The Nation: We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization's Collapse

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/civilization-collapse-climate-change/

AUGUST 22, 2023
We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization’s Collapse
Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?
MICHAEL T. KLARE

In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, N.M., the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland. Such societies, having achieved great success, imploded when their governing elites failed to adopt new survival mechanisms to face radically changing climate conditions.

Bear in mind that, for their time and place, the societies Diamond studied supported large, sophisticated populations. Pueblo Bonito, a six-story structure in Chaco Canyon, contained up to 600 rooms, making it the largest building in North America until the first skyscrapers rose in New York some 800 years later. Mayan civilization is believed to have supported a population of more than 10 million people at its peak between 250 and 900 A.D., while the Norse Greenlanders established a distinctively European society around 1000 A.D. in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Still, in the end, each collapsed utterly and their inhabitants either died of starvation, slaughtered each other, or migrated elsewhere, leaving nothing but ruins behind.

The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.

…

[Irish_Dem]

1. Motto for the 21st century: ADAPT OR DIE

[GPV]

2. Just talked abt this w YoungerGreenKid yesterday.

I think it's going to get very bad very fast.

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Re: "I think it's going to get very bad very fast."

2023 has a number of factors acting in concert to make it as bad as it is. 2024 may not be as bad, but I’m confident that it will be worse than 2014 (one of the 10 warmest years on record.)



Oh for the halcyon days of 2014!

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Civilization and even democracy rely upon adequate resources.

Then greed takes over, and eventually outstrips supply. Humans become like rats in a maze that's too densely populated. We are just about there especially since civilization and lifestyle require complex sourcing, manufacture, and distribution systems.

[anciano]

4. Outlook not so good ......

[Think. Again.]

5. This is worthy of repeating...

From the article:

"Such societies, having achieved great success, imploded when their governing elites failed to adopt new survival mechanisms to face radically changing climate conditions.

(Emphasis mine).

Edited to add: My deepest Gratitude to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

[Turbineguy]

6. That's why MAGAts want Trump

He's a specialist at failing to adapt.

[LiberaBlueDem]

8. Star Trek fan here

We're gonna pull thru and make a better world.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and even if all the bombs blow up and the nuclear plants melt, there will be a smarter society alive and thriving. Cheer up!

[Marcus IM]

9. Yep. After all, Star Trek is in the 32nd century.

So, I'm feeling pretty good about where we are based on that.

[LiberaBlueDem]

11. And I am an ex-doomer

No future in thinking we are doomed.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. Hey, I'm a fan myself

Star Trek is (of course) Science Fiction (not fact.)

One of the most beloved episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (not my favorite series) was The Inner Light. I’m sure you remember it. Picard is linked with a probe, and lives out a life in less than a half hour, along with his memories, he gets a flute! (That flute would become a Picard touchstone.)



The probe was created as the last act of a dying civilization, so someone would remember them. They died due to climate change. No smarter society came after them on their planet.

[OnlinePoker]

17. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger..."

Tell that to the people with long Covid or Polio. I really hate that saying.

[BlueIn_W_Pa]

24. Well, at least Star Trek came back for humpback whales

and not the almost extinct right whales :/

[mopinko]

12. i think he's wrong about the ag sector.

sustainable ag has been in motion for over 20 yrs now.
when i started my urban farm almost 12 yrs ago, all the buzz was permaculture and sustainable.
the language has shifted since, meaning, to me, that there is progress. now the buzz word is rewilding. great parts of the uk are already there. chinks of europe, too.
and i can get a plant based burger at any drive through.

and as we get serious, this movement has laid the groundwork to pick up the low hanging fruit.
we could turn cafos into power plants. we can rebuild spent soil.
i think no till has already been pretty widely adopted. cover crops. we can fertilize w/o oil.
the blue print is there. get the bigs to adopt it, and it will actually help.

also, we could all kill our lawns.

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. We could do many things, if we had the time

Agriculture is racing to develop food crops which will survive in a less hospitable climate.

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3124/global-climate-change-impact-on-crops-expected-within-10-years-nasa-study-finds/

NEWS | November 2, 2021
Global Climate Change Impact on Crops Expected Within 10 Years, NASA Study Finds

By Ellen Gray,
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

In Brief:
Climate change may affect the production of maize (corn) and wheat as early as 2030, according to a new NASA study.

Climate change may affect the production of maize (corn) and wheat as early as 2030 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, according to a new NASA study published in the journal, Nature Food. Maize crop yields are projected to decline 24%, while wheat could potentially see growth of about 17%.

Using advanced climate and agricultural models, scientists found that the change in yields is due to projected increases in temperature, shifts in rainfall patterns, and elevated surface carbon dioxide concentrations from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These changes would make it more difficult to grow maize in the tropics, but could expand wheat’s growing range.

“We did not expect to see such a fundamental shift, as compared to crop yield projections from the previous generation of climate and crop models conducted in 2014,” said lead author Jonas Jägermeyr, a crop modeler and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. The projected maize response was surprisingly large and negative, he said. “A 20% decrease from current production levels could have severe implications worldwide.”

Average global crop yields for maize, or corn, may see a decrease of 24% by late century, with the declines becoming apparent by 2030, with high greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new NASA study. Wheat, in contrast, may see an uptick in crop yields by about 17%. The change in yields is due to the projected increases in temperature, shifts in rainfall patterns and elevated surface carbon dioxide concentrations due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, making it more difficult to grow maize in the tropics and expanding wheat’s growing range. Credit: NASA/Katy Mersmann Download from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

…

[mopinko]

15. when i say low hanging fruit, i mean things w a quick pay off.

no till/cover crops is something u can do in 1 season.
a cafo near transmission lines could have an anaerobic digester up in a year or so.

my personal favorite is hugelkultur, which i do here. it solves the landscape waste problem in a win-win-win. pay farmers to take tree waste, they build piles where they have runoff.
both fertilizer and soil runoff are captured by the pile, a few yrs later, you spread it on your field, and start over.
instead of composting or leaving to rot, carbon is sequestered. in a lot of cases the round trip for those big diesel trucks is cut. the 20+ trees i’ve buried were all from w/in a mile or 2. saved a 100 mi round trip.
(and ftr, you could do this on urban vacant lots, too. besides being a great foundation for community gardens, the kind of topsoil i’ve made here goes for a lot of money by the truckload.)
5 yrs is not that long a time line.

it’s a given that the best time to do any of this was 20-50 yrs ago. but the second best time is today.

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. Yes, I understand "low hanging fruit."

My grandfathers were both farmers, although at different scales. My maternal grandfather was the more successful, although when my mother was growing up, he was a dairy farmer, I only knew him as a “dirt farmer.” He was also the more scientific of the two. He died at the age of 94, not long after bringing in the last harvest from his (for him) relatively modest garden. (Most back yard gardeners would have considered it large.)

I sometimes chuckle at recent advances in agriculture. I remember Grandfather planting marigolds in his vegetable garden! I remember him planting fields with timothy & clover rather than corn. I remember him explaining about plants he called “three sisters” in his garden. (All of this in the 60’s and 70’s.)

Several years ago, an acquaintance and I were talking about “climate change” and she was bemoaning the fact that we did not know as much as our grandparents had known about growing food, and I replied, “Even our grandparents couldn’t grow food if the climate was not conducive.”

[mopinko]

20. ya know, a harebrained scheme of mine-

(i have a rather large collection of them. all brilliant. lol. )
dig back through patents on old time farm machines, and figure out how to modernize/motorize/digitize them. i think we’ve lost the infrastructure for mid-range farming, but ppl want to do it. i’m sure there were dandy planting, food processing, etc machines that were handcrank, or small motor driven that have been just forgotten. cuz these days you just ship it to the factory.
stuff like fruit pitters, corn shuckers, something in between boutique and dole-size. there’s also a lot of low hanging money for small farmers if they process their own crops.
after the fall, they’d come in handy on the remaining communal farms. 🫣

i couldnt have done ANY of what i’ve done w/o my skidsteer. i think most small farmers would do better w a little horsepower.
that is also low hanging fruit.

[OKIsItJustMe]

21. May I suggest a trip to visit the Amish?

In Central Pennsylvania, you can see thriving farms, producing crops using traditional methods (their animals do not live easy lives.)

[Think. Again.]

22. Indigenous people...

...are preserving what we colonists call Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).

It would behoove us to listen to whatever wisdom they would be willing to share.

[OKIsItJustMe]

14. AP: Rice crops are being threatened by El Nino after grain supplies were disrupted by the war in Ukr

Rice crops are being threatened by El Nino after grain supplies were disrupted by the war in Ukraine

BY ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL
Published 11:35 PM EDT, July 12, 2023

NEW DELHI (AP) — Warmer, drier weather because of an earlier than usual El Nino is expected to hamper rice production across Asia, hitting global food security in a world still reeling from the impacts of the war in Ukraine.

…

That’s bad news for rice farmers, particularly in Asia where 90% of the world’s rice is grown and eaten, since a strong El Nino typically means less rainfall for the thirsty crop.

There are already “alarm bells,” said Abdullah Mamun, a research analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute or IFPRI, pointing to rising rice prices due to shortfalls in production. The average price of 5% broken white rice in June in Thailand was about 16% higher than last year’s average.

Global stocks have run low since last year, in part due to devastating floods in Pakistan, a major rice exporter. This year’s El Nino may amplify other woes for rice-producing countries, such as reduced availability of fertilizer due to the war and some countries’ export restrictions on rice. Myanmar, Cambodia and Nepal are particularly vulnerable, warned a recent report by research firm BMI.

…

[mopinko]

16. did i say something that made u think i dont understand the problem?

i’m not saying we can fix it, i’m saying there are steps that could have an impact even if ppl refuse to give up modern living.

i dont think the whole world is going to go up in flames and become completely uninhabitable. i think the zone of human habitability will shrink considerably. and faster than we think.
but the more we do now, the bigger that zone will be.

maybe there isnt a point, but i’m taking pascal’s bargain.

[OKIsItJustMe]

19. Oh! By all means!

I tell people not to make plans based on the world coming to an end, because you might be wrong. (I typically don’t bring Pascal into the picture.)

On the other hand, I think we’ve all been in denial (about several topics) for too long.

[Think. Again.]

23. The thing I don't like...

...about that chart is that it neglects to account for the interdependence, interactions, and overlapping effects the components have on each other as the various changes occur.