environment India Politics: archaeology history monsoons sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 9: Great God a’Mighty, That’s Moose Turd Pie!
More on the Harappans, this time from the Calcutta Telegraph:
“The link between a weakening monsoon and the fate of the Harappan civilisation should now be considered as settled,” said Ronojoy Adhikari, a physicist with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, a research team member.
“We can now almost rule out every other hypothesis that has ever been proposed for the decline of urbanism in the Harappan heartland,” said Adhikari, who used statistical tools to analyse changing urban patterns in the region from 7000 BC to 500 BC.
Adhikari and his colleagues from Pakistan, Romania, the UK, and the US combined evidence from archaeology, geology, and satellite photos to develop a chronology of landscape changes in the region spanning nearly 10,000 years.
Their analysis shows that the emergence of settlements coincided with a steady weakening of the monsoon that began about 5,000 years ago. The Harappans took advantage of a window in time during which a weakening monsoon encouraged settlements.
“It was a kind of a Goldilocks civilisation,” said Liviu Giosan, a geologist and principal of the study at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US. “During periods of heavy rains, the floods were too wild for people to settle near rivers, it was too dangerous.”
As the monsoon rains weakened, a gradual decrease in the intensity of floods stimulated the intensive agriculture and encouraged urbanisation about 4,500 years ago. But the continued decline in monsoon rainfall began to drive people to wetter regions upstream and eastward.
“As rivers became increasingly drier, going east became an escape route,” Giosan told The Telegraph. The archaeological record shows that settlements shifted eastward, but the region did not support crop surpluses that the Harappans had enjoyed in their river valleys.
“They forgot their (Harappan) script, and concentrated on survival,” Giosan said.
Archaeologists believe it might have been during these times of decline that the Harappan civilisation developed one of its great legacies — the double-cropping system with kharif and rabi crop rotations that survives in the subcontinent even today.
Generic…but good! Sent May 30:
While differences outweigh similarities in any comparison of our own industrialised civilisation with that of the ancient Harappans, there is much to be learned from the emerging story of a vibrant urban culture that met its doom in the forces of environmental transformation.
The climate crisis that now threatens us is of our own creation; our rapid and unthinking consumption of fossil fuels has unleashed an essentially instantaneous shift away from the relative climatic calm of the past ten or twelve thousand years, to a new state of increasing extremity, violence and irregularity. One wonders if the Harappan citizens (like so many of us modern humans) assumed that the forces of nature are inherently benign? Did they avoid thinking about their vanishing monsoons until it was too late for their cities to survive?
Will future archeologists similarly speculate on our culture’s fate in the aftermath of a runaway greenhouse effect?
Warren Senders
environment India Politics: denialists history sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 8: The Indus Near!
The slow eastward migration of monsoons across the Asian continent initially supported the formation of the Harappan civilization in the Indus valley by allowing production of large agricultural surpluses, then decimated the civilization as water supplies for farming dried up, researchers reported Monday. The results provide the first good explanation for why the Indus valley flourished for two millennia, sprouting large cities and an empire the size of contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, then dwindled away to small villages and isolated farms.
The Harappan civilization, named after its largest city, Harappa along the upper Indus River, evolved beginning about 5,200 years ago and reached its height between 4,500 and 3,900 years ago, stretching across what is now Pakistan, northwest India and Eastern Afghanistan. An urban society with large cities, a distinctive style of writing and extensive trade that reached as far as Mesopotamia, the society accounted for about 10% of the Earth’s population at its height and rivaled Egypt in its power. Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, however, the Harappans did not attempt to develop irrigation to support agriculture. Instead, they relied on the annual monsoons, which allowed the accumulation of large agricultural surpluses — which, in turn, allowed the creation of cities. The civilization was largely forgotten by history until the 1920s, when researchers finally began studying it in depth.
OK, it’s a bit of a stretch, but it felt good to write this. Sent May 29:
The ancient Harappans had it good for a long time. The annual monsoons provided ample water for their crops, ensuring food enough to sustain their civilization for well over a millennium. What did the Harappan people think when the seasonal rains began to get irregular? Were priests lavishly paid to perform elaborate incantations in the hopes of restoring the no-longer-idyllic climate? Did traveling storytellers tell their listeners that everything would be just fine, that the monsoons had always been undependable? Was there a bitterly polarized political standoff between those who recognized that things were changing and those who steadfastly refused to accept the facts?
Of course, their culture was regional, not global — and their demise was not self-triggered through profligate consumption of fossil fuels. But future anthropologists will surely puzzle over industrial civilization’s apathetic and uncomprehending response to global climate change. Are we all Harappans today?
Warren Senders
environment: economics media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 7: Well, I Guess You “Win” That Round.
Peter Passell offers a well-constructed argument in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Climate change, we are often told, is everyone’s problem. And without a lot of help containing greenhouse gas emissions from rapidly growing emerging market countries (not to mention a host of wannabes), the prospects of avoiding disaster are small to nil.
Now you tell us, retort policymakers in the have-less countries: How convenient of you to discover virtue only after two centuries of growth and unfettered carbon emissions.
Since you were the ones to get us into this mess, it’s your job to get us out. (The United States’ what-me-worry posture on climate change does not, of course, make the West’s efforts to co-opt the moral high ground any more convincing.)
This clash of wills is a bit more nuanced than that, but not much. Almost all the net growth in greenhouse gas emissions for the last two decades – and more than half the total emissions today – is coming from the developing world.
What’s more, most of the cheap opportunities for reducing emissions are to be found in the same countries. But as a matter of equity, it’s hard to argue with “you’ve had your turn, now it’s ours.” And it’s equally hard to see how the stalemate will be resolved before the world goes to hell in a plague of locusts (in some places, literally).
The comments are full of stupid denialists who have not, apparently, taken the trouble to read the article. Shocked, I tell you. Shocked. Sent May 28:
Any approach to an equitable assignment of responsibility for mitigating the impact of climate change is doomed to fail as long as citizens of the developed world find it easier to reject the existence of the greenhouse effect entirely. In the world’s poorest and least developed countries, climate-change denialism is an unaffordable luxury; it is only the economically privileged who are free to indulge in careless wishful thinking under the guise of “skepticism.”
Ask any rural agriculturist whether the climate has changed; the answer will be immediate and unequivocal. An Indian farmer facing the consequences of a vanishing monsoon is immune to the persuasions of a petroleum-sponsored news program.
Yes, poor countries need to invest in economic growth along with sustainable technology — but rich countries cannot claim moral ascendancy as long as their citizens prefer to reject the evidence of science in favor of thinly disguised arguments of convenience.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics idiots responsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 5: It Wasn’t Me Who Made Him Fall / No, You Can’t Blame Me At All…
The Worcester Telegram (MA) runs an AP story on the squabbling teenagers of the international community:
BONN, Germany — Another round of U.N. climate talks closed Friday without resolving how to share the burden of curbing man-made global warming, mainly because countries don’t agree on who is rich and who is poor.
China wants to maintain a decades-old division between developed and developing countries, bearing in mind that, historically, the West has released most of the heat-trapping gases that scientists say could cause catastrophic changes in climate.
But the U.S. and Europe insisted during the two-week talks in Bonn that the system doesn’t reflect current economic realities and must change as work begins on a new global climate pact set to be completed in 2015.
“The notion that a simple binary system is going to be applicable going forward is no longer one that has much relevance to the way the world currently works,” U.S. chief negotiator Jonathan Pershing said.
Fools. Sent May 26:
If there’s anything more depressing than the continual accumulation of bad news on climate change, it’s the endless cycle of avoidance and denial on the part of the world’s richest nations. For decades we’ve watched the same spectacle: those countries which have prospered economically through their profligate consumption of fossil fuels are also the ones resisting any moves toward responsibility for the messes they’ve created. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest nations — also, of course, the smallest contributors to the planetary greenhouse effect — are the good citizens of the international community, committing themselves to further reductions in CO2 emissions even as the United States dithers and blusters.
Coupled with this is the predictable chorus of catcalls directed at those who point out the obvious fact that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. The first president Bush once stated, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” Why not?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists ecologies idiots media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 25: The Pitter-Patter Of Little Feet
The Boston Herald (my local Murdoch rag) runs an article from the Seattle Times on a problem with animals:
SEATTLE — As climate change transforms their habitat, some animals are already on the move. But a new analysis from the University of Washington warns that many species won’t be able to run fast enough to survive a warming world.
On average, about 9 percent of the Western Hemisphere’s mammals migrate too slowly to keep pace with the rapid climate shifts expected over the next century, says the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In some areas, including parts of the Appalachian Mountains and the Amazon basin, nearly 40 percent of mammals may be unable to reach safe haven in time.
They’ll never print this one in a million years, but it was fun to write. Sent May 15:
If the thousands of mammal species whose slowly-changing migratory patterns put them at risk of extinction just knew that climate change is a hoax engineered by a worldwide conspiracy of scientists and liberal environmentalists, it would undoubtedly make them feel much better about the loss of their irrecoverable habitats.
But only humans are susceptible to the misdirection practiced by conservative news networks, which means that those endangered animals will just have to get used to their newly inhospitable ecological niches, or die. Ultimately, though, it’s not just regional and local ecosystems that are being transformed, but the entire planet. That’s what “climate change” means — global, not local; long-term, not short-term — and the implications of the University of Washington study should be a wake-up call for any still living in the denialist dreamland.
Humans are mammals, too. Where will we go when our habitats will no longer sustain us?
Warren Senders
Ha ha! The joke’s apparently on me. They printed it. And boy oh boy did it attract a fusillade of stupidity in the comments.
environment Politics: anarchy Barack Obama scientific consensus sustainability Tar Sands
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 21: Tangled Up In Blue
James Hansen is (justifiably) shrill:
GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
I revere Hansen, but I am not so certain about the phrase “game over.” Sent May 10:
Scientists are not known for their extreme language, so when a respected (and unjustly maligned) authority like James Hansen uses words like “apocalyptic” it should be a huge flashing warning light for the rest of us. But “game over for the climate” carries a host of misleading implications.
Earth’s climate is not a sport, and the human species isn’t going to get another chance in next year’s playoffs. Neither is it a video game; we’re not going to yawn, stretch, get another handful of chips, and begin again. When we hear Dr. Hansen’s phrase, we need to imagine a planet-wide version of the football riots in Egypt that killed nine people and injured thousands earlier this year.
Recovering from the inevitable consequences of our profligate consumption of fossil fuels will take hundreds of years; halting the potential disasters likely by mid-century will demand civilizational transformations.
This is not a game.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: 350 energy use habits sustainability
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 15: The Biggest Bankruptcy…
The Barre/Montpelier Times-Argus (VT) writes about “Connecting The Dots”:
Thus, volunteers in Waitsfield will be cleaning up debris along the Mad River left by Tropical Storm Irene. It is part of what 350.org is calling Climate Impacts Day. At the same time, villagers in Pakistan have participated in demonstrations showing their understanding that cataclysmic floods that destroyed vast regions in Pakistan over the past two years are also a manifestation of the changing climate.
The climate change movement is focusing broadly on fossil fuel industries and new projects for expanded exploitation of fossil fuels. It is the burning of fossil fuels, after all, that has heated up the atmosphere to a degree that extreme weather events are spreading devastation across the globe. Drought in Texas and Mexico, floods in Vermont and Pakistan, hurricanes, tornadoes, rising ocean levels, destruction of habitats — Climate Impacts Day has much to consider.
The climate crisis cannot be addressed without confronting the fossil fuel industry, which has billions of dollars at stake in the coal they hope to mine and the oil they hope to extract. Many current controversies grow out of industry’s determination to make use of new sources of hydrocarbons, including oil from tar sands in Alberta, coal from the American West and natural gas from shale formations underground in Pennsylvania, New York, Wyoming and elsewhere.
This is a fairly generic better-get-our-shit-together-soon type of letter. Sent May 5:
Industrialized civilization’s gleeful consumption of fossil fuels over the past century or so is turning out to be more expensive than any of us anticipated. Like teenagers turned loose with our parents’ credit cards, we’ve racked up enormous bills with no thought of paying them.
While we’ve long been aware of the health and environmental impacts of coal and oil extraction (factors never included in price calculations), the long-term costs of carbon-based fuel are only now becoming apparent. As human-caused global climate change emerges as an imminent threat to agriculture, infrastructure, and regional environments everywhere on the planet, we are faced with the necessity of transforming our energy economy, mitigating the damage we cannot prevent, and finding ways to restore equilibrium to the planetary climate system. It’s going to be expensive and inconvenient — but we have no choice if we are to bequeath a livable Earth to our posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: scientific literacy sustainability
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 14: Got Two Reasons Why I Cry
The Decorah Newspapers of Winnishek County, Iowa run a bit of advocacy for the 350.org “connect the dots” action. Good for them:
Across the planet now we see ever more flood, ever more drought, ever more storms. People are dying, communities are being wrecked – the impacts we’re already witnessing from climate change are unlike anything we have seen before.
Every time we pick up the newspaper and read about another record-breaking natural disaster, it becomes increasingly clear that climate change is not a future problem – it’s happening right now.
But because the globe is so big, it’s hard for most people to see that it’s all connected. That’s why, Saturday May 5, we will “Connect the Dots” starting at the Decorah Court House.
A revision of the letter for yesterday, which was also sent May 4 (putting me 10 days ahead):
Robust and enduring responses to the burgeoning greenhouse effect must begin with understanding and awareness — without the long-term perspective that allows us to imagine centuries in the future, climate strategies are doomed to fall off our collective radar screens.
Combating climate change doesn’t require a “new Manhattan project” or a “new Apollo program,” although climatology will surely be one of the most important scientific fields of this millennium. While the atomic bomb was an absolute secret until it fell on Hiroshima, successful climate technologies must be transparent and accessible to all. While there was little ordinary citizens could do for the race to the moon (beyond sending pennies to NASA), preparation for global warming’s consequences has to happen in our daily lives, not just in the top echelons of government.
But it all starts with connecting the dots between extreme weather and global climate change. Let’s get to work.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: analogies sustainability
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 13: Ain’t No Place A Man Can Hide
The Barnstable Patriot discusses the ways climate change is affecting Cape Cod, Massachusetts’ own vacation paradise:
Climate change is costing Cape Codders. It is eating at our shorelines, causing storm surges to overrun our beaches and houses. It is raising the price of our homeowner’s insurance. Our vulnerable sandy habitation, 10 miles wide, is part of a global system of weather that affects us locally, according to four experts who spoke at a climate change forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters at the Harwich Community Center April 28.
The takeaway message is that while belief in climate change is falling, the reality of it is increasing via accumulated science from real events, according to Dr. Eric Davidson, executive director of the Woods Hole Research Center, which looks at climate science from the Amazon to the Arctic. Davidson warned that hard facts prove the dangers of rising global warming. He said that since the world focused its attention on this issue at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, emissions have been lowered in some nations, but by and large, little has been accomplished.
Unless we mitigate, adapt and change now, Davidson said, there will be increased suffering from heat, violent weather extremes, famine, drought and flooding, all of which, data collected, measured and sifted over time show, will increase exponentially. He added that actuarial information from insurance companies supports the data.
Describing global warming as the “parked car effect,” Davidson said that heat from the sun comes through the window, but in re-radiating back out it becomes trapped, heating up the car. The earth’s atmosphere is the same, trapping rising methane, carbon dioxide and other gases from fossil fuel use in a big puffy blanket of molecules that prevent the heat from getting back through the “car window.” Since Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others have been keeping records, from 1960 to now carbon dioxide has increased from 320 parts per million to 380 parts per million. (The Arab oil embargo of 1973 diminished greenhouse gas emissions briefly by lowering usage.) Davidson says that La Nina and a sun spot cycle actually are cooling the planet somewhat now, but when the solar cycle changes and we enter El Nino, warming will accelerate. Best scenario, the Cape will have a mid-Atlantic-states climate in the future; worst, a climate like South Carolina’s.
This is a generic letter, but one that makes a useful point. I’m going to do a few more on this theme today (May 4) if I get the time.
We often hear that combating climate change will require a “new Manhattan project” or a “new Apollo program.” But both of these analogies are inexact. America’s development of the atomic bomb was kept under wraps until the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — but successful climate technologies must be transparent and accessible to all. While the race to the moon was no secret, there was little ordinary citizens could do beyond sending pennies to NASA — but preparation for global warming’s consequences has to happen in our daily lives, not just in the top echelons of government.
Mounting a robust and enduring response to the burgeoning greenhouse effect is not in itself a goal, like making an explosion or returning safely from the moon. Rather, it is an essential transformation in the way we collectively understand our responsibilities to the environment and to our posterity. If we are to survive and prosper in the coming centuries, our species and our civilization must change our focus to the long term. And, perhaps paradoxically, we’ve got no time to waste.
Warren Senders
Education environment: sustainability timescale timespan wisdom
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 1: Have Another Hit, Babe…
Walter and Nan Simpson have an excellent piece in the Buffalo News. Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:
Earth Day is more than celebrating the little things we do to protect the environment. It’s time to look more broadly at environmental policy and take our planet’s pulse.
Are we doing enough to protect nature and endangered species and reduce air and water pollution? Are we maximizing the green jobs and public health benefits of environmental protection? Are we rapidly developing new green technologies to compete with global green export leaders like China and Germany?
Daring to answer these questions honestly is difficult. We all have our own priorities and problems. We are endlessly distracted by cellphones, computers, video games, hundreds of TV channels, advertising and shopping. We lead busy lives, detached from nature.
Few people want to be troubled by “inconvenient truths” that require significant action and sacrifice. Besides, polluting industries and their friends constantly reassure us there’s no problem. Case in point is the 1,000- pound polar bear in the room — climate change — the most serious environmental problem ever.
More like this, please. Sent April 22:
The flotsam and jetsam of our chaotic information environment can distract us from attending to the environment that really matters. While more and more people are connecting the dots between extreme weather and the burgeoning greenhouse effect, there are an awful lot of people who believe what they’ve been told: there is no crisis; it’s all a fabrication of the so-called “liberal media”; it’s all an excuse for environmentalists to raise our taxes, etc., etc., etc.
But the problem goes beyond the preening megalomaniacs of right-wing radio. The transient, helter-skelter nature of our media conveys an equally misleading message: that the 24-hour news cycle is the only one that really matters. The timespans of Earth move far more slowly; if we are to restore equilibrium to our troubled world, we must learn once again to think in the long term. There is no wisdom in a two-minute attention span.
Warren Senders