Posted by
Catmman on Thursday, November 20, 2008 7:51:11 PM
No longer content to blame
only the United States for climatological catastrophe, Al Gore writes this little
blog post about some study on the collapse of the Maya civilisation:
A new study suggests the Mayan civilization might have collapsed due to environmental disasters:
"'These models suggest that as ecosystems were destroyed by mismanagement or were transformed by global climatic shifts, the depletion of agricultural and wild foods eventually contributed to the failure of the Maya sociopolitical system,' writes environmental archaeologist Kitty Emery of the Florida Museum of Natural History in the current Human Ecology journal."
As we move towards solving the climate crisis, we need to remember the consequences to civilizations that refused to take environmental concerns seriously.
If you haven’t read already read it, take a look at Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse.
I am no archaeologist, nor am I a history professor, though I have watched about a half dozen History Channel shows on the Maya and am pretty good with a internet search engine. Additionally, I'm pretty sure I have more college credit than Al Gore, but even if I don't I'm still smarter than he, but I digress.
It is possible that the Maya did indeed suffer from
some type of ecological problem which hastened their collapse as a civilisation. One recent theory states the area the Maya populated may have suffered from a protracted drought. This would indeed be an ecological disaster. To add to the confusion is the fact that some
88 different theories or variations of theories have been postulated as to the collapse of the Maya, none of which has been proven or which answers the question once and for all, "What happened to the Maya?"
What Al Gore is doing though is completely disengenuous. He is taking an event which occurred over 1000 years ago and attempts to equate possible ecological problems with his current alarmism on global warming: there was some type of "ecological collapse" which caused the Maya to disappear; we (current history) are suffering from "climate change", if we don't do something then we'll disappear. I'm sure there is some type of moniker to attache to Gore's illogic but like I said, I'm no professorial type (though I could play one on TV, I do wear glasses). Ironically, this is an attack angle global warming skeptics have used against Gore himself. Skeptics (such as myself) say we should look at the climatological history of the planet, see if there are any trends in climate, are there climate shifts, and if so what happened? Gore and his acolytes have refused to do this clinging bitterly to their computer models as a Pennsylvania Republican does to his bible and guns.
Side Note: It is also interesting to note there are over 88 different theories on the collapse of the Maya - none of which has been proven or quantified. Al Gore holds to one single theory of climate change - anthropogenic (man-made, driven by industrial CO2 emission) - which has also not been proven or reliably quantified. Yet this single theory we are told to hold to by Gore himself. A theory which doesn't stand up under real-world scientific observation or analysis of the aforementioned planetary history.
Gore also places the blame of possible ecologic collapse of the Maya on their own limited knowledge of nature and science. As brilliant as the Maya were let's face it, they didn't invent the plasma TV. Heck, they didn't even have electricity! Perhaps the Maya did overfarm or over hunt the land. The Maya though were at least a partially (probably mostly) agrarian society and it's hard to believe after farming the same lands for hundreds of years that they didn't know what they were doing. There could have been some kind of uprising, war, pestilence, invasion, no one knows - but Al Gore knows what he believes - the Maya destroyed their ecosystem, they perished. Must have been those damn Maya Humvees...
Maybe the ruling class of the Maya got to comfortable. Maybe fewer and fewer farmers and hunters were doing all the work for more and more "priests" and "slave girls" and they simply could not sustain a population where only part produced and the other part mooched? Maybe aliens from Al Gore's home world stopped by, showed them the wonders of government control of energy production and the Maya all threw themselves off a cliff?
I suppose my point is that Al Gore has no shame. He points to history as a warning of what ecological disaster could do. Fine. We skeptics try pointing Al Gore to climatological history and he runs to his SKYNET War Room and looks at computer models some more and polishes his Nobel Prize and Oscar.
Of course anyone so inclined to listen to Al Gore when it comes to the history of a civilisation should at least know: former vice-president Gore (and the man who ran for the nations' highest office in 2000)
didn't know who the Founders were on a tour of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home. Until I see Al Gore identify a picture of George Washington (in public and for the record) he needs to shut the heck up on history as well as climate.