Collapse of Liangzhu and other Neolithic cultures in response to climate change
science.org
science.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China) for the curious.
That would be very frustrating having your ancestors complain of too much water and you’re living through a ‘mega drought’. Then repeated swings.
4400 years ago, when this collapse happened, Egyptians had already finished building all three Giza pyramids. Mespotamians and Harappans had built cities for a thousand years, and the former had been writing for hundreds. But the paper says, "Of all Neolithic cultures, the Liangzhu culture was, perhaps, the most materially and technologically advanced".
The time it took to get them barely-functioning, and the time that it's going to take to get them fully restored is concerning. I believe that we may be able to adapt to long-term, slow-moving catastrophes, that we can all see coming, and have all agreed are important to deal with.
Unfortunately, the interests of the people who will be doing the work/paying for people to do the work rarely align in that direction - or stay aligned for the years and decades that it takes to get these solutions built out.
I thought that was the point of climate change, that there will lots of 'tons of unexpected' climate events happening?
There was no danger to Vancouver. It's a port city, that could always be supplied by I-5. There was a lot of danger to Chilliwack, if Highway 1 could not be saved (Which, thankfully, did not turn out to be the case).
My parents live in Chilliwack. It was a really scary week for them, between their need for prescription medication and animal feed.
I feel like this is equally evidence for incredible preparedness and flexibility though? The fact that such a major event was only scary for a week seems like a good thing? Even in a perfect world, there will be extreme weather events, and if people can't survive a week in their homes without outside help, that seems like the problem rather than evidence that we can't adapt to disaster. I assume your parents will be sure to stock up on certain essentials going forward.
It was scary for a week because they were down to a single remaining point of failure (Abbotsford pumping station). If that station failed (which was quite possible, due to rising floodwaters), the Fraser river would have flooded the valley, and Highway 1 would have been... Gone. Not 'flooded for a week', but 'flooded permanently'.
On the other side of the city, mudslides destroyed bridges on the Coquihalla highway - which will take at least 2 months to be made passable - and things won't be back to normal for another year.
Had the pumping station failed, and the highway flooded, it's entirely unclear what anyone could have done in that situation to keep Chilliwack supplied over the next two months.
Certainly folks could be evacuated or supplied with essentials if it came to that. They did so as far away as Afghanistan.
It would require some adjustment and dealing with adversity, but your comment makes it sound like everyone would starve to death and be found having eaten each other or something if the roads were out for a week.
That is exactly what scares me most.
> Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths.
Leading to greater collapses with worse consequences
And not like those 8 billion mouths that currently need feeding are going to go quietly into that dark night if something starts to go wrong.
Further, increased hyper-specialization means fewer and fewer of the population is capable of engaging in productive behavior when the systems fail. (Twitch streamers cannot rapidly be recruited to help with electrical maintenance, whereas the average neolithic flood victim is approximately as useful as any other.)
Further, our social technology appears to be barely chugging along, with people more atomized and the social fabric fraying, meaning falling levels of trust and fewer connections, so coordinating responses to...anything is becoming increasingly difficult.
Now, about 60% of the surface area is cultivated. Most of that (80%, so half of the country all in all) is used to grow pig feed. A lot (most, I think) of that meat is exported, in exchange for money - which was always very bad sustenance for pigs and people alike, and, these days, is digital, so in the sense that it "exists" at all, does so in the imagination of sand that was tricked into thinking.
There are many adjectives one could use to describe this situation. "Resilient" isn't one of them.
Danish people know that neighboring nations won't wage war in the near future and can afford to be several steps removed from survival considerations.
I don't think, however, that Denmark is irresilient. The same supply chain you are worried to be too dependent from has to be quite robust for the country to rely on that. Apart from sudden and rapid events I bet that same supply chain will handle well medium/slow changes like climate change.
Absent frequent disruptions, markets do not optimize for robustness; they optimize for efficiency and profit. So no, I don't agree that these supply chains are robust. It's like arguing "life on Earth evolved to be dependent on oxygen, therefore oxygen must be everywhere in the universe" (not remotely true); classic overfitting.
Two of those approaches are about as old as agriculture. In the modern day you have people saying that (1) variable rainfall in California is an emergency, but also (2) we shouldn't build aqueducts because that would be expensive.
Romans made them look cheap, reliable, and ornate enough to last for hundreds of decades.
And then you find out that another country wants to pipe water from that exact same place.
It seems modern expectations suggest that the solution always exists, we just need to be clever enough to find it (or 'technology' will just solve it somehow)
Infinite water is never the goal anyway - it was water for the density of demand from areas which could not use it all anyway like the snow melts in the mountains - where all of it not soaked up literally rolls away. Seriously what is with this trend of Malthusian lazy nihilism? Your body may inevitably start to stink again but that is no excuse to never wash it.