Fallen ancient civilisations show us why we must not ignore climate change

[Imperial Dave]

https://theconversation.com/fallen-ancient-civilizations-show-us-why-we-must-not-ignore-climate-warnings-241622

It's a slight off the beaten track article but very relevant in its message

[Nick Harbud]

Gosh, I never realised the Mayans generated such large amounts of atmospheric CO₂.

[Erpingham]

I did struggle to match the historical examples to climate change. Two of them seemed to relate to military conquest and no explanation is given to why the Mayans abandoned their city.

[Imperial Dave]

It's not immediately obvious

[tadamson]

It's not obvious because there isn't a link  :-)

Sadly this is a list of civilisations (broadly speaking) that collapsed, very very loosly linked to Climate Change. This sort of weak writing is part of the reason many people dont get it.

Simpler story..
Nine of the last ten years were the nine hottest years on record, the tenth one was only the eleventh hottest on record.
This year will be hotter still.
The +1.5C 'tipping point' will be passed in 2025.
Ocean surface temperature is hitting +3C..

[Erpingham]

As Tom says, this is an important issue obscured by poor writing. There are many historical examples of climate change impacting on historical populations, from desertification to rising sea levels.  There are also examples of communities irrevocably damaging their local environment, leading to abandonment.  If the authors (or their AI?) had done some better research, they could have put up some more meaningful historical examples.

[tadamson]

My favorite chart for talks is  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-long-term-concentration

Guess where on the chart the industrial revolution was...

[Imperial Dave]

Is it like where's Wally...? 

[Keraunos]

Pre-industrial revolution, natural climate change rather than change forced by human activity, was a major threat to civilisations.  I dug for a while on a late Roman farming settlement near Hertford.  They were trying to grapple with climate change that was making England cooler and wetter than in the balmy years when Claudius had invaded, employing all their ingenuity to make things like corn dryers to artificially compensate for poorer growing seasons but as a consequence rapidly depleting woodlands to provide fuel.  To get to the Roman layer we had to dig through Saxon gruben(?) houses, pitiful structures compared to the Roman stuff but much better adapted to coping with change.  Something to look forward to again? 

[Jim Webster]

Pre-industrial revolution, natural climate change rather than change forced by human activity, was a major threat to civilisations.  I dug for a while on a late Roman farming settlement near Hertford.  They were trying to grapple with climate change that was making England cooler and wetter than in the balmy years when Claudius had invaded, employing all their ingenuity to make things like corn dryers to artificially compensate for poorer growing seasons but as a consequence rapidly depleting woodlands to provide fuel.  To get to the Roman layer we had to dig through Saxon gruben(?) houses, pitiful structures compared to the Roman stuff but much better adapted to coping with change.  Something to look forward to again? 

The dietary change from bread to porridge would be an interesting one for people to get used to. Actually even as it is, in the UK it is rare we can grow enough bread making wheat. Because of our history we import some Hard Red American Wheat which we use to mix in with our bread making wheat to bring it up to the right quality.
In very rare years (hot and dry at the right time) we do occasionally export bread making wheat to France. But because of history our bread owes more to the US grain than European grains. If we got wetter years with less hot dry days then we'd probably find we had to make the switch to oats or import more. 

[Justin Swanton]

Gosh, this obsession with climate....civilisations collapse because the social institutions that created them just get old. Civilisations are like clothing fashions: when a new line comes out people are enthusiastic about it and plonk down good money to get it. It becomes the norm and everybody wears it. After a while the novelty and charm wear off and people first take it for granted and then simply lose interest. They pay a kind of lip service to it in that you're expected to wear the line if you want to be respectable, but their hearts are no longer in it. Eventually they get sick of it. It just needs the appearance of a new line for the old line to be dumped like, well, old socks.

At the core of this I think is the human desire for utopia that we think we should have and can construct. As long as a civilisation holds out a convincing promise of utopia it keeps people's interest, but once the promise is shown to be just another lie then that's it. A civilisation is at its best when things are improving but it is well short of its full potential: the hardships of the past are a recent memory (and still exist to some extent) whilst the promise of a glorious future remains bright. And that all works in hot as well as cold weather.

[Erpingham]

Let them eat Maslin, the original multigrain loaf 

[Imperial Dave]

I like oats...

[Erpingham]

I like oats...

But you are neither a Scot or a horse  I thought you Welsh made bread out of seaweed?

[Imperial Dave]

That too and caws