My neighbor. This is gonna be tough...
Posted on 05/07/2008 6:28:29 PM PDT by blam
Save water to avoid eating you neighbour
By Chris Turney
Last Updated: 1:01pm BST 02/05/2008
It's easy to get hung up on the tag 'global warming'.
There's no doubt it's a useful catchphrase for describing the challenges we face, but there's always the risk that our predicament is just seen as warming.
Temperature is of course an important facet of the climate, but it's not our only concern. Downpours in the future are likely to vary around the world and throughout the year.
The combined effect of changing rainfall and increasing temperature will mean that some regions will get wetter, others drier. Although this might be good news for the bottled water industry it's a worrying trend.
A great benefit of looking at the past is that we can see what effect historical trends in temperature and moisture have had on other cultures and civilizations.
A great example is in the southwest of the USA. Built into many of the cliff faces across the region are the impressive ruins of large stone villages, comprising numerous multi-storey dwellings.
These are the remains of the ancient Pueblo people called the Anasazi, who flourished in the desert and scrub of the Four Corners region from around AD 850.
It's an arid place, today receiving only some 30 centimetres of rain a year. Yet for nearly 500 years these great people accomplished a huge amount. By focusing on low-lying floodplains, the Anasazi had a reliable source of water most years, allowing them to grow maize, squash and beans. When the good times boomed, yields were high, the population grew and the culture blossomed.
During the Anasazi's reign in the southwest, however, it wasn't all plain sailing. There were times when the population also crashed. The archaeological evidence points to two key periods where things went badly for the Anasazi.
Around AD 1150 many settlements were abandoned. At a site called Cowboy Wash, a grisly discovery was made. In an Anasazi home dated to this time, seven bodies were discovered dismembered, cooked and eaten. It wasn't a nice way to go.
We'll never know precisely why this particular act was carried out, but the fact it happened during a period when the Anasazi were struggling suggests things weren't rosy at the time. By AD 1300 pretty much all their settlements became deserted. When the times got bad, it wasn't pretty. Something wasn't right.
To see whether climate played a role in all this, we can interrogate trees in the region. By measuring the thickness of the rings across a tree's trunk it's possible to work out what the growing conditions were like for each year: thick rings indicate that it was a great year for growth; a thin or missing ring meant it was a bad growing season and the tree effectively shut down.
Because trees within one region experience the same conditions they should show the same pattern of thick and thin rings. By measuring the rings of trees preserved in the landscape it's possible to match up characteristic patterns of growth. It's the ultimate jigsaw puzzle: trees living for several hundred years have one set of rings that can only match with trees growing at the same time.
By looking across the region, Ed Cook and colleagues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia University have pulled together a huge tree ring dataset.
They've been able to use these results to map where and when drought took place. Interestingly, it was drier than today for most of the time the Anasazi flourished.
But Cook's team has also shown that for several decades at a time the region became even more arid, experiencing what are sometimes described as mega-droughts, with particularly harsh periods around AD 1150 and 1250.
It's clear that the Anasazi were capable of dealing with a certain degree of aridity, but it looks as though they had problems when the conditions went beyond what they were used to.
The Anasazi provide an important lesson for the world. It's the shortage of water that has been the big challenge for many civilisations and cultures. In all likelihood, it will be again.
The omens are not good. Since the fall of the Anasazi, the southwest USA has received a lot more rain. When droughts have taken place they've not been nearly as big as those that went before; even the Dust Bowl of the 1930s doesn't rank against the mega-droughts the Anasazi had to contend with.
Worryingly, climate models are already suggesting this rapidly growing region has started a long-term shift to more arid conditions as a result of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
If the Anasazi have a lesson for us, it's if we want to avoid eating our neighbours we'd best be frugal with the water that's available. We'd better start getting greenhouse gas levels down and fast.
Chris Turney is Professor in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter and author of Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).
“I’d still like to know why the Anasazi built their settlements largely in caves.”
Nobody had invented the teepee yet.
My neighbor. This is gonna be tough...
There is soon to be a revolution in water purification because of nanotechnology. Filters with nanotubes only large enough to pass single molecules of water. They use 1/4th of the energy of typical water purification.
Typically, I can imagine a very large pipeline at the bottom of the ocean. Water, crude filtered to eliminate “biologicals”, is pushed by water pressure alone through nano-filters, so that an inner pipeline is filled with fresh water, surrounded by slightly more concentrated brine which returns to the ocean, to maintain its salinity for sea life.
The fresh water in the inner pipeline is pumped to shore, where it is monitored for salinity and purity, then pumped directly into the water mains.
Dream big. :’) IBTZ. ;’D
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Thanks Blam. |
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There's a little...Aztec, enough for some to speculate about a possible clash of cultures.
If he had stopped right there he'd have maintained a little credibility for scientific honesty.
...as a result of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
By tacking on this empirically-unsupported ideologically-derived assertion which does not follow from any of the data cited in the article he blows whatever credibility he had.
If he had included even a mild qualifier such as "...which some researchers speculate could be a result of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere" he'd have maintained at least a modicum of scientific integrity.
The arrogance of these pseudo-scientific hacks, however, won't allow them to acknowledge any degree of the uncertainty in their "theories" required by a basic application of logic and the scientific method. The reason for this, however, is simply that these types and their "pronouncements" aren't really about science, they're about ideology and dogma.
An oportunity to MLM 'waterless' cookware?
Every bar-girl knows that: look for the lighter shade of skin on the finger.
I know there's a town of Aztec located not too far from the Mesa Verde ruins and other Anasazi settlements, but I was not aware that any Aztec culture extend up so far north.
"But Turner contends that a "band of thugs" - Toltecs, for whom cannibalism was part of religious practice - made their way to Chaco Canyon from central Mexico. These invaders used cannibalism to overwhelm the unsuspecting Anasazi and terrorize the populace into submission over a period of 200 years."
"Turner says the culture's carefully constructed social fabric began to tear. Finally, the Anasazi fled the oppressive cultists and sought haven deep in remote canyons. The next time any part of the culture appeared, these Pueblo people were found to have constructed elaborate dwellings adhered to the sheer sides of cliffs."
"Generations of scientists have postulated that such suspended villages - located far from water - represented a fear of a great foe. Turner suggests the Anasazi took up these defensive positions against a horrible enemy - the evil that had infiltrated their own people."
The only thing that makes sense to me is that they were defensive position, because they were certainly hard to get to.
It wasn’t much of a strategy, though, since they grew their crops in plain sight above the cliffs, and they certainly couldn’t protect them from within the cliffs. And, even in peace time, these folks were doing a whole bunch of rigorous climbing just to accomplish routine tasks.
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