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Study Suggests Climate Change-Induced Drought Caused the Mayan Collapse

Posted by timothy on from the what-if-they-just-wanted-to-wane? dept.

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."

56 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Advanced as They Were by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · 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.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:Advanced as They Were by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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 poor black people affected.

      What will affect the developed world more is peak oil, with the result of their not being enough oil for the population. Or at least not the amount of oil they are used to. That's what's going to cause your near future resource wars. And indeed the Iraq war has been a forerunner of that.

    2. Re:Advanced as They Were by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Your information is out of date.

      Thanks to shale oil, the very concept of "peak oil" has been debunked.

      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.

    3. Re:Advanced as They Were by BasilBrush · · 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.

    4. Re:Advanced as They Were by BasilBrush · · 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.

    5. Re:Advanced as They Were by symbolset · · Score: 2

      In the last 1200 years people have become more mobile. Back then in addition to suffering drought they were also surrounded by territorial cannibalistic slave-taking peoples with significant cultural differences and a lack of diversity appreciation training.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    6. Re:Advanced as They Were by rrohbeck · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      thegodmovie.com - watch it
    7. Re:Advanced as They Were by BasilBrush · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And yet mankind's ability to wage war over resources hasn't diminished one bit.

    8. Re:Advanced as They Were by superwiz · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
    9. Re:Advanced as They Were by roman_mir · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      You can't handle the truth.
    10. Re:Advanced as They Were by mathmathrevolution · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Last friday Brent Crude Oil was trading at $126/barrel. This is near the all time high in modern history. 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 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 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.

    11. Re:Advanced as They Were by chrb · · Score: 2

      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 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.

    12. Re:Advanced as They Were by BasilBrush · · Score: 2, Informative

      The question that should be asked here is does this alleged climate change make things worse? The "worst areas" are that way not because they're particularly vulnerable to climate changes, but because they're vulnerable to everything including the mere ticking of the clock.

      The Republican 9 Step Global Warming Denial Plan

      1) There's no such thing as global warming.
      2) There's global warming, but the scientists are exaggerating. It's not significant.
      3) There's significant global warming, but man doesn't cause it.
      4) Man does cause it, but it's not a net negative.
      5) It is a net negative, but it's not economically possible to tackle it.
      6) We need to tackle global warming, so make the poor pay for it.
      7) Global warming is bad for business. Why did the Democrats not tackle it earlier?
      8) ????
      9) Profit.

    13. Re:Advanced as They Were by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 2

      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.

    14. Re:Advanced as They Were by chrb · · Score: 4, 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. 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:

      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.

    15. Re:Advanced as They Were by chrb · · 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.

    16. Re:Advanced as They Were by mathmathrevolution · · Score: 3, 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%.

    17. Re:Advanced as They Were by MartinSchou · · Score: 2

      At the current levels of energy consumption, natural gas from fraking alone satisfies all energy needs for the next 150 years.

      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 take into account that there are 6x as many people who wants to get to our level, and that'll cut it right down to 50 years.

      And in 150 years, with an average population growth of 1%/year, the worlds population will have increased from 7 billion to 31 billion.

      Any time you see anyone saying things like "at the current levels of consumption" you need to smack them over the head.

    18. Re:Advanced as They Were by dryeo · · Score: 2

      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%

      --
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
    19. Re:Advanced as They Were by dbIII · · Score: 2

      but now oil has many substitutes

      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 computer". It's still a useful term because there are a lot of things that are easier with liquid mineral oil than with anything else - we don't have the Star Trek generic "energy" but instead live in a more complex world.

    20. Re:Advanced as They Were by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 3, Funny

      Wow Republicans need 9 steps? What a bunch of idiots. Al Gore did it in only 3:

      1. 1) Create a slide show about the End of the World if we don't DO SOMETHING
      2. 2) Invest in companies that get DO SOMETHING grants
      3. 3) Profit.
      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
    21. Re:Advanced as They Were by mathmathrevolution · · Score: 2

      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. 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".

      Might I suggest that perhaps your limited understanding of the global economy and the Federal Reserve fractional lending system could have a few blindspots? Seems a bit more likely that your "invisible inflation" theory.

    22. Re:Advanced as They Were by tehcyder · · Score: 2

      Fossil fuels are a finite resource; there are no new fossil fuels.

      I find that kind of talk defeatist. We should be out there chopping down trees and killing large animals and vurying them to create new fossil for our descendants!

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    23. Re:Advanced as They Were by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 2

      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! Obviously there's a lot of money to be made, considering a tiny nation like the Maldives is worth a $50 million payment just to get them to go along with the scam.

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
  2. The South will rise again! by TWX · · Score: 4, Funny

    From the article:

    The Yucatan is apparently highly sensitive to water reductions, a hypothesis supported by current data, and that means that reduced tropical storm action was likely enough to trigger the downfall of the Mayans, thanks to a quickly-depleting water supply.

    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...

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:The South will rise again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      "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!"

  3. Source? by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  4. Served them right by oldhack · · Score: 5, Funny

    Driving hummers, flying all over the place spewing carbon out the wazoo. Fools.

    --
    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
    1. Re:Served them right by DesScorp · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Life is hard, and the world is cruel
    2. Re:Served them right by Zorque · · Score: 5, Funny

      Specifically, the Pontiac Aztek.

  5. Duh. by rs79 · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?
    1. Re:Duh. by Krojack · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's why we started crop rotation.The great Dust Bowl woke us up to that in the early 1930's.

    2. Re:Duh. by dkleinsc · · 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.

      --
      I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
    3. Re:Duh. by a_n_d_e_r_s · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      Just saying it like it are.
    4. Re:Duh. by istartedi · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  6. Jared Diamond by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    New? Wasn't this described in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond years ago?

  7. Re:They could move to Las Vegas! by ibsteve2u · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who the hell goes to Las Vegas to drink water?

    --
    Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
  8. The Mayans were not "killed off" by Kohath · · 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.

    1. Re:The Mayans were not "killed off" by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 2

      Propaganda from Wikipedia: "Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position."

      Ok, I'll bite. Why would there be motivation to spread propaganda about the Mayans being killed off?

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    2. Re:The Mayans were not "killed off" by TWX · · Score: 2

      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 that nation or culture goes away, then the label no longer applies.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    3. Re:The Mayans were not "killed off" by tomhath · · Score: 3, 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

    4. Re:The Mayans were not "killed off" by mathmathrevolution · · Score: 4, 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.

  9. Climate Change: is there ANYTHING it can't do ??? by Salgak1 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Nobody bothered to notice that the time of fall of the Maya segues into the Medieval Optimum ??? If you look at this graph, you'll see that the temps start their rise around 800AD, and the Optimum is well established by 950AD.

    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. . . .

  10. Al Gore can save them. by BobandMax · · 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.

    --

    "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
    -- Pablo Picasso
    1. Re:Al Gore can save them. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:Al Gore can save them. by irtza · · Score: 2

      so they can take credit for the oxygen atmosphere?

      --
      When all else fails, try.
  11. It didn't kill off the Mayans by Fieryphoenix · · Score: 2

    It just wrecked their civilization.

  12. We need to get off this planet. by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  13. Re:Climate Change: is there ANYTHING it can't do ? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  14. just look at our current civilization by FudRucker · · Score: 2

    agriculture totally depends on petroleum, to make fertilizers, herbicides & insecticides, from beginning to end the entire process of modern industrialized farming depends on oil, if something happens to either the supply of oil or just a few bad growing seasons for one reason or another it could cause a big chunk of civilization to starve, and if that happens it wont be pretty, (i sure dont want to be around to witnesses it)

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  15. Re:as opposed... by tmosley · · Score: 2

    I don't think you have your timeline right. The Nauhatl didn't arrive in Tenochtitlan until well after the start of city-state abandonment in the Mayan Regions.

    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 cities.

    Make all the comparisons to modern day "environmentalists" you like. Many of them will be true. They aren't lying when they say they are lead by the spirit of Maya.

  16. New study is old by tomhath · · Score: 2

    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.

    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.

  17. some pro-tips, friends by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    1: Maya people, Maya culture, the Maya. Mayan is the language, written or spoken. ONLY the language, written or spoken. Mayan = Language

    2: "The Maya collapsed" makes poor shorthand for: "The Late Classic Maya period evidenced major demographic shifts from large cities to smaller communities and southern city centers to nothern city centers, with strong continuity of material culture, daily practice, structures of governance, language, and genetic population, although some southern city centers experienced depopulation not unlike current conditions in downtown Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and perhaps a hundred other city centers in the U.S. as a response to shifts in resources, industries, and economic structures." See the work of: Scott Fedick, Rosemary Joyce, Jim Aimers, Patricia McAnany, Quetzil Castaneda, John Henderson, Marvin Cohodas...

    3: Contemporary scholarly literature on "collapse" focuses on mining the past for either cautionary tales or modes of resilience. Either way, scholars are in agreement that 1) the transformations in the current climate are occurring at an unprecedented rate, 2) the impacts of globalization are felt across human society at an unprecedented scale, and 3) current human behaviors and trajectories (nuclear armament, biological transformations, global warming, etc.) put us at far greater risk, as a species, than any other scenario experienced in human history. See the work of: Jared Diamond, Norman Yoffee, Joseph Tainter, J.Brett Hill, Christopher Fisher, Terry Hunt, Arthur Mol, Alan Robock...

    4: "humankind" not "mankind". Unless you are literally discussing only (slightly less than) 50% of the world's population.

    5: Although there are heated anthropological debates on whether "stages" of society are valid semantics or metrics, by no standard was the collection of pre-Contact Maya city states ever an "empire".

    signed,
    your friendly neighborhood archaeologist

  18. Re:Climate Change: is there ANYTHING it can't do ? by WhiplashII · · Score: 3, 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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  19. Shale is even worse than you think by dbIII · · Score: 2

    Shale oil is very difficult and expensive to extract, so it's very unlikely that it will ever be produced in the sort of quantities that mineral oil is being produced in now. Barring some breakthrough that has eluded us in the continuous research since the 1960s it's looking far less effective than even the WWII oil from coal efforts.
    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 water and big mounds. You can't go deep because you have to give it room to expand. Add to that a very small extraction rate and that means a large surface area gets changed into loose acidic gravel for relatively small amounts of oil. That means for any sort of volume the cheap and nasty approach is just too nasty so expensive digging has to be done but that still leaves a vast amount of difficult to store tailings (very serious acid runoff) for a relatively small amount of oil.

  20. Re:frist by flyneye · · 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?

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    *Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!