Climate Change Incited Wars Among the Classic Maya

Does a warming world beget more wars? A new study that investigates the relationship between climate change and clashes among the Classic Maya believes so, drawing an explicit link between temperature increases and growing conflicts.

Reconstruction of Bonampak frescos, 9th century AD. | Wikimedia Commons

The study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, examined about 500 years of Maya history, from 363 to 888 AD.

This is the so-called Classic period in which the Mesoamerican civilization boomed, with its people constructing extensive cities and massive pyramids, as well as developing one of the earliest writing systems in the Americas.

Indeed, the Maya began a tradition of recording historical events on stone monuments.

“The inscriptions that have been translated provide often remarkably detailed accounts of myths and political events, including conflicts between city-states,” said the report, which was authored by Mark Collard, Canada research chair at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and professor of archaeology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, along with Christopher Carleton and David Campbell, both of Simon Fraser University.

The researchers cataloged inscriptions on monuments related to violent struggles and compiled temperature and rainfall records for the regions inhabited during the Classic period: the lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, which includes parts of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

A total of 144 unique conflicts emerged from inscriptions on monuments from more than 30 major Maya centers. The research team then compared conflict records to palaeoclimate data, and the correspondence was impressive.

“The change in conflict levels between 350 and 900 AD was considerable,” they wrote. “The number of conflicts increased from 0 to 3 every 25 years in the first two centuries to 24 conflicts every 25 years near the end of the period.”

Polychrome vase decorated with eleven figures involved in battle. Late Classic Maya period, 600 900 AD. | Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

They noted the exacerbation of conflicts could not be explained by change in the amount of rainfall. It was instead associated with an increase in summer temperature.

“There's been quite a bit of discussion about the impact of climate change on the Classic Maya, but this discussion has focused on drought,” Collard told Seeker. “Our study suggests that we've been looking in the wrong place and that the impact of temperature needs to be looked at more closely.”


Experts think that there are two potential mechanisms by which increases in temperature can lead to greater conflict.

One is psychological — when temperatures rise, tempers shorten. Several studies suggest it is possible that increased average summer temperatures made the Classic Maya more bellicose.

The other mechanism, which Collard and his colleagues find more likely and compelling, is economic, and involves the staple crop for the Classic Maya: maize.

Throughout the Classic period, average temperature fluctuated between 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius) and 84.2°F (29°C). During periods when the temperature was around 82.4°F (28°C) or less, maize yields were reasonably stable, with little or no food shortage and little conflict.

But as temperature continued to rise and the region experienced days at or above 86°F (30°C), crop shortfalls occurred frequently. Large-scale deforestation throughout the Classic period caused by urban expansion worsened the effect, increasing regional temperatures by reducing soil moisture availability.

The result was food shortage, which led to spiking levels of conflict.

"Small year-to-year changes in climate can result in large, negative effects over the long term. This is a problem for us humans, because most of us are oriented towards the short term.”

“We had originally thought that it all came down to starvation, but after talking with Maya specialists, we decided that wasn't convincing,” Collard said.
He explained that maize would have been difficult to transport, in which case the idea of attacking neighbors for food did not seem very likely.

“Instead, it's probably better to consider the increase in warfare in a way that we often think about warfare today — namely as a tool for the elite to maintain support,” Collard said.

With declining maize yields, a ruler could not have relied on opulent festivals or fed large labor forces needed to build impressive monuments. Consequently, going to war more often would have been an effective tactic to maintain status, prestige, and power.
“I think of it as being similar to the way that some modern political leaders seem to use conflict with neighbors to distract from problems within their country,” Collard said.

Eventually, the growth in conflict became explosive.

The researchers believe the findings have implications for the debate about contemporary climate change. Concern is growing that climate change effects would increase violence within and between human societies.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has cautioned that climate change will exacerbate conflict at a range of scales, from inter-personal violence to civil war, while the US Department of Defense has classified climate change as a threat multiplier, suggesting that it could lead to political and social unrest and increased terrorism.

“Our study shows that small year-to-year changes in climate can result in large, negative effects over the long term,” Collard said. “This is a problem for us, humans, because most of us are oriented towards the short term.”

“We run the risk of ignoring changes that will affect our children and grandchildren, because we can't perceive those changes,” he added.
Some very important questions still need to be investigated.

“Most obviously, we need to know whether the effect is a regional one, specific to the Maya area, or one that holds for other parts of the world,” Collard said.
But he warned that without government support it won’t be possible to answer this and other crucial questions.

“The data we used in the study were collected by researchers funded by US agencies that have been targeted for massive cuts by President Trump and his administration,” he noted, pointing to the impact of politics on his research. “I think most people — most voters — want evidence-based government policies, and we can't have evidence-based policies without evidence.”


SOURCE: https://www.seeker.com/culture/history/climate-change-incited-wars-among-the-classic-maya

Teenager Set to Plant a Trillion Trees

Climate change may be a controversial subject to many, an urgent one to others, and an afterthought for everyone else, but of those people thinking about it — or trying not to think about it — it’s typically adults having the conversation.


And though children aren’t normally the face of climate change action, that’s exactly why a then-nine-year-old Felix Finkbeiner of Germany chose to do something about it. It’s easy to talk, it’s easy to argue, and it’s even easier to just turn off your brain and live in your bubble, but it takes a lot of work to put words into actions. So, feeling like many adults were only talking about climate change issues instead of taking action, Felix felt obligated to step up to the plate.

“We children know adults know the challenges and they know the solutions,” he said at the United Nations General Assembly. “We don’t know why there is so little action.”

He cites the idea of differing perspectives on the meaning of the word “future” as one possible explanation.

“For most adults, it’s an academic question. For many of us children, it’s a question of survival,” he said. “Twenty-one hundred is still in our lifetime.”

Another reason could be climate denial, and the last explanation proved especially insightful.

“If you let a monkey choose if he wants one banana now or six bananas later, the monkey will always chose the one banana now,” he said. “From this, we children understood we cannot trust that adults alone will save our future. To do that, we have to take our future in our hands.”

At the time of his speech, Finkbeiner had been four years into heading an environmental cause that has now become a global network of children activists fighting to slow down Earth’s warming by reforesting the planet.

N0w 19, Finkbeiner’s Plant-for-the-Planet, along with the UN’s Billion Tree campaign, has planted more than 14 billion trees in more than 130 nations. And the group has even urged for the planting goal to increase to one trillion trees, or 150 trees for every person on Earth.

This environmentalist urgency was sparked in Finkbeiner during a fourth grade school assignment, when he was researching how climate change threatened polar bears, his favourite animal. When browsing Google, he came across information on the Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai who, over 30 years, planted 30 million trees in Africa, and ultimately won the Nobel Prize in 2004. Felix then wrote a report about trees, expressing his desire to plant one million of them in Germany.

The movement took off from there, with Finkbeiner speaking to the UN and the European Parliament about his goal. He kept planting trees, and his goals kept getting bigger. His organization gained so much support, it even caused the first scientific, full-scale global tree count, which is giving NASA more insight for its ongoing study of forests’ abilities to store carbon dioxide and protect the Earth.

“Felix is a combination of inspirational and articulate,” notes Thomas Crowther, an ecologist who managed the tree count.  “A lot of people are good at one of those things. Felix is really good at both.”

The tree study commenced as Plant-for-the-Planet’s ambitions expanded. And as bigger projects came to be, more questions surfaced. Were the 14 billion trees planted making any difference? Would the reforestation on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico — which aims to plant 10 million trees — make a difference? There were a lot of questions, especially whether or not all that planting can keep up with the continuing deforestation around the globe.

Crowther and his team at Yale wanted answers, and so the two-year study, published in Nature in 2015, came to be. The study found that Earth has 3 trillion trees, which is seven times the number of previous estimates, and that since the dawn of agriculture dating back 12,000 years ago, this number has fallen by almost half. About 10 billion trees are lost every year, so planting a billion may be a positive thing, but according to such findings, it’s still not nearly enough.



“I thought they might be disheartened,” Crowther notes, but “they said, ‘Okay, now we have to scale up.’ They didn’t hesitate. They’re contacting billionaires all over the world. It is amazing.”

Plant-for-the-Planet took action, now aiming to plant one trillion trees rather than let discouragement slow them down.

“We’re going to be the victims of climate change. It is in our own self-interest to get children to act,” Finkbeiner says. “At the same time, I don’t think we can give up on this generation of adults and wait 20 or 30 years for our generation to come to power. We don’t have that time. All we can do is push them in the right direction.”

SOURCE: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2017/03/16/teenager-set-to-plant-a-trillion-trees/