So 2000 years ago people also had access to this part of the river. They must have experienced the climate changing too.
Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
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Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#62So 2000 years ago people also had access to this part of the river. They must have experienced the climate changing too.
Doesn't follow.
Eg: the pictured carvings are on collapsed rock shelves, presumeably these were above normal river level when carved and in a two thousand year period the river has undercut the rock shelf and they've colapsed to below the usual river level.
In fact there are many possible reasons why your apparent smug bad faith poo poo climate change comment isn't well considered.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#63Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me
Likely by then catastrophic wars or economic hardship will lead to one or two “resets” and a lot will be lost.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#64The article closes by quoting an historian involved: "Having our rivers back (flooded) and keeping the engravings submerged will help preserve them, even more than our work." Is there a risk to the carvings by being exposed to air rather than the erosive river currents? In colder climates, freezing can erode rocks, but I don't imagine that's relevant here.
Nearly everything old survives best undiscovered. Think of those dinosaur fossil teeth that survived buried for hundreds of millions of years, only to get dug up by a fossil hunter, sold to a collector, lives on the collectors mantlepiece for 40 years, then lives in boxes in the collectors sons attic for 60 years, and finally gets trashed (incinerated, destroying it).
This does not answer the question.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had a Mayan guide when we were in the Yucatan on vacation. He spent quite a bit of time pointing out proofs (as the native Mayans see them) of horses being around the entire time. He claimed to have a college degree in archaeology, but went on a rant about non-Mayan archealogists and their bias against native Mayans. Basically, he saw the disbelief against horses being around the whole time as racially motivated.…
> I'm trying now to remember the proofs he was showing I don't want to sound mean, but without any links to anything, any mentions of books, papers, even mentions of archaeological finds in local newspapers... what you're saying is just a story about someone you met who made some outlandish claims.
Yes. My takeaway from that account wasn't that there is necessary a hidden truth, but that some people do believe there is one and such belief correlates with their identity politics.
The fact that the argument appears to be cut and dry is also testament to the fact that it has been rehearsed many times and shared within that identity community
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the Americans who did the actual westward expansion didn't bother with justification. They saw the land was lightly populated and took it.
>They saw the land was lightly populated and took it. This framing is passive and hides the history that our own government even admits to[1]. The west wasn't simply lightly populated. There were state-sponsored and well documented extermination campaigns that cleared the land for white settlement. 1. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/what-happened-to-the-bison....
The West, other then the coastline itself, is lightly populated now. It was absolutely lightly populated back then.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#67Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me
Look at the letters you just typed. They're an incredibly efficient information transmission technology. By making the minimal energy expenditure of moving your fingers across the keyboard you're able to convey so much of your current emotional state and ideas in your head. While people thousands of year back only had the stone and who knows what other tools to do the same, but at the much larger cost of carving stone, and only with a minimum of effectiveness in conveying their emotional state, which for us, will forever remain unknown.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#68So 2000 years ago people also had access to this part of the river. They must have experienced the climate changing too.
Climate change does not simply cause more severe weather events but also more frequent severe weather events. This means a "once in a century" event can turn into a yearly occurrence. It's also a cumulative process with cascading effects and emergent properties, so you can't just reduce the factors that contribute to the climate crisis and get back to where we were before the same way you a molten candle won't turn back into its original shape when you remove the heat.
A lot of climate science has been dumbed down to "it's getting warmer" in popular media, which isn't wrong, but people misunderstand this as "winters get less cold and summers get warmer" which isn't necessarily the case in every place.
There's more energy in the system. Imagine an intricate network of tiny machines all working in unison (heck, think of a road network with driverless cars if you want) and then making everything run much faster with no regard for physical constraints and mechanical properties. Eventually there will be collisions and those will have effects on other parts of the network and the more complex the initial system is the harder it becomes to predict what will happen exactly but even if you stop increasing the speed and allow for the system to stabilize, it will be very different from how you started and even if you slow it down back to the original speed, the system will look different. If you imagined this as a road network, humanity and other animals are the pedestrians trying to cross the streets and there are no traffic lights. I hope this metaphor also demonstrates how historical changes effectively just slowed down and sped up the traffic a tiny bit (say, going slightly above or under the speed limit). The implications for the system overall and for the pedestrians within are very different.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#69So 2000 years ago people also had access to this part of the river. They must have experienced the climate changing too.
Doesn't follow. Eg: the pictured carvings are on collapsed rock shelves, presumeably these were above normal river level when carved and in a two thousand year period the river has undercut the rock shelf and they've colapsed to below the usual river level. In fact there are many possible reasons why your apparent smug bad faith poo poo climate change comment isn't well considered.
I'm downvoted, but why? I'm simply making the obvious observation - that the river got this low 2000 years ago, but today the drop is blamed on climate change.
> the pictured carvings are on collapsed rock shelves, presumeably these were above normal river level when carved and in a two thousand year period the river has undercut the rock shelf and they've colapsed to below the usual river level.
You presume something that is not expressed in the article. There's nothing about the river undercutting the rock shelf and causing a collapse - that's an act of imagination on your part.
If you simply take out the political, environmental slant (out of the article, and your mind) and just look at what is stated, the most obvious conclusion is that every so often this river drops lower than usual. And that droughts, floods, etc have always been part of life on earth.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#70So 2000 years ago people also had access to this part of the river. They must have experienced the climate changing too.
Climate change does not simply cause more severe weather events but also more frequent severe weather events. This means a "once in a century" event can turn into a yearly occurrence. It's also a cumulative process with cascading effects and emergent properties, so you can't just reduce the factors that contribute to the climate crisis and get back to where we were before the same way you a molten candle won't turn b…
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
However, your answer has 'climate change' baked in. What evidence is there in this article to suggest climate change, rather than an intermittent event that has probably occurred numerous times in the past 2000 years? Why does the article say 'climate change'? Why do you think it? Why was the river low 2000 years ago, in pre-climate change times?
The thing is that there have always been droughts, floods, etc - these were recorded in biblical times. That most people frame 'changing weather' in terms of climate change is a question of psychology and education - but has nothing to do with any evidence anyone can see and verify. We have to simply told to accept the provided 'climate change' explanation.
The weather has always changed - its not running faster now, or at least I don't have any reason to this it is. What is running faster is the level of information being provided on weather.