Easter Island, the Mayans and Us

What do the great Mayan civilization of 800 AD and the peoples of Easter Island circa 1600 AD have in common with us, 21st century mankind with all our technology and connected lifestyle ?  Surely very little.  Well, we have one thing very much in common, and hopefully not, but possibly two.

The Mayan civilization flourished in South America for hundreds of years and built a society similar in technological ability and city building prowess to the ancient Egyptions, with their Pyramid like Zygaruts jutting out of dense jungle, large city developments and extensive farming.  Unfortunately, the Mayans did not adequately respond to seasonal changes in crop production nor did they effectively manage their environment.  Continued over defforrestation and the resulting degradation of soils through over farming of the same fields without crop rotation led the Mayans to a massive collapse of their food production, leading to famine, disease, and in a matter of just a few years, total destruction of their civilization.
If they had paid attention the signs would have been there, rainwater washing away over exposed soils, decreasing crop production as soil quaility diminished, raising disease levels as populations become too concentrated.

The data was there to be understood, but it was overlooked, perhaps they prayed at the top of their Zigaruts for better fortunes the following harvest...

The Easter Islanders also built a great civilization on a small island in the Pacific.  They also performed impressive feats of engineering and mathematics, moving massive columns of volcanic rock to locations around the island and carving them into the world famous Easter island heads.  An incredibly impressive technical feat even today, there is still signficant puzzlement regarding how they managed to move these immensely heavy rocks.

Unfortunately, yet again, the Easter Island civilization perished almost over night.  Defforestation is seen as the root cause, with the removal of the tree cover the soil on Easter Island became exposed to weatherization and degraded to a point in which crops could not adequately grow and feed their population - famine would come, then disease, then the mass die-out.   Yet again the information would have been there to see, steadily declining tree coverage, rains washing away the soils, crop production decreasing with each year as the soil weathered and washed away.

Clearly we must be MUCH more advanced than these societies right ?  We have been to the Moon, we can talk to our loved ones on a device the size of a few playing cards, with moving video.   We can talk with friends all around the world with a few key presses.   We have hundreds of satellites in space monitoring every aspect of our planet, we have scientists at every point of the globe recording, watching and measuring and trending weather and climate change over days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millenium.

In the Antartic circle we take deep core samples of the packed ice, we sample the chemical make up of air bubbles trapped in this ice and can tell the make up of the atmosphere 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, 10,000 years ago and so on.   In Space we have the ISS and hundreds of other satellites measuring global temperatures, forest density, atmospheric gases.   On land we have cameras watching glacier levels, weather stations recording snowfall, wind, rain, temperature.    Surely we have been watching the data, we have been collecting the data, so surely, obviously, we aren't as stupid as the Mayans and Easter Islanders right ?

Umm, actually yes we are.   A majority of Americans still disbelieve climate change is real and man made; over 60% in fact, even though 99% of scientists in this field agree fully with the findings of the major research instituations, and the United Nations, that this is very much real, very dangerous, and needing urgent attention.

We are adopting the same patterns as the Mayans and Easter Islanders, assuming everything will be alright, writing off any evidence to the contrary as a blip, shooting the messenger when we don't like the reality we are being told of...

What kind of information do we have?  How about this ...

Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported recently that the average global temperature was higher over the past 12 months than during any other 12-month period in history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released corroborating data, adding that the past four months, including June, have each individually been the hottest on record as well.

Or this

Marine phytoplankton have a crucial role in Earth's biogeochemical cycles, and form the basis of marine ecosystems. Data from satellite remote sensing — available since 1979 — have provided evidence that phytoplankton biomass has fluctuated on the decadal scale, linked to climate forcing, but a few decades of data are insufficient to indicate long-term trends. Daniel Boyce and colleagues now put these results in a long-term context by estimating local, regional and global trends in phytoplankton biomass since 1899, based on a range of sources including measurements of ocean transparency with a device known as a Secchi disk, and shipboard analyses of various types. What emerges from the records is a century of decline of global phytoplankton biomass. The authors estimate that the decline of phytoplankton standing stock has been greatest at high latitudes, in equatorial regions, in oceanic areas and in more recent years. Trends in most areas are correlated significantly to increasing ocean warming, and leading climate indices

Or this

Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world's leading climate research centres.


Scientists have also released what they described as the "best evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators – from air and sea temperatures to melting ice – each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.

Or this

The report emphasizes that human society has developed for thousands of years under one climatic state, and now a new set of climatic conditions are taking shape. These conditions are consistently warmer, and some areas are likely to see more extreme events like severe drought, torrential rain and violent storms.



“Despite the variability caused by short-term changes, the analysis conducted for this report illustrates why we are so confident the world is warming,” said Peter Stott, Ph.D., contributor to the report and head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution of the United Kingdom Met Office Hadley Centre. “When we look at air temperature and other indicators of climate, we see highs and lows in the data from year to year because of natural variability. Understanding climate change requires looking at the longer-term record. When we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”

While year-to-year changes in temperature often reflect natural climatic variations such as El Niño/La Niña events, changes in average temperature from decade-to-decade reveal long-term trends such as global warming. Each of the last three decades has been much warmer than the decade before. At the time, the 1980s was the hottest decade on record. In the 1990s, every year was warmer than the average of the previous decade. The 2000s were warmer still.

So we have plankton dying off in such numbers in the oceans that their total population has dropped 40% since 1950.  No big deal, they just provide HALF THE OXYGEN WE BREATHE.

We have the hottest global year on record, EVER, yes, even counting the snow we got in the northeast.

CO2 levels are going through the roof and Russia is now burning.  I mention Russia because Siberia has the world's largest volume of trapped methane gas in its soils.   If those frozen soils melt, just once, trillions of tons of CH4 methane will be released.   Methane is many times more dangerous than CO2 as it is a much stronger warming agent in the atmosphere.   In other words, we are VERY CLOSE to a tipping point at which point no change in energy policy, car use or whatever else will slow down warming.   The seas will die, the oxygen levels will drop off, and it will just get hotter and hotter from there...

This is a big deal, so big in fact, that we are close to leaving our children and grand children with a really shitty planet for them to live in.   Yet public apathy continues, reinforced by deliberate misinformation by the various industries that fear pollution controls the most - oil and coal.

In light of the heavy lobbying by these industries, and the public's apathy to the future of the planet, this happened this month :

Conceding that they can't find enough votes for the legislation, Senate Democrats on Thursday abandoned efforts to put together a comprehensive energy bill that would seek to curb greenhouse gas emissions, delivering a potentially fatal blow to a proposal the party has long touted and President Obama campaigned on.


Instead, Democrats will push for a more limited measure that would seek to increase liability costs that oil companies would pay following spills such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico. It also would create additional incentives for the development of natural gas vehicles and would provide rebates for products that reduce home energy use. Senate Democrats said they expected to find GOP support for the bill and pass it in the next two weeks.

ah not so fast, that apparently is also too much to expect, this is what we hear this week :

Senate Democrats and Republicans appear on a collision course that would sink chances of passing oil-spill and energy legislation amid disagreements over both substance and process.


Democratic leaders Wednesday foretold the likely failure of the package and blamed Republicans for obstructing it and other legislation.

So there we have it.   We are trashing the planet and no one is adult enough to do anything about it.  Cheers.
Time to go build some nice Zygaruts and Statues, don't you think ?  Someone will have to find out about us when we are long gone from the planet....

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