In an absent-minded fit of enthusiasm, National Geographic burbles about “What We Can Learn from Ancient Societies About Disaster-Proofing Our Cities”. Of course it’s pitched as useful advice as our weather gets worse than the worst thing ever: “Our ancestors knew how to use nature to their benefit, keep landscapes healthy, and rely on strong community ties. Relearning those old lessons could now help us better prepare for the disasters of the future – which are poised to cause more damage than ever.” No. Not unless you mean because we’re so much more numerous and wealthy that the same old same old weather now destroys more of our stuff (even while killing fewer of us). But what it reveals, even states up-front, is that there’s always been bad weather. For instance “Earthquakes, hurricanes, and wildfires are natural phenomena that can become disastrous, but just how severely they affect us depends on how we prepare for and respond to them” rather gives the lie to recent claims like those we ridiculed last month that the ground never shook until we invented climate.
For instance, they write:
“Inca masons used mortar-free, precisely fitted, irregularly shaped stones that could move and settle back into position. Traditional Japanese wooden constructions featured a massive central wooden post that functioned similarly to the features that help today’s skyscrapers withstand shaking ground movement. And a new understanding of ancient Roman concrete suggests that it became stronger over time and was, to a degree, self-healing, with inclusions that reacted with water to stop cracks from propagating.”
Climate dogma is strong with this one. So it insists that:
“Around the world, flooding has become more dangerous as climate change intensifies rainfall and more people live along coastlines that are vulnerable to floods and hurricanes. But some ancient societies used overflowing rivers to their benefit. Rather than confining and directing water into a narrow space, which can create powerful torrents, flood waters were given room to spread out over large areas.”
And it’s remarkable how when an urban flood happens, it becomes plain that our dopey municipal planning and Promethean capacity to put bad ideas into practice is making floods seem more dangerous when they’re actually not. And how journalists can’t see the forest for the allegedly blazing trees. Even though the wisdom of the ancestors is de rigeur:
“Indigenous Australian peoples, for instance, used small, controlled fires to prevent larger ones. This preventative measure helped control the amount of fire-fueling brush that accumulated on the forest floor.”
Whereas we suppressed fires until they were bound to be huge when they happened. Duh.
Naturally they also go after rugged individualism:
“Today’s popular survivalist culture focuses on individual stockpiling and heroic solo acts. But the historical record shows that community cooperation, not self-reliance, makes those experiencing a disaster likelier to survive and recover. Slow and systematic does not make a good movie, but it is how people have always recovered from disaster. After Europeans arrived in North America, bringing conquest and disease…”
Yeah yeah yeah.
We don’t want to get drawn too far afield here, including to a Phys.org piece about how “Lost ‘mega-escarpment’ across ancient USA may explain Grand Canyon’s missing billion years” which we confess we hadn’t realized were missing. But it’s kind of hard to write “The study, led by the University of Southampton in the UK, proposes that a vast ‘great escarpment’ of steep rocky cliffs formed when the supercontinent Rodinia broke apart 800 million years ago” and then go back to saying geology was stable until CO2 came from a chimney.
Or, again from Phys.org, that “Salt may have helped turn Earth into a frozen world 700 million years ago” and not notice that a lot of weird, often scary stuff has been happening climate-wise for a very long time indeed and CO2 wasn’t the control knob or even lack-of-control knob. Though give them credit: that piece managed to say:
“The salt-covered state was also harder to escape from. A much greater increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide was needed to melt the ice than in the version without salt.”
But in addition to the usual call for more research by the people who just did that bit, the piece says of the hypothesis that salt left behind by freezing water increased albedo:
“If the effect survives those more detailed tests, salt precipitation could prove to have been an overlooked player in one of the most dramatic climate transformations in Earth’s history.”
Whose very existence is a challenge to current orthodoxy.
While National Geographic tries to turn past bad weather into evidence that there never used to be bad weather, we offer a disquieting final thought. Evidently our ancestors were not dolts when it came to things like storms and earthquakes. But we are, so the enormous advances in materials and engineering have left us worse off due to the precipitous retreat in good sense.
