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."
Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Funny)
They hadn't yet mastered their world woth "cap and trade" or the Prius.
That's why they were doomed, and we are assured.
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The gist of the article is that a succession of droughts over several years meant that they no longer had enough water to support their population numbers. Which caused resource wars between different city states, resulting in the self destruction of the civilisation.
Now, for sure, droughts are not that in frequent an occurrence in the current era, and AGW will change the areas that are affected by droughts. But most of the developed wold won't care because they aren't in the worst areas, and it's mostly po
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Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet mankind's ability to wage war over resources hasn't diminished one bit.
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Well for all the crying over pollution, if anything this story should remind us that "mother" nature is a raw knuckled bitch when she wants to be.
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Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked. Add in the fact that bio-diesel forms of fuel are up and coming, and we will have no shortage of fuel sources for the foreseeable future.
This is only partly true. It just softens the peak a lot. The theory still stands, what was debunked is the theory that peak oil means running out. We will not run out of oil, but the price will still rise, and it will get very high. This also means the wars will still happen.
It's not racism.
It's indifference and self-centeredness.
Don't forget imperialism
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.
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Imbecile.
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.
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Which has nothing whatsoever to do with peak oil, only with mostly deliberate misunderstandings of the term. Even alternative and much harder ways of getting liquid oil (shale, from coal etc) are something else. It was always about mineral oil and not about peak energy.
It's not useless it just doesn't mean what many (apparently including yourself) pretend it means. It's like calling the beige box under the desk the "hard drive" and the thing with pixels you look at "the co
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:4, Interesting)
This is only partly true. It just softens the peak a lot.
Nah. At the current levels of energy consumption, natural gas from fraking alone satisfies all energy needs for the next 150 years. The technology for converting large fleets to liquid gas is already available. Personal autos will get there as an afterthought.
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Interesting)
natural gas from fraking alone satisfies all energy needs for the next 150 years.
I doubt it. The average American consumes about 250 kWh per day. [cam.ac.uk] Natural gas accounts for something like 20% of that. Also, energy need is not constant, it will grow over the next 150 years because the population will grow. You can't just take total potential supply and divide it by the existing consumption, when demand is constantly rising.
Where does this 150 year figure come from anyway? The last time someone claimed 100 years, it turned out to be bogus: [slate.com]
By the same logic, you can claim to be a multibillionaire, including all your "probable, possible, and speculative resources."
Assuming that the United States continues to use about 24 tcf per annum, then, only an 11-year supply of natural gas is certain. The other 89 years' worth has not yet been shown to exist or to be recoverable.
Even that comparably modest estimate of 11 years’ supply may be optimistic. Those 273 tcf are located in reserves that are undrilled, but are adjacent to drilled tracts where gas has been produced. Due to large lateral differences in the geology of shale plays, production can vary considerably from adjacent wells.
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That's very interesting, but the main issue with that is "at the current levels". The trend is ever increasing energy consumption. Even if the US, Japan and Europe cut their energy consumption by 50%, there'd still be 6 billion people trying to get up to our levels of consumption.
So, if we reduce our levels by those 50%, that'd extend the coverage to 300 years. But then you'd have to
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That's very interesting, but the main issue with that is "at the current levels". The trend is ever increasing energy consumption. Even if the US, Japan and Europe cut their energy consumption by 50%, there'd still be 6 billion people trying to get up to our levels of consumption.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not as clear-cut as you're making out, here. In fact, worldwide energy use actually decreased in 2009, by just over 1%, due to the economic downturn. And while the US population is growing, energy consumption per capita has actually decreased over the last 20 years.
We will have to find alternatives eventually, but it's doable, we have time, and the transition can happen over time. We don't need a New World Government to take control of everything to do it.
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:4, Interesting)
What a bunch of nonsense. There's a limited amount of oil in the ground anyway, even if shale oil increases the amount. That changes absolutely nothing about peak oil, except perhaps by postponing it by a little bit.
Also, things like shale oil are energy intensive to extract. Oil is only convenient because so far getting it has been easy. If you need to spend 2 gallons to dig up and progress 1 gallon, then it doesn't matter how much there is.
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Insightful)
Last friday Brent Crude Oil was trading at $126/barrel [bloomberg.com]. This is near the all time high in modern history [wtrg.com]. We are already at the point where oil supply has become much less responsive to the price and price spikes are commonplace. It's a curious time for somebody to be declaring peak oil "debunked".
Oil is finite and the price of oil is getting exponentially more expensive as was predicted decades ago. Meanwhile, solar technology has been benefiting from a Moore's Law rate of advancement [oreilly.com] and the price of solar energy is plummeting exponentially. Even without cap-and-trade, the price of solar energy is projected to achieve grid parity by the end of this decade. Given prevailing trends, we can expect that people will use energy to make petrochemicals synthetically from the carbon in the air, using Green Freedom [nytimes.com] or some other such technology in the next 20 years.
Solar is the power source of the near future. If we embrace that fact now we can begin to adapt and avoid a huge amount of economic dislocation and suffering. Or we can get dragged into the future kicking and screaming and burdening the human race with massive ecological damage.
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Oil priced in gold is steady, and BELOW AVERAGE [barchart.com] for the last100+ years.
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I was given a link to the relative "values" of gold and oil recently over at G+ Obviously, the problem here in the US is, our money is losing value. And, the problem in Europe is, the euro is also losing value. I think I want my boss to start paying me in Chinese currency - what is that, yen? He may laugh at me today, but as time goes on, he'll laugh less and less.
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%.
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While inflation is officially running at a couple of percent the important stuff like food staples, electricity, and gasoline are going up closer to 10%, at least here in Canada. Shit, in the last week, locally, gas went from $1.12 to $1.28 a litre. As most everything depends on gas and diesel for transport etc I hate to think what groceries are going to cost in the near future. Still the iphone is twice as good so it's calculated as dropping in price by 50%
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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.
OMG that was so ignorant it makes the rest of your post entirely irrelevant. That government statistic of 2 to 3 percent that you have quoted doesn't reflect any sort of reality, and certainly not even close to the case regarding the E3 and global commodity markets. The saber rattling over Iran is serving the same purpose as fake "uprisings" in the middle east that somehow seem to blow up natural gas pipelines multiple times: It's done intentionally to drive up prices. But the single most significant fa
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I see. In your view the magic mystery inflation is hiding and it only shows up in select highly volatile commodities like oil. We can't see inflation in "government statistics" like CPI. We can't see large inflation in independent metrics like the BPP [mit.edu]. We can't see inflation in agricultural commodities or base metals, both of which are cheaper than they were a year ago. But in the minds of some those facts don't "reflect reality" anymore than those "fake 'uprisings' in the middle east" [wikipedia.org].
Might I sugges
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The yuan is pegged to the dollar, so no you wouldn't want that. If the Chinese were to unpeg it from the dollar's value, its value would spike, hastening the coming Chinese collapse, and then would crash.
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If and only if we can create an efficient means of power storage
We already have one: Pumped storage. [cam.ac.uk] The existing pumped storage systems are 75% efficient, and scientists think they can make future ones that are 90%+ efficient. You don't even need land: "Thinking further outside the box, one could imagine getting away from lakes and reservoirs, putting half of the facility in an underground cham- ber. A pumped-storage chamber one kilometre below London has been mooted."
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Pumped storage is very useful for covering peaks because it can be run up to full capacity in under a minute. Peaks are far more of a problem than base load for nearly every electricity network. That's what makes even things that are very expensive per MW viable. When you only need 75MW that expensive little wind or solar farm can still be up to ten times the cost per MW of a coal fi
Shale is even worse than you think (Score:3)
The in-ground production experiments designed to attempt to drive down the price result in a lot of acidic material and a lot of expansion - so you get acid in the ground wate
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Your information is out of date.
Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked. .
That's a ridiculous overstatement: shale oil makes an insignificant difference to the concept of peak oil. It might push it back a few decades: if you're a market analyst that can't think beyond the next bonus, maybe that makes a difference to you. For everyone else, it's just a question of when.
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Scroll up to tmosley's post. Rather than experiencing all time highs in oil prices, we are experiencing all time lows in the value of the dollar. It's called "inflation" I believe. Historically, that has been a problem with all fiat money systems.
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Inflation only matters if the price of stuff is going up without wages also going up. When I first went to work in the mid '70s I could buy about 5 gallons of gas for an hour of work at minimum wage. I now make about 3 times minimum wage and can buy about 4 gallons for an hour of skilled work. I'd hate to try to survive on minimum wage now.
This is Canada which should be similar to other places
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:5, Insightful)
Your information is out of date. Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked.
Nonsense. There's nothing new about shale oil. It's been known about and extracted in small quantities for centuries. It's extremely inefficient to extract. The very fact that the oil industry has begun to turn to that old crap source of oil is a demonstration that we're passing the peak. Shale oil is a source used on the way down the slope, after the peak, when high oil prices make it worthwhile.
Bio-fuels are outside of peak il theory, but are not a solution to it. The amount of vegetable matter that you need to produce the massive amounts of oil that humans use, would take up all the worlds arable land,leaving us nowhere to produce food for the every expanding population.
As the droughts have affected Saskatchewan and US mid-west farmers over the past few years, I fail to see how "it's mostly poor black people affected."
Broaden your fucking horizons. World news doesn't mean the 50 states. Think Africa.
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The amount of vegetable matter that you need to produce the massive amounts of oil that humans use, would take up all the worlds arable land,leaving us nowhere to produce food for the every expanding population.
Indeed. Sustainable energy without the hot air [cam.ac.uk] contains the figures. It doesn't look good even for the "promising" plants:
For comparison, world oil consumption is 80 million barrels per day, which, shared between six billion people, is 23 kWh/d/p. So even if all of Africa were covered with jatropha plantations, the power produced would be only one third of world oil consumption.
The only thing that seems potentially viable is algae grown in water enriched with co2 captured from industrial plants. But obviously that requires some advanced carbon capture technology. It would also require land, though not as much as other biofuel ideas.
What about algae?
Algae are just plants, so everything I’ve said so far applies to algae. Slimy underwater plants are no more efficient at photosynthesis than their ter- restrial cousins. But there is one trick that I haven’t discussed, which is standard practice in the algae-to-biodiesel community: they grow their algae in water heavily enriched with carbon dioxide, which might be col- lected from power stations or other industrial facilities. It takes much less effort for plants to photosynthesize if the carbon dioxide has already been concentrated for them.
In a sunny spot in America, in ponds fed with concentrated CO2 (concentrated to 10%), Ron Putt of Auburn University says that algae can grow at 30 g per square metre per day, producing 0.01 litres of biodiesel per square metre per day. This corresponds to a power per unit pond area of 4 W/m2 – similar to the Bavaria photovoltaic farm.
If you wanted to drive a typical car (doing 12 km per litre) a distance of 50 km per day, then you’d need 420 square metres of algae-ponds just to power your car; for comparison, the area of the UK per person is 4000 square metres, of which 69 m2 is water (figure 6.8).
Please don’t forget that it’s essential to feed these ponds with concentrated carbon dioxide. So this technology would be limited both by land area – how much of the UK we could turn into algal ponds – and by the availability of concentrated CO2, the capture of which would have an energy cost (a topic discussed in Chap- ters 23 and 31). Let’s check the limit imposed by the concentrated CO2. To grow 30 g of algae per m2 per day would require at least 60 g of CO2 per m2 per day (because the CO2 molecule has more mass per carbon atom than the molecules in algae).
If all the CO2 from all UK power stations were captured (roughly 212 tons per year per person), it could service 230 square metres per person of the algal ponds described above – roughly 6% of the country. This area would deliver biodiesel with a power of 24 kWh per day per person, assuming that the numbers for sunny America apply here.
A plausible vision? Perhaps on one tenth of that scale? I’ll leave it to you to decide.
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Debunked? Um. No. I understand that there's a spate of little happy-talk articles out now in the mainstream media. If you believe them, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. For a numerate discussion of what we're facing, start with the book referenced here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil [wikipedia.org].
Peak oil is complicated, and those new to the idea think it's all about quantity of oil left. It's a bit more than that. It's about being able to produce enough oil that's energetically and economically pro
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Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked.
- yeah, like the concept of gravity has been debunked thanks to the hot air balloons.
The simple fact is that as long as people can get their discount crap at the local stores, they really don't give a damn about the poor and starving in any nation.
It's not racism.
It's indifference and self-centeredness.
- it's called pragmatism and life.
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shale oil? there's only a few billion barrels of that. a few months' supply at current US consumption.
if you're talking about 'oil shale', there's about 2 trillion barrels' worth of that stuff in CO and WY, but it isn't even oil. it's a waxy nasty precursor to oil that has to be strip mined, cleaned and cooked under pressure, then processed to create syncrude. 3 tons of rock makes 1 barrel of syncrude.
think we can produce 15 million bpd of that?
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And with our demand growing exponentially we have a problem.
It's not, AC. Not even close. In fact in the US, it growing slower than the population.
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US oil peaked in the early 1970s. North Sea oil peaked in the 90s. World oil production has been peaking since 2005. Saudia Arabia is probably peaking right now.
Yes there is/was more than one peak. Go read about Hubbert theory.
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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?
Re:Advanced as They Were (Score:4, Funny)
Wow Republicans need 9 steps? What a bunch of idiots. Al Gore did it in only 3:
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Gore depicted an unrealistic and frightening prediction of the future and has made money out of scamming idiots that buy into his tripe
FTFY
Oh, oops - never mind we won't take responsibility for that failed prediction [grida.no]! Obviously there's a lot of money to be made, considering a tiny nation like the Maldives is worth a $50 million payment [wordpress.com] just to get them to go along with the scam.
The South will rise again! (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
With the massive increase in severe tropical storms, the Yucatan will have some of the wettest weather in history, The Mayans will reemerge, and will take over the Americas again!
Not the South normally expected to rise...
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"The Mayans will reemerge, and will take over the Americas again!"
The new Mayan chief will be heard to ask, "What year is it?" Followed by, "Dang!"
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
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Served them right (Score:5, Funny)
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Driving hummers, flying all over the place spewing carbon out the wazoo. Fools.
So the truth is finally out. What ended the Mayans? The SUV.
Re:Served them right (Score:5, Funny)
Specifically, the Pontiac Aztek.
Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
This happened in Mesopotamia too. It's called "biological succession" - forest gives way to grassland which gives way to scrub which becomes desert. It happened all over Africa and Mesopotamia is now called Iraq. Environmental biology 101.
We haven't been screaming for people to take care of the soil, flora and fauna for nothing. But carry on.
Re:Duh. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thousands of years actuallty. As far back as the roman empire - or maybe even earlier then that - mankind has used crop rotation.
But as always, those that dont learn from history will repeat the mistakes. So its been forgotten many times.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
In different climates the biological succession works the other way. For instance, right now, in New England, if you leave bare rock undisturbed, it starts growing lichens. The lichens eventually trap enough material to make the wetter spots suitable for mosses which move in next. Then come the grasses, which turn the place into a field. Eventually, the field builds up enough soil that shrubs and pioneer tree species can show up. And finally, the larger canopy trees move in, and you have a forest again. This process actually happened over about 150 years, as the farming that used to happen in New England moved westward leaving land behind.
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In Virginia it's even faster. When I was a kid they cleared a piece of land for development. Then they stopped the process for a few years. By the time they were actually ready to break ground for construction some of the sapplings were 10 feet high. Maples are particularly aggressive there. If you don't clean your gutters for two years, 3 foot maples will sprout and thrive on the moist leaf litter.
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I live in Virginia, and there are grassy plots over a hundred years old (historically grazing land) that haven't accepted shrubs or trees thanks to thin topsoil.
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Here in the [US] Pacific Northwest too... You can have two inches moss/lichens in as little as two years.
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Taking care of the soil isn't going to prevent changes in the the tilt of the earth's axis [independent.co.uk].
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We haven't been screaming for people to take care of the soil, flora and fauna for nothing. But carry on.
We will!
We don't need to worry (Score:2)
Jared Diamond (Score:3, Insightful)
New? Wasn't this described in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond years ago?
They could move to Las Vegas! (Score:2)
They could move to Las Vegas! They have plenty of ... Wait http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4719473.stm [bbc.co.uk] No, they shouldn't go to Las Vegas.
Re:They could move to Las Vegas! (Score:5, Funny)
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They could move to Las Vegas! They have plenty of ... Wait http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4719473.stm [bbc.co.uk] No, they shouldn't go to Las Vegas.
"Right now, 6,000 people a month are moving to this valley because the weather is good, the taxes are low and there are plenty of jobs," she said.
Mr Van Ee laments that the town he arrived in some 20 years ago is now the fastest growing urban area in the country.
- Friday, 29 July 2005
Little did they know a couple years later their urban expansion problems would be solved. Who says Las Vegas isn't lucky :)
The Mayans were not "killed off" (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mayans are still there, living in the land their ancestors lived in. They were not "killed off". Any study that suggests they were "killed off" can be ignored as propaganda.
The Mayans made a transition from living in large, centralized cities to a more dispersed, less organized society. This is likely because their centralization was expensive and only supportable based on specific agricultural conditions and faith in their leaders to be able to sustain them. When those conditions changed, that faith could no longer be justified and the expense could no longer be afforded.
When your society is built on the idea of all-powerful mystic kings, then your society falls when the population loses faith in those kings' power.
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Ok, I'll bite. Why would there be motivation to spread propaganda about the Mayans being killed off?
Re:The Mayans were not "killed off" (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would there be motivation to spread propaganda about the Mayans being killed off?
See references to AGW, poor black people, and peak oil up above. Everybody has an agenda
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Ok, I'll bite. Why would there be motivation to spread propaganda about the Mayans being killed off?
Three incentives off the bat: protecting an ideological sunk cost, status signalling, and money/power.
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Those devious scientists!
And all along I thought they were warning us because they thought global warming would mess up the environment.
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Same can be said for the Romans, the Byzantines, Mongols, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and every other major collapsed empire that had thousands upon thousands in cities that were lost to time or to diaspora.
If my descendants live in a country that is no longer the United States of America, even if they live in the same geographical area as I live now or anywhere else within the extant borders, they're no longer Americans. Their nation and culture define that encompassing label, and if tha
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The Mayans are still there, living in the land their ancestors lived in. They were not "killed off". Any study that suggests they were "killed off" can be ignored as propaganda.
The Mayans made a transition from living in large, centralized cities to a more dispersed, less organized society.
And surely these changes were ordered, pacific and without bloodshed. Their culture survived, as did their way of life and society. In fact we do not need archeologists for learn anything about the Mayans, because we just can ask the contemporary Mayan scholars who know everything about their culture.
And there was neither famine nor infighting for the resources that suddenly had become scarce. And even better, from being an unsuccessful society with some degree of science and organization they became a bunc
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[Lots of oddly contentious strawman arguments deleted] ...
And now, since you are the one who brought the subject of AGW...
Nope. I didn't.
You might be better at discussions if you'd focus on what a guy said rather than complaining about stuff he didn't say. You'd probably be worse at communicating propaganda though, so I guess it depends on what you're trying to do.
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When asked, you just let tomhath [slashdot.org] answer for you (you have not given an alternative explanaition, so until then I will rightfully take it as that you agree with him). Anyway you are right that you don't explicity explained why this is "propaganda".
Anyway, you still have a few more rebuttals to answer (sorry, but just calling them names does not invalidate them).
I would like to know if you think that what happened to the Mayans is what you would like to happen (or would not care if it happened) to you.... as
Re:The Mayans were not "killed off" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Killed off" is a broadly accurate term. Nobody has ever suggested that 100% of the Mayan population died. It is sufficient that the vast majority of the Mayan population died while the rest were forced to abandon the ruins of their cities to eek out a primitive existence in the jungle.
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Centralization and organization are cheaper and more efficient except when they're not. When a farmer can't harvest enough for his family to eat, he isn't going to be too eager to save a share for his king.
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I should also specifically add that sacrificing lots of people to the gods is very expensive, in several different ways. Presumably, when the priests and kings weren't able to magically produce bountiful harvests, the populace gave up on them. Such an event would necessarily lead folks to be distrustful of priests and kings. And without an alternate model of centralized civilization, that leaves a more rural subsistence-oriented lifestyle as the remaining option.
Same thing (Score:2)
Took out Angkor Wat.
Climate Change: is there ANYTHING it can't do ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, a planetary climate change contributed to the fall of the Maya. Which just goes to prove a point: climate is NOT a fixed value, but a variable with a substantial-enough range to cause major ecological changes in relatively short periods of time. . . .
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Correlation, especially single variable correlation when the data is on an entirely different continent, doesn't imply causation.
Further the word 'optimal' in the phrase "Medieval Optimum" usually refers to temperatures in Europe. Whatever caused warmer temperatures in Europe might well create droughts in the Yucatan peninsula. Then again, it might not.
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Who said it was fixed?
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The biosphere sure is, human civilization, not so much. There is an optimum range for human civilizations.
Re:Climate Change: is there ANYTHING it can't do ? (Score:4, Insightful)
But in the face of a variable climate, surely the solution is the expand the optimum range for human civilizations - not decrease the liveable range in order to delay climate change?
That's what makes me think the AGW crowd is not "living in the real world." We can't keep the climate from changing! At this point, if AGW is right, it is too late to do anything and all those drastic measures being taken will not have any effect on the climate (which is what makes it sound like a religion, by the way). The only effect will be to transfer power to politicians and decrease society's technological base from where it could have been. Even if AGW is wrong, there better not be a scientist on Earth that believes the climate is going to be stable for the next 100,000 years.
So, my take is this: climate change is inevitable, AGW or otherwise. We should work as hard as possible to increase human technology so make the blows softer. The AGW crowd is working against that.
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If it is everywhere; wouldn't it be connected to everything?
How is that new? (Score:2)
Hasn't this been public knowledge for decades?
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Second parragraph (in essence, putting numbers to the "amount" of climate change):
That’s been posited for some time, but this report adds the twist that the change in question amounted to about a 40 percent drop in rainfall. Researchers argue that, if that’s indeed what set up the final blow, the Mayans succumbed to climate change that was much less severe than previously expected
Therefore (Score:2)
Human-influenced global warming is fake and Ron Paul is immediately president. Take THAT, Fartbongolibs.
Al Gore can save them. (Score:2, Funny)
If we can find a way to send Al back in time, he can save the Mayans from climate change. PLEASE find a way.
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If we can find a way to send Al back in time, he can save the Mayans from climate change. PLEASE find a way.
If that works with Al, then we can send the rest of the politicians back in time. Way back in time. Like before oxygen atmosphere time.
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so they can take credit for the oxygen atmosphere?
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Well, I was hoping they would just curl up and die, but since Politicians (like Zombies) seem indestructible, they probably would take credit for the oxygen in the atmosphere.
And then try to tax it.
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It didn't kill off the Mayans (Score:3)
We need to get off this planet. (Score:3, Insightful)
That way we can exploit other worlds. There are just too many people living here today. With 6 Billion plus people, how is it that we could not affect the global climate. Now whether that is a good thing or a bad is another story. I personally think the Earth could be a few degrees warmer. These liberals all want another ice age. Either way, it will work out in the end. If the climate changes, and we can no longer support everybody, that will mean there will just be less climate change, and the status quo will return. I just can't fathom why liberals want to do away with every modern convenience so that we can go back to the way things were 1000 years ago. I say fuck mother Earth. She hasn't done anything for us except give us earth quacks and typhoons. It is about time we started taking the fight to her. We need to probe deep into her bowls, so that we can extract all her juicy oil. Make her our bitch instead of the other way around. Plain and simple mother Earth will not respect humanity, unless we can shove her around a bit. Then she will show us her gapping chasms just waiting to be plumbed. Or we can just continue to be liberal whiners, and she will leave you for some other species, that isn't afraid to get down and dirty.
I
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just look at our current civilization (Score:3)
"New study"? It was published in 2001! (Score:2)
Some new study. It was "new" when it was first published in Science in 2001? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5520/1367.short [sciencemag.org]
This is one of many papers showing that 1. The Mayan empire was subject to a series of droughts that finally offed them, and 2. That variations of solar activities caused these droughts.
It doesn't "suggest" anything, it forcibly affirms it with tons of data to accompany it.
Advanced as they where (Score:2)
From TFA:
As our study suggests, the TCP rainfall reductions where not of catastrophic proportions,
Their proof-reading is the only catastrophic thing here. There's no "h" anywhere near "w" or "e" so it can't be a typo (unless they have a dvorak keyboard?)
This error didn't exist in the 1980 and 1990s, it seems to have started up more recently than that.
New study is old (Score:3)
Droughts occur frequently in this region, the Mayans had reservoirs but it wasn't enough. Most likely is that the population had grown during a wet period, then couldn't be sustained in a drought cycle. [google.com]
The 760 AD drought signaled the end of a 200 year ‘wet’ period in the Yucatan, during this time the cities prospered, but populations grew to such great numbers that agricultural production became over stretched.
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 experien
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A more likely scenario to me seems that the high priests promised that they could bring back the rains if they were able to give enough blood and living hearts to the Gods. Eventually, the people would rebel against this bloody treatment, and, after slaughtering the priest class for the lying mass murderers they were, abandon the temple complex
Re:frist (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, I have it on good credit that they died from complications brought about by copyright on maize by Cargill, pyramid design by Egypt and poor gold smelting practices licensed by Union Carbide.
It was being hassled by "the Man" that killed them in the end. Won't we ever learn?