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Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
- j-bos 3y agoDo these articles ever link to a comprehensive gallery of photos? Or are those selectively published?
- woliveirajr 3y agoEngravings that are 2,000 years old: so the river was (at least) this low without the current climate change, no?
- MrRolleyes 3y agoOr it changed path, which is not terribly unusual.
- Belopolye 3y agoRivers change course all of the time for reasons unrelated to climate change. It’s entirely likely that the Amazon was some distance from this site 2,000 years ago.
- irrational 3y agoThere have been droughts in the past. But a drought in the past would be no proof that climate change is not real.
- vasdae 3y agoTherefore, a drought in the present would be no proof that climate change is real.
- bcrosby95 3y agoBecause the only proof we currently have of climate change is a drought.
- blackoil 3y agoA single draught isn't enough proof. Frequency of draughts can be indivative. Also, natural climate change also occurs, the current one is man made.
- nextaccountic 3y agoYou're entirely right. But the evidence is not a single drought, it's a staggering combination of many events that show things are changing in a drastic way. Anyway it's also important to point out that the climate has changed before, but during humanity's existence it never changed this quickly: it looked more like this https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ which describes changes along thousands of years rather than a century. The derivative of in respect to time is just to steep. Another thing to consider is that quickly changing environmental conditions is often associated with extinction events. We are in the middle of one such event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction but maybe one can say it's okay; on a geological scale, such disasters this happens all the time. The question is, maybe, to ask what will happen to us and the things we care about.
- swatcoder 3y agoI'm going to generously assume that you're asking a sincere question and not trying some tired political baiting, even though you mentioned climate change out of nowhere. Yes, rivers are extremely dynamic -- they run dry, flood, and change course over time. Often, those changes are dramatic and oscillatory so the same path may repeatedly run dry or wet over periods of years, decades, centuries, millennia, and longer. This is why we can often predict where droughts and floods are likely to recur, without precise timing of when. None of that has anything to do with climate change. I hope this answered your question!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- woliveirajr 3y agoYes, it was a real question. "Climate change" didn't come in vain: there are many news using small events as a final proof of a new ice / greenhouse / warm / climate change era. So, can the fact of something happening in the past be a proof of something ? And yes, your reply was a good one. Assume "good faith" should be the norm to a open and sincere debate... Thanks!
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoRivers and their tributaries change paths all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBivwxBgdPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBivwxBgdPQ
- IKantRead 3y agoThis is a good opportunity to point out this strategy of climate denial, and why it is not a rational approach to refuting climate change. Let's suppose that all the other commenters are wrong, that the river has not changed course in the past. The implication, from a probabilistic perspective is that P(evidence|climate change) is the same as P(evidence| natural variation), and your implied assumption is that because your prior belief that no climate change is more likely than climate change, then this works ultimately as evidence in favor that there is no climate change. The reason this does not yield interesting results, even if all these other assumptions we're making hold, is because the hypothesis of climate change doesn't simply explain this one observation, it explain an enormous range of phenomena. To explain away all of the observations explained by climate change you end up building a huge list of different hypotheses to explain away each fact. Even if individually these alternate hypothesis do explain each piece of evidence better (which in practice they often don't), and even if your prior for all of these other hypotheses is higher than climate change, because climate change is a single hypothesis that explains many observations, the joint probability of the individual hypothesis quickly becomes much lower than the climate change hypothesis. In order to effectively argue against climate change you would need a competing singular hypothesis (or small set of very likely hypotheses) that ultimate do a better job explaining all of the observations we have collected. I don't know if this fallacy has a name, but it sure should since it comes up in a lot of arguments about systemic problems.
- flir 3y agoI don't think it's a fallacy, as such - it's more like a wilful failure to apply Occam's Razor. Great comment, by the way.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago> “inestimable" value in understanding the first people who inhabited the region It is not from the first people in the area. It is previous people in the area.
- ViktorRay 3y agoOh 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
- isk517 3y agoDepending on how well digital records are preserved I think future people might run into the opposite problem, so much information that there is absolutely no mystery about what people thought and believed.
- askonomm 3y agoEven with all the information at our fingertips, I still don't know what a person dreams of, hopes for, cries about, longs for, and ultimately, who the person really, truly, is, because us humans are all too good at sharing everything, but the truth of our humanity, the things that make us vulnerable, so we invent a shallow shell of a personality over the years to protect ourselves and thus we put out there only that we think is acceptable to put out there all while remaining in solitude with our actual self. I wish it would be different.
- skylurk 3y agoand on the inside of that shell, we're all pretty much the same...
- isk517 3y agoLooking at Roman graffiti from 2000 years ago does pretty much confirm this.
- username135 3y agoCocks. Lots of cocks.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoPeople generally dont know it, but the facts/debate around the sophistication of populations thousands of years ago, and how those vary across geographies, is extremely political. There is generally an unseen hand that dictates the narrative around the distant human past. You can pull the facts together, but the full picture is almost never presented cohesively to the non academic population.
- subw00f 3y agoHow so?
- irrational 3y agoLike horses in the Americas. There is a narrative that horses were in the Americas, then died off, then were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors. But, there is sporadic evidence that horses did exist in the Americas the entire time.
- skylurk 3y agoMind sharing a link to that evidence?
- flybrand 3y agoYes, or a book?
- margalabargala 3y agoA representative example of the sporadic evidence mentioned is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017332
- jtbayly 3y agoThat, sir, was good fun!
- 3y ago
- mdkdog 3y agoin Italy there are "the stones of famine". not that old but interesting anyway. one reads "if you see me you must be crying". https://blog.3bee.com/pietre-della-fame-siccita/ https://blog.3bee.com/pietre-della-fame-siccita/ sorry... can't find english version.
- civilitty 3y agoAlso known as hunger stones in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone They're all over central Europe.
- nescioquid 3y agoThe 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.
- londons_explore 3y agoNearly 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).
- guerrilla 3y agoThis does not answer the question.
- pvaldes 3y agoEven more extraordinary; ancient engravings submerged for years, without a trace of life growing over them.
- leecoursey 3y agoI pasted the title of this post into DALL-E 3 and got this: https://www.bing.com/images/create/drought-in-brazil27s-amazon-reveals-ancient-engravi/6539a6e8167c4337b085a723094d5f0f?id=ARidKIVsOQ2b0rI3LBVSwA%3d%3d&view=detailv2&idpp=genimg&FORM=GCRIDP&mode=overlay https://www.bing.com/images/create/drought-in-brazil27s-amaz...
- bowmessage 3y agoOK? Not sure how this relates to TFA.
- verisimi 3y agoSo 2000 years ago people also had access to this part of the river. They must have experienced the climate changing too.
- defrost 3y agoDoesn'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.
- verisimi 3y agoI'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.
- defrost 3y ago> I'm downvoted, but why? No idea, I was also downvoted by someone, it's not something I fuss about; you'd have to ask the downvoters. > You presume something that is not expressed in the article. It's right there in the pictures, layered strata, rock shelf, carvings on rock collapsed off of the shelf. It's a pretty basic geological observation. > I'm simply making the obvious observation - that the river got this low 2000 years ago, That's a shallow conclusion, geologically speaking .. a leap of "can't think of anything else". There are many possible reasons strata | water relationships might alter over the course of two thousand years. I've fleshed out one. > take out the political, environmental slant (out of the article, and your mind) There you go with the poor reasoning and shoddy conclusions based on projected assumption again. My background is geophysics and my two comments are related to geology and timescales.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]