Elizabeth Shogren has an interesting short piece on Weekend Edition today. It’s about water. Water and drought. 740 years ago.
We’ve all seen pictures of the Anasazi ruins in Colorado. Perhaps you’ve been there and wondered — both at the magnificence of the structures, and at their abandonment. Researchers think the answer is the problem coming around again….
… the reason was climate change. A major drought hit the area in the 1270s. …research from one of the villages, Sand Canyon Pueblo, shows that the drought destroyed the people’s ability to grow corn to feed themselves and their turkey flocks. They were forced to revert to hunting and gathering.
Research done by others, examining tree-ring chronology — wide rings mean wet years — tells a cooberative story.
They sampled the oldest trees they could find — dead and alive — and used them to estimate stream flows all the way back to the year 762. Their results show that the droughts over the last hundred years weren’t as severe or as long as earlier droughts. And in fact, the first part of the 20th century was unusually wet.
“Not only was it wet in the context of 100 years, but there was not a wet period like that for at least 400 years,” Woodhouse says.
That has major ramifications for modern people who rely on the Colorado River for water. The laws that are used to divvy up the river assume that the extremely wet period was normal.
Woodhouse says the lesson from the tree rings is that longer dry spells, like the one that chased the pueblo farmers from their villages, could return.
Some experts believe they already have.
Quite apart from CO2 abatement, energy-use reduction and other “slow it down” ideas and actions, major changes are on the way; in fact have arrived in many parts of the world. Americans will not escape. Per usual, those with certain psychological profiles will find ways to turn misery to profit, ensuring their own comfort and safety at the expense and suffering of others. It’s up to those of us with a different persuasion to find mutual ways to recognize the risks, getting out of the way when we can — leaving our own, not quite as graceful ghost towns — reshaping public attitudes and policies to be ready, to share the burden, and the joy of lives still possible, in the coming trials.
[The Climate Connections link is one worth having in your favorites.]