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 Politics: carbon emissions corporate irresponsibility greenhouse gases
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 6: The Longest Moustache…
The Miami Herald runs an AP story from Neela Banerjee about our giant carbon-emission numbers:
WASHINGTON — Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide reached an all-time high last year, further reducing the chances that the world could avoid a dangerous rise in global average temperature by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, the energy analysis group for the world’s most industrialized states.
Global emissions of carbon-dioxide, or CO2, from fossil-fuel combustion hit a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes in 2011, according to the IEA’s preliminary estimates, an increase of 1 Gt, or 3.2 percent from 2010.
The burning of coal accounted for 45 percent of total energy-related CO2 emissions in 2011, followed by oil (35 percent) and natural gas (20 percent).
According to the vast majority of climatologists, the rapid rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of industrialization over the last 150 years has led to an increase in global average temperature by about 1 degree Celsius.
Yay, us. Sent May 27:
Most world record attainments are occasions for pride. The fastest, the strongest, the furthest, the most powerful. But the news that 2011 set a record for global carbon emissions is no cause for celebration.
It’s not just that post-industrial humans have pumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than ever before, but that we’ve known for decades about the likely consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect — thereby making 2011’s accomplishment a world record for willful ignorance as well as destructive pollution.
The huge quantities of greenhouse gases we’ve set loose indicate not just our burgeoning fossil-fuel consumption, but of our inability to clean up the waste products of our profligate lifestyle. Another landmark achievement: whether it’s turning oil into disposable plastic containers, or burning gasoline in our idling vehicles, we’re number one when it comes to converting the Carboniferous era’s ancient sunlight into toxic trash. Notify the Guinness Book of Records!
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: Bonn climate conference economic injustice economy
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 4: Yo-Ho-Ho And A Bottle Of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Romanee-Conti Grand Cru!
Well. Who could ever have expected this:
BONN, Germany — U.N. climate talks ran into gridlock Thursday as a widening rift between rich and poor countries risked undoing some advances made last year in the decades-long effort to control carbon emissions that scientists say are overheating the planet.
As so often in the slow-moving negotiations, the session in Bonn bogged down with disputes over technicalities. But at the heart of the discord was the larger issue of how to divide the burden of emissions cuts between developed and developing nations. Developing nations say the industrialized world – responsible for most of the emissions historically – should bear the brunt of the emissions cuts while developed nations want to make sure that fast-growing economies like China and India don’t get off too easy. China is now the world’s top polluter.
“There is a total stalemate,” said Artur Runge-Metzger, the chief negotiator for the European Union.
The negotiations in Bonn were meant to build on a deal struck in December in Durban, South Africa, to create a new global climate pact by 2015 that would make both rich and poor nations rein in emissions caused by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels. But on the next-to-last day of two weeks of talks there was little sign of progress, as different interpretations emerged on what, exactly, was agreed upon last year.
“There is distrust and there is frustration in the atmosphere,” Seyni Nafo, spokesman for a group of African countries, told The Associated Press.
Sociopaths. Sent May 25:
The sickness of America’s economy is uncannily mirrored by the sickness of the planet: the very wealthy and powerful resist regulation, deny responsibility for their actions, and spurn any policies that would impact their profitability.
On Wall Street, unregulated banks gamble money that never existed to begin with, turning to our government to bail out their losses, while at the Bonn climate conference, it’s the nations that triggered global climate change in the first place that are vehemently rejecting the kind of robust, systemic transformation that climate scientists tell us is essential for the survival and prosperity of our species in the coming centuries.
Just as “pirate capitalists” reward themselves for the destruction of our nation’s once vibrantly interdependent economy, great multinational oil corporations reap rich returns while plundering the ecological systems upon which all Earthly life depend. Economic and environmental injustice, it turns out, are one and the same.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture extreme weather media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 2: Howdja Like Them Apples?
The Ionia County Sentinel-Standard tells us about their local fruit growers, who’ve been having a rough time. Naturally, the article never uses a certain phrase that rhymes with “primate strange.” Read it and weep:
IONIA COUNTY, Mich. —
Michigan’s unseasonably warm winter and late April freeze means a near-total loss to many Ionia County growers of apples, peaches and other tree fruits.
“It’s been a severe year as far as all Michigan cherries, apples, plums, peaches,” said Alex Hanulcik of Hanulcik Farm Market and Hanulcik Pick-Your-Own Peach and Apple Orchards in Ionia. “It’s all pretty much gone across the state.”
More than half of Michigan’s apple crop, and possibly more, could be lost, according to The Packer, a news source for the fresh fruit and vegetable industry.
In southwest Michigan, damage to tree fruit was even more grim, although the extent won’t be known until early June.
Hanulcik estimated his loss at “approaching 100 percent.” Luckily the strawberries were only minimally damaged, but that is small comfort.
“When two-thirds of what you grow is gone, I’m dependent upon what little is left,” he said.
“I’ve been through a number of years, and I haven’t seen anything like it,” said Hanulcik, who has been farming since 1985. His grandparents started the business in 1936.
“People have told me this is similar to 1945, when it was a complete wipeout,” he added.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. Sent May 23:
It’s not just Michigan. New England’s fruit growers also confronted the possibility of crop devastation from severe and unpredictable weather. And it’s not just the United States, either. All over the world, farmers are confronting a dangerous new reality in which weather patterns that have been consistent for centuries are transforming faster than human agriculture and infrastructure can cope.
But in the USA, an anti-science political party has framed the phrase “climate change” in exclusively ideological terms, thereby impossibly hamstringing any public discussion of critical issues like the plight of Michigan’s orchards.
Scientists have predicted for years with ever-increasing accuracy that mounting atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will lead to unpredictable and extreme weather, and Ionia County fruit growers are confronting this new reality for themselves. No one on Earth can evade the effects of climate change, and American news media should no longer evade direct discussion of the issue.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 31: Sounds Pretty Fair And Balanced To Me….
The West Virginia Gazette-Journal has an editorial by some brave fellow who dares to speak the truth in the midst of Coal Country:
Last year, America suffered historic weather calamities: disastrous tornadoes, severe floods, extended drought, record-breaking snowfall, raging wildfires, etc. Federal agencies say $52 billion in property loss was inflicted, and more than 1,000 Americans died in weather ravages.
This year brought the warmest March ever known, breaking about 15,000 local U.S. heat records. Early tornadoes again left wreckage and death.
Scientists say the violent weather is solid evidence that fossil fuel fumes are girdling Planet Earth with greenhouse gases that produce global warming and climate change. Warmer air holds more moisture, producing more extreme storms.
A new study by Yale and George Mason university pollsters found that 70 percent of Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” Yale professor Anthony Laiserowitz commented: “People are starting to connect the dots.”
Read the comments for the full effect. Sent May 21:
On one side of the Great Climate Change Debate, we have almost every single scientific association on Earth. Their overwhelming consensus, built on the integrated results of thousands of different studies and research projects over the past five decades, is that climate change is real, it’s dangerous, human consumption of fossil fuels is a major factor, and doing something about it before it gets worse is both an economic and an environmental necessity.
On the other side, we have the oil-funded American Association of Petroleum Geologists along with a few other scientists (like Dr. Richard Lindzen, who still firmly believes the link between cigarettes and cancer is statistically inconclusive). We have conservative “think-tanks” like the Heartland Institute (recently famous for recklessly comparing environmentalists with mass murderers), a coterie of professional denialists whose voices are heard constantly in our broadcast and print media, and a major political party firmly opposed to science of every sort. Their interpretation of the data? There is no such thing as climate change; if there is, it’s not dangerous; if it’s dangerous, it’s not caused by humans; if it’s caused by humans, it’s too expensive to address. And anyway: Liberals! Socialism! Squirrel!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 29: Getting So Much Realer All The Time
The Ledger (Lakeland, FL) runs a piece by Charles Reynolds, addressing some implications — and taking a dig at the chuckleheads along the way.
Some people believe the concept of climate change, also called global warming, is a plot cooked up by tree-hugging liberals to get everyone else to stop treating planet Earth like a trash heap. But governments and multinational corporations worldwide don’t think climate change is a hoax.
Among corporations taking an active role in finding solutions for problems caused by ever-worsening weather patterns are Weyerhaeuser, DuPont, Boeing, Georgia-Pacific, Deutsche Telekom, Royal Dutch/Shell, Toyota and Ontario Power Generation. Hardly bastions of liberalism. And speaking of the flip side of altruism, the government of communist China is becoming increasingly concerned about the damage climate change is causing.
The organizations mentioned are, of course, worried about their bottom lines. It’s the world’s biologists, botanists and scientists who are distressed over the effects of climate change on hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals.
Sent in a rush, 5/19 – getting ready for the Flutes concert.
When confronted with the facts about climate change, denialists respond in one of several extremely predictable ways. By far the most popular is a mix of guilt-by-association and ad hominem attack, as in the endless attacks on the integrity of former Vice President Al Gore. Another “greatest hit” for self-styled skeptics is the argument from incredulity — “it must be impossible, because I don’t understand anything about science.” And, of course, we’re always going to hear from the tinfoil hat brigade, with their increasingly far-fetched conspiracy theories: “global warming is a hoax cooked up by socialists in order to enforce global redistribution of wealth from the hands of the job creators into the pockets of greedy climatologists,” or something like that.
Meanwhile, the researchers who are actually working in the field keep finding more information that suggests the problem is actually significantly more dangerous than had been previously thought. While warmer weather is excellent news for gardeners in the short term, the steady increases in planetary temperature are going to make feeding our civilization exponentially more difficult in the centuries to come — something which should (eventually) engage the attention of the denialists.
Would those who reject the validity of climate science be willing to sign insurance waivers, relinquishing any damages from the effects of global warming? Let’s see them put their money where their mouths are.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Bonn Conference corporate irresponsibility economics
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 28: We Don’t Deserve The White Hats
As usual, we’re the bad guys in this picture.
NEW DELHI: On the second day of the Bonn climate change negotiations, the US, the EU and other developed countries tried to stall discussions on whether the rich countries had met their obligations on reducing emissions and financing the poor countries. Many developed countries pushed for talks to take place only on a new single legal treaty that would wipe out all past and existing obligations.
The talks got stalled with developed countries opposing adoption of the agenda, which requires pending issues from the Bali Action Plan of 2009 to be addressed before negotiations on this parallel channel come to end this year. Under the Bali Action Plan, the developed countries, including the US, are required to increase their ambition levels to cut emissions.
It took me forever to find an article that catalyzed a letter today. Sent May 18:
There seems to be no impulse more powerful than the profit motive. Why else should the world’s richest nations continually hinder any move toward a sane international policy on global climate change? As multinational corporations take advantage of legal loopholes to exert ever more control over the political systems of the industrialized West, the notion that governments exist for the benefit of the governed seems increasingly naive.
As the climate crisis unfolds, we see a grotesque irony. Whether it’s actual obliteration in the form of rising ocean levels or the decimation of population from extreme weather disasters, there is no denying that the countries contributing the least to the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect are the ones sacrificing the most. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest polluters continue blocking progress toward a robust international policy on climate change. Apparently “sustainability” is apparently only desirable when it applies to their astronomical profit margins.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes centrism corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 27: You Say Yes, I Say No.
The Calgary Herald has a columnist named Brian Crowley, who is attempting to thread the centrist needle on climate.
The time has come to think differently about climate change.
For too long, the debate has been monopolized by two parties. One is almost religious, fervently believing in man-made climate change, and that only large changes in human behaviour can stave off disaster.
Their opponents argue that the science is uncertain, unsettled and inconclusive, and therefore, that no action is warranted until we possess that missing certainty.
I don’t agree with either camp. In most areas, there is only ever certainty of uncertainty. In other words, both those who believe certainty has been achieved and those who say it has not share the same assumption: that certainty is what we are after and we can get it.
The reality is that long-range future energy, climate, economic and other carbon-related environmental conditions are and will remain significantly uncertain, highly variable and largely unpredictable. Scientists and mathematicians know that the systems involved in the various dimensions of climate change policy are in fact extremely complex and often chaotic, fraught with considerable, irreducible uncertainty.
But contrary to the so-called skeptics, this uncertainty does not license inaction. Most human decisions are made in conditions of imperfect uncertain information. We have to act even though we don’t know everything.
More than the usual denialist bullshit, stuff like this really makes me mad. The Herald did not stipulate a word limit, so I let myself run on a bit. Sent May 17:
In his attempt at a “centrist” position on climate change issues, Brian Crowley sets up and knocks down several convenient strawmen.
One: caricaturing those concerned about Earth’s climatic transformation as “almost religious, fervently believing in man-made climate change” misrepresents both environmentalism and religion by overlooking the simple fact that those advocating for action on climate change would be delighted to learn they’d been mistaken (unlike the faithful, who resist contradictions, facts, and logic with preternatural stubbornness). Those who understand enough science to recognize that our civilization is in deep trouble aren’t persuaded by out-of-context statistics, ad hominem arguments, or pseudo-scientific irrelevancies, which is why there aren’t a lot of “former climate-change believers” around except on internet comment threads.
Two: Mr. Crowley’s dismissal of “policies that promise to prevent climate change.” No such policies have been seriously proposed by any politician anywhere, for the simple reason that those who understand the science know that the changes are already irreversible. Realistic global warming legislation advocates either preparation strategies (e.g., investing in strengthened infrastructure) or mitigation (e.g., ways to reduce greenhouse emissions).
Three: he dismisses the notion that human attitudes and behavior can change, calling it an assumption “that has little or no basis in social science or historical precedent.” Mr. Crowley’s notion that the conveniences of contemporary civilization are somehow permanently fixed in our species’ way of living is risible. Two hundred years ago, most people never traveled more than a few miles from their birthplaces; one hundred years ago, almost nobody on Earth owned a car; fifty years ago, almost nobody owned a computer; fifty years from now, we’ll be out of oil, and living on a grossly hotter planet — and we will have to adapt if humanity is to survive.
Warren Senders