National Geographic reports that climate change can be very hard on young people. And you may be thinking yes, there’s a lot of debilitating despair among true believers in man-made warming, especially teens, and no surprise when they’re continually bombarded with alarmist headlines. Or you might be thinking yes, foolish climate policies mean young people realize they face an impoverished future. And you’d be right on both counts, but it’s not what this story refers to. National Geographic recently said that shortly before being whacked by the Inca, the Chimú of northern Peru sacrificed hundreds of children to stop flooding events tied to El Niño rains. Which forced NG to blurt out the inconvenient truth that “While many scientists believe the impact of El Niño cycles are increasingly exacerbated by climate change, archaeological evidence shows the climate phenomenon has been severely affecting life in the region for more than a thousand years”. Good heavens. You mean natural climate change leading to mass panic, apocalyptic cults and terrible policy is nothing new?

As a rule National Geographic is totally woke on climate. And the piece even starts:

“Peru is currently suffering one of the worst dengue outbreaks on record, with more than 170,000 Peruvians suffering from the mosquito-borne virus and more than 225 dead. The outbreak is driven in part by unusually wet conditions caused by the climate phenomenon known as El Niño.”

Actually El Niño is a cyclical phenomenon of very long standing so perhaps they don’t mean “climate change” when they say climate, or are having it both ways. But NG is also pretty woke on other stuff including this story’s reluctance to condemn people for murdering kids and, in this case, baby llamas as well. It included this morsel:

“’Sacrifices are very carefully constructed negotiations and forms of communication with the supernatural,’ says Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University. ‘It’s the Chimú interacting with the cosmos as they understood it.’”

Also known as a slashing strike to their chests before tossing them onto some slaughtered “crias”. (We could also say something about how the Nazis were also “interacting with the cosmos as they understood it” if Godwin’s law didn’t forbid it.)

NG then quoted another expert’s antiseptic view that this amount of child murder “would have been a massive investment on behalf of the state”. To which we retort that the kids were the ones incurring the massive costs.

The woke compulsion to justify such conduct need not detain us, beyond quoting Wikipedia’s attempted whitewash of the Aztec version of this evil brutality that “A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview… Human sacrifice was in this sense the highest level of an entire panoply of offerings through which the Aztecs sought to repay their debt to the gods” and “the sacrificial role entailed a great deal of social expectation and a certain degree of acquiescence” followed by an admission that “Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, a Mexica descendant and the author of Codex Ixtlilxochitl, estimated that one in five children of the Mexica subjects was killed annually.” Ah, the wisdom of the ancients, and the rich tapestry of multiculturalism.

The whole thrust of the piece is to emphasize that there is nothing unusual about today’s conditions except that child sacrifice has been mostly stamped out in the world due to, well, the same Western imperialism that largely abolished slavery. The piece speaks of “acts of ritual child sacrifice unprecedented in world history” but anyone who knows anything about world history as it really unfolded is aware that human sacrifice, including that of children, has been grotesquely common from Carthage to China, and from Tenochtitlan to Tanzania.

So has bad weather. And variable weather. Indeed, the piece includes a chart of “El Niño flood intensity” that dares show it worse in 750 AD than today, to indicate a “medieval anomaly” when it was drier, not that there was a Medieval Warm Period or anything, you understand, then a jagged line of dramatic variability all the way up to the present.

One more thing. Yet another anthropologist contributed the thought:

“that the Chimú may have considered their children among the most valuable offerings they could present to the gods. ‘You’re sacrificing the future and all that potential,’ she says. ‘All of the energy and effort that’s gone into continuing your family, continuing your society into the future – you’re taking that away when you take a child.’”

Good point. So let’s not drive our own young people into paralytic despair or reckless lawbreaking by peddling fables that by slashing apart internal combustion engines, capitalism and free speech we can appease the gods we have offended with our CO2.