Dr. Benny Peiser
Like most things, collapse explanations are subject to fashion, and the one most in the limelight today is climatic change … Right now mega-drought is the ‘hot’ explanation for the Classic [Maya] collapse, and the usual bandwagon effect is in full career among many of my colleagues, although others remain properly suspicious of drought as the triggering mechanism. --David Webster, The Fall of the Ancient Maya, London 2002
One of the most powerful drivers of environmental gloominess and cultural pessimism is the spectre of ecological apocalypse. The mutation of age-old, religious end-time prophecies into secular predictions of natural cataclysms and societal collapse – in short, the emergence of environmental apocalypticism – is perhaps the most significant ideological development in the western world since the demise of Marxism.
Marxist doctrine, let us never forget, crumbled because its predicted, and eagerly anticipated, disintegration of free market economies never transpired, but communist economies and totalitarian dictatorships have mostly come to sticky ends. Deeply infuriated by the failure of their predictions and the unremitting vibrancy of capitalism, many disillusioned believers turned to ecological pessimism and environmental determinism. Not for the first time in the long history of apocalyptic movements, new wine was poured into old bottles.
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Climate Impacts On Ancient Societies
Dr. David Whitehouse,
The Observatory
I think that anyone who has taken an interest in climate change is aware of the role that our ever-changing climate has played in the rise and fall of civilisations and the prosperity and suffering of ordinary people ranging from anecdotes about the Greenland settlements and the considerably more detailed material available about the effect of the degradation of the European climate during the so-called Little Ice Age.
Writing in the Science Online a team of researchers (led by Willy Tegel, University of Freiburg, Institute for Forest Growth and Ulf Büntgen, Swiss Federal Research Institute) have produced what they say is the first annual-resolved European summer climate data for the past 2,500 years. The climate data comes from tree rings obtained from living trees, historical timber and sub-fossil wood of Stone Pine and European Larch from Germany, France, Italy and Austria. In all they say they examined some 9000 pieces of wood collected over 30 years.
The researchers say their analysis reveals possible links between past climate variability and changes in human history, although they are clearly not the first to make this link. Climate change, they maintain, coincided with periods of socioeconomic, cultural and political turmoil associated with the Barbarian Migrations, the Black Death and Thirty Years’ War.
Most Significant Global Warming Tipping Point Theory Bites the Dust
by
hauntingthelibrary
A scientific study on the results of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill has yielded some surprising results that appear to disprove fears of methane release as a global warming “tipping point” to catastrophic warming.
The theory as currently incorporated by most climate models requires “tipping points” to go from mild anthropogenic warming to catastrophic global warming. The most plausibleand significant of these potential tipping points has always been the release of methane triggered by warmer temperatures:
A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.
Here’s why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect—warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka “methane hydrates” and “methane clathrates”) is probably the most significant global warming tipping point event out there.
