Study Suggests Climate Change-Induced Drought Caused the Mayan Collapse 243
pigrabbitbear writes "The collapse of the Mayan empire has already caused plenty of consternation for scientists and average Joes alike, and we haven't even made it a quarter of the way through 2012 yet. But here's something to add a little more fuel to the fire: A new study suggests that climate change killed off the Mayans."
Source? (Score:5, Informative)
I hate when people cite academic papers and don't provide a link to it...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6071/956.full
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Informative)
The theory still stands, what was debunked is the theory that peak oil means running out.
Peak oil never meant running out. Right from the coining of the term in the 1950s by Hubbert, it was always about peak of oil production, not the end of oil.
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:3, Informative)
The question that should be asked here is does this alleged climate change make things worse? The "worst areas" are that way not because they're particularly vulnerable to climate changes, but because they're vulnerable to everything including the mere ticking of the clock.
The Republican 9 Step Global Warming Denial Plan
1) There's no such thing as global warming.
2) There's global warming, but the scientists are exaggerating. It's not significant.
3) There's significant global warming, but man doesn't cause it.
4) Man does cause it, but it's not a net negative.
5) It is a net negative, but it's not economically possible to tackle it.
6) We need to tackle global warming, so make the poor pay for it.
7) Global warming is bad for business. Why did the Democrats not tackle it earlier?
8) ????
9) Profit.
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Informative)
oil has many substitutes, since we have centuries of fossil fuel supply, there will not be peak of fossil fuel.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource. There is no way there can not be a peak. Hubbert "concluded that no finite resource could sustain exponential growth. At some point, the rate of extraction will have to peak and then decline until the resource is exhausted."
Many countries have already experienced fossil fuel production peaks. The UK hit peak coal in 1913. Since then, production has fallen from 287m tons to 15m tons today. The same thing will eventually happen to China and all of the other coal producing nations. Fossil fuels are a finite resource; there are no new fossil fuels.
some pro-tips, friends (Score:2, Informative)
1: Maya people, Maya culture, the Maya. Mayan is the language, written or spoken. ONLY the language, written or spoken. Mayan = Language
2: "The Maya collapsed" makes poor shorthand for: "The Late Classic Maya period evidenced major demographic shifts from large cities to smaller communities and southern city centers to nothern city centers, with strong continuity of material culture, daily practice, structures of governance, language, and genetic population, although some southern city centers experienced depopulation not unlike current conditions in downtown Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and perhaps a hundred other city centers in the U.S. as a response to shifts in resources, industries, and economic structures." See the work of: Scott Fedick, Rosemary Joyce, Jim Aimers, Patricia McAnany, Quetzil Castaneda, John Henderson, Marvin Cohodas...
3: Contemporary scholarly literature on "collapse" focuses on mining the past for either cautionary tales or modes of resilience. Either way, scholars are in agreement that 1) the transformations in the current climate are occurring at an unprecedented rate, 2) the impacts of globalization are felt across human society at an unprecedented scale, and 3) current human behaviors and trajectories (nuclear armament, biological transformations, global warming, etc.) put us at far greater risk, as a species, than any other scenario experienced in human history. See the work of: Jared Diamond, Norman Yoffee, Joseph Tainter, J.Brett Hill, Christopher Fisher, Terry Hunt, Arthur Mol, Alan Robock...
4: "humankind" not "mankind". Unless you are literally discussing only (slightly less than) 50% of the world's population.
5: Although there are heated anthropological debates on whether "stages" of society are valid semantics or metrics, by no standard was the collection of pre-Contact Maya city states ever an "empire".
signed,
your friendly neighborhood archaeologist
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:4, Informative)
The price of oil is near a record high in inflation-adjusted real terms, not nominal terms. Inflation, which has been running 2 to 3 percent annual for several years, has nothing to do with the skyrocketing oil prices. Oil is spiking because the fragile supply chain can no longer respond to supply disruptions. Under these circumstances even the threat of war with Iran is sufficient to cause the price to spike.
As rising oil prices threaten global economic growth and the fragile American recovery, gold is spiking and copper is plummeting. Gold is the traditional safe haven for poor economic times while demand for copper is driven by economic activity. Both are being driven by oil prices in the opposite direction. Let me reemphasize: none of this has anything to do with inflation which is running at 2 to 3%.