see only the block moving backwards relative to the paper. The same perception-centered error leads us to speak of pseudoforces such as “centrifugal force”, to underestimate the range of variability of almost any real-world system, to trust that tomorrow will be like today, if only we do not offend the gods.
Humans on both sides of the skeptical climate fence sin in this regard, but skeptics sin less, recognizing that one swallow does not make a summer and one Sandy does not validate a hypothesis that the climate is more variable than it has been in the past, given that if anything we almost certainly underestimate that past variability just because we can’t remember it, have no historical records of it, and truthfully it often — perhaps usually — leaves remarkably little enduring paleo/proxy trace. This underestimation of variability has a huge effect on the Bayesian estimation of possible human impact — a mere glance at the proxy derived thermal history of the Holocene, let alone the last 50 million years, suffices to substantially weaken any argument for anthropogenic impact at the global level because there is far more noise than we are allowing for when we try to resolve a hypothetical anthropogenic “signal”.
Anthropogenic: Personally I have no doubt that humans have had an impact on the climate. Two specific instances are the Great Dust Bowl, where one can argue that average temperatures would have been substantially different over a continental-sized chunk of the Earth’s surface if that surface was still undisturbed naturally (evolved) drought-resistant grassland and forest when the drought began instead of mechanically cultivated and overfarmed bare topsoil when the first crop failures occurred. Also, the vast quantities of dust no doubt altered everything from snow albedo to atmospheric transparency over an equally vast region. Then there are the deserts of North Africa, very probably caused by the introduction of goats that ate the scrub grass and trees that protected that region from the same fate thousands of years ago. Does the Sahara have an enduring impact on global climate? Of course it does, and humans very likely helped to create it. Human impact may be small (on a global scale) and somewhat localized, but in a chaotic system even small changes can have large impact, given time.
That doesn’t really help us here, because we don’t know and cannot predict those changes because the system is chaotic, and because we don’t understand it well enough to predict even its normal variability, to be able to answer the question “if the human race had never evolved, what would the climate/weather outside be right now?” or any of the even simpler “what if” questions one might ask, what if the CO_2 level was 280 ppm, what would the climate be, what if humans died off tomorrow, how would the climate evolve. We have no clue — not any clue with significant predictive value. A chaotic system could easily all by itself have produced 100% of the climate variation observed over the last two centuries (in the thermal historical era), or humans may well have had a significant impact only we don’t know what that impact is. We don’t even know for certain what the sign of that impact is — GCMs have to balance positive GHG influences on climate against negative aerosol influences (where I could wax poetic of the numerical dangers that abound in differential systems that rely on the partial cancellation of two opposing terms when any part of the parameters implicit in those terms are set by fitting the system to a historical dataset, but won’t, unless I just did). The overall impact could actually be negative or neutral, or weakly positive, or strongly positive, or overwhelmingly positive and lacking an objective baseline or convincing theory we can do no better than assign rather weak probabilities to all of these possibilities.
So sure, humans have almost certainly impacted the climate, and will probably continue to do so. We just don’t really know how much, where, or why. We don’t know of the anthropogenic changes have been (on average) beneficial or harmful or (most likely) irrelevant as humans have done as they always have done, and adapted to them (or died from them) in real time as they occurred. When Tambora exploded, it altered the climate for at least a decade afterwards, and sure, it killed a lot of people from climate change on the opposite side of the globe from where it occurred in “the year without a summer” and beyond. When humans were touching off nuclear bombs every few weeks on remote south pacific islands, in central Eurasia, in the southwest US, in some sense they were creating a fifty year stretch of unending Krakatoa. When the firestorms of Word War II were torching entire cities and releasing massive amounts of war chemicals into the air, it may well have had an impact. As rising populations have drained rivers dry, tapped groundwater, dumped nutrient-rich agricultural silt into oceanic estuaries, cut down forestland and replaced it with shopping malls and concrete, and blanketed millions of square miles with industrial aerosols and easily measurable CO_2 anomalies, it very likely has had an impact. In each case a small impact because the Earth is really rather big, but see above on natural variability and chaotic systems with multiple feedbacks.
We do not know how significant any one of these things have been, or how they have worked together to add or partially or even completely cancel. We do not know what the climate would be like if we went back in time and altered any particular one of them to an entirely different value, then tracked the climate’s evolution with just that one change. We do not know not because one cannot do this with GCMs, but because GCMs don’t do particularly well at hindcasting or forecasting the climate as it is with the actual data, because they contain driving terms that partially cancel in a powerfully nonlinear system, and because they don’t even have terms for some of these things — what is the net global climate impact of an algae bloom caused by runoff and silt emptying into the Gulf of Mexico or Bay of Bengal? Surely larger than that of the wings of a Brazilian butterfly, one would think. But the truth is that we don’t know.
So really, the best skeptic and catastrophist alike can do is acknowledge that humans likely are having some impact on climate, that we don’t know what it is and are unlikely to be able to find out in the immediate term with only 30+ years of halfway decent global climate data (far less than this for the 70% of the Earth’s surface covered by the ocean) and a mere smattering of halfway decent solar data, period. We’re a long, long way from being able to know what is going on inside the Sun in any sort of detail, and it is pretty clear that we do not yet completely understand the complete effect of the state of the Sun (past as well as present, as this is a non-Markovian problem) on the ongoing evolution of the climate.
Catastrophic: And finally, we get to the key problem. The risk of catastrophe. Again, skeptic and catastrophist alike should take a look at the proxy derived climate record, supplemented as best we can by actual historical records from the 6000 or fewer years where such records exist (you can learn a lot even from cuneiform tablets from the Sumerians, for example, because they were bookkeeping records for things like crops and cows). Then, we should all be afraid, very afraid! Screw the anthropogenic variability — mother nature all by herself is a source of literally unending climate catastrophes that strike all over the world in turn!
Here is where the human species has a very narrow window of time to grow up. Forget global warming or “anthropogenic climate change” per se. Forget the start of the next glacial era too, even though IMO that is nearly certain to occur “soon”, just because we don’t know what soon is, lacking any sort of quantitative model that could plausibly predict it, with or without anthropogenic modifications. Look only at the normal sorts of climate catastrophes — the Mayan drought, the droughts that killed millions of humans in India over a mere two centuries, the monsoon floods. Look at the year without a summer and the impact on the weather of natural events like El Nino and volcanic explosions. Look at the impact of mere blizzards or hurricanes out of place, where blizzards or hurricanes are never really “out of place”, only out of the memory and experience (maybe) of the people living in the places where a rare one hits. Abnormal weather, abnormal climate, is perfectly normal, the rule itself not the exception.
And it is indeed not infrequently catastrophic.
We help make it so. “Sandy” in the 1350s would have torn up a handful of coastal native american communities and then left not the slightest trace as those communities were prehistoric an lacked a written language and normal weather and other storms constantly erase the past and overwrite it with the latest “big” events of the present. “Sandy” in the 1600s did impact “civilized” communities on the seaboard, but there weren’t many such communities and the people in them were phlegmatic, considering catastrophic natural disasters to be god’s will and something beyond their control to be endured. “Sandy” in the early 20th century did a lot of actual damage to human institutions and communities and killed a lot of people, but again, there weren’t THAT many people and it wasn’t our fault that the hurricane itself occurred, it was only our fault that we built entire seaside communities as if hurricanes with this degree of violence would never occur.
A mistake that we then repeated, only tenfold, over the next 75 years, so that when the real Sandy hit it did truly catastrophic damage. Why? Not because of “anthropogenic climate change”. Not because of carbon dioxide. Because we build the entire Eastern Seaboard as if hurricanes of that strength never happen there!
Cheeze. How dumb can you get?
We continue this idiotic “blindness” right on today. Durham NC, where I live, is in a comparatively wet part of the world. We have on average nearly perfect rainfall — a rain anywhere from every few days to every few weeks, sufficient to keep the water table high, the lakes and rivers full, the farmers reasonably happy. Still, there is a finite volume of water flow in those (mostly impounded) lakes and rivers. Durham has two city water reservoirs, both lake impoundments of small rivers, plus the capacity in principle to draw on two more much larger impoundments in or next to the city that are in fact used to provide water as far away as Virginia. Chapel Hill (a stone’s throw away but that’s an uphill thrown stone as it really is on a “hill”, or ridgeline, stretching from Chapel Hill to Hillsborough (right behind by house). Chapel Hill has an impoundment as well but it is uphill and doesn’t get as much flow.
In the 80s we had two memorable droughts, each one a few years long and only a couple of years apart. In the 2000s we had another drought that lasted a couple of years. Again, nothing whatsoever remarkable about this, and if you go back in the records for the region you see many examples of similar patterns of events over well over a hundred years. Yet the 1980s droughts nearly drained the city water reservoir — I used to fish there at the time and remember driving my car miles down into the reservoir basin itself into what used to be ten or fifteen feet of water to park it next to the water to fish. They opened the second reservoir in time to do better (but still pretty badly) in the second 80s drought — it doesn’t help that much to have two reservoirs if the reservoirs are being fed by a literal trickle of water instead of a small river, especially if you use the water itself to drive the pumps that fill the city tanks ten or twenty miles away. Chapel Hill suffered (and continues to suffer) much more than Durham — their reservoir is tiny and empties almost immediately anytime there is a drought.
Over the next twenty years, what did the city do? Did they impose a moratorium on new construction, take measures to limit the population, given that nature had conclusively demonstrated that we were at or near the natural carrying capacity of the land as far as human population is concerned given the known natural variability of climate?
Don’t be daft. There is money to be made building new houses. More taxes. More money for real estate agents and builders. More people to buy more food, more services, more cars, to run more companies with more jobs to offer. And when it rains normally there is plenty of water!
Enter 2000, and once again the city reservoirs — now both of them — pretty much ran out of water. Chapel Hill had nearly doubled in size in the intervening 20 years and rationed water to the point where they wouldn’t serve you water in a restaurant unless you asked for it, and to where they served you on paper plates to avoid having to wash dishes. Durham didn’t get that bad, but watering your lawn outside of some narrow time window became illegal, and the idea of “natural” yards that have drought resistant plants instead of grass at all briefly flourished. The rivers subsided to a trickle, and all the downstream communities (all of them constantly growing, ever increasing the peak demand on a finite and erratic resource) suffered as much or more than Durham.
The drought ended once again — as droughts do — and some hurricanes refilled the reservoirs to literally overflowing in a matter of a few days as floods replaced droughts — the natural cycle observed over thousands of years. We had a hundred year record snowfall in there, a five hundred year flood, a few decade record dry or hot days, weeks, months, years — business as usual, in other words. Weather extremes are normal as soon as you look a century or better timescales instead of the half-century or so of our “typical” living experience.
Did we learn even from the 2000 droughts? Of course not. Why do you think real estate agents run for city councils? Block that kick! There is always room for one more house, one more development, one more tap suckling at Mother Nature’s watery tit and surely we won’t ever have another drought, will we? Or at least, we won’t have it until I’ve made my money from the new houses, and who cares about a little thing like water rationing anyway?
To conclude, my own opinion is that if the human species deserves to survive, it needs to get its act together and use its rather extensive knowledge of history to learn from it and act on it to avoid the extreme events that we know with absolute certainty await us in our futures. We know that over a roughly hundred year time frame, there will be at least one major earthquake (even in relatively stable parts of the world). There will be multiple multiyear droughts, and a few nasty floods to balance them out. In North Carolina we can absolutely count on being hit by at least a half dozen “catastrophic” (cat 3 or better) hurricanes, with a number of them coming inshore and roaring over the top of my house where I type this like Fran did, still at least a category one, doing catastrophic damage to any structure that was designed and built as if this could never happen. We can count on tornados that at the very least pass by close to our houses, if not right over them or through them. Either we design and build our cities, organize our entire culture from the farm to the heart of downtown, as if these events will occur or we have nobody but ourselves to blame for the catastrophic costs that follow when they do.
Of course no amount of building codes or careful planning can avoid all risk, so thoughtful insurance both personal and federal is called for, where the latter should be provided (really) only to those people and institutions that weren’t damn fools and built ticky-tack houses right on the coast or down in a flood plain in spite of the near certainty of the house’s demise in due time.
This, not “carbon regulation”, is what we should be doing in response to “climate catastrophes”. Screw CO_2 — with it or without it, climate catastrophe is certain every few decades or centuries. Should we be worrying about catastrophic ocean rise? Not particularly — there is absolutely no evidence that anything like that is occurring, and there is time to take action once there is. Should we be worrying about another five meter or better storm surge anywhere on the East Coast of the US? Damn skippy, because we can be certain of this — it happens somewhere literally all of the time, almost every year, and it happens everywhere given enough time. SHould be we worrying about an Anthropogenic Global Warming produced drought and subsequent Dust Bowl? We should be worried about massive droughts period, because with or without anthropogenic influences, Dust Bowl-scale droughts are certain to occur, nearly everywhere. Those who do not learn from the past are, indeed, doomed to repeat it until they get it right.
Most of the measures we should take to deal with “climate change” should be taken no matter what because climate change is normal, weather extremes are normal, and we have thousands of years of human history to draw on to back up either assertion. Only complete idiots and greedy fools willing to gamble (with other people’s money, inevitably) think otherwise.
With that said, I think that one should be — concerned is the right word, I think — about the possibility that increasing CO_2 might increase the variability of the climate or alter the trajectory of the climate in negative ways. It is difficult to argue convincingly that this is impossible, just as it is difficult to argue convincingly that it is certain. Most likely it will have an effect that will be nearly impossible to disentangle from the substantial noise and natural variation of the climate, an effect that almost certainly will be positive in some ways and negative in some ways and we don’t even know enough to sort that out to properly balance the costs and benefits.
Should our concern be great enough to take action and limit CO_2 production?
That’s a very difficult question, one that is strictly a cost-benefit problem and requires a cost-benefit analysis. My own take on it is that the answer is a very limited yes. Yes we should — as a matter of public policy — encourage the development of safe and cost effective energy resources, such as nuclear power (a no brainer) and solar power generation and storage. We should pay special attention to ensuring that human civilization continues to endure and flourish as we work on this by not shutting off the power or impeding the development of energy resources in the third world — not while our knowledge of cause and effect here is so limited that we cannot make anything like accurate predictions of comparative outcomes.
rgb

This has been reported before for some areas of the Mayan civilization.
More Tabloid Climatology
Do you have a criticism of the paper? You wrote “Seek and you shall find it”, but in scientific research what is sought is sometimes not found; the finding of what might not have been there is usually evidence in favor of a proposition. You are not really denying, I hope, that climate change can end civilization, at least in some places, as it has in the past. The issue is independent of whatever change might be due to CO2 change.

rgb at Duke: Because we build the entire Eastern Seaboard as if hurricanes of that strength never happen there!
Cheeze. How dumb can you get?
Good essay. About that quote, right now there are people advocating that we spend many resources reducing CO2 emissions instead of preparing for the next hurricanes, droughts, fires etc. This even though the natural disasters will recur even if we can reduce by targeted amounts, and even if that “works” to halt the warming. I am not sure “how dumb” people can be, but I bet that Mayor Bloomberg even now thinks that trans fats and soda pop restrictions are more important than preparing New York City for the next storm. I don’t know him, this is a kind of guess. Let’s see where he devotes his attention and the city’s resources through the remainder of his term.

It also appears that the Old Kingdom in Egypt was destroyed by a drought that greatly reduced or completely stopped the flow of the Nile about 4200 years. There is evidence that a worldwide, short-lived, period of very cold temperatures. A Text have been found, which describes a massive famine punctuated by unspeakable horrors occurring along the Nile at the time.
Ancient Apocalypse Death on the Nile
“Published on Apr 24, 2012 by English Video”
10 likes, 0 dislikes; 1,856 Views; 48:59 min
BBC Series
“Professor Fekri Hassan attempts to determine why the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the civilisation of the great pyramids, collapsed around 2200 BC. Can science show that terrible forces of nature were to blame – even driving people to cannibalism? Clues come from the remote deserts of southern Egypt, the glaciers of Iceland and a dramatic and unique archaeological find in the Nile delta.”