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When CO2 was ideal Easter Island was hit by severe drought for a century — “far worse than today”

 

Mike W. from Vancouver, Canada

By Jo Nova

Yet more proof that mother nature is far worse than man-made climate change.

The extinction of tall trees and land birds on Easter Island became the apocryphal story of a man-made ecological disaster, but a new technique for estimating rainfall shows that there was a terrible drought starting in 1550AD that lasted for 100 years. This would have been a bit dire on a small island that doesn’t even have a river and relied on a crater lakes.

In recent times, catastrophic climate change has apparently reduced rainfall by 370mm. But starting around 1550AD rainfall declined by a shocking 600 to 800 mm per year. Despite the severe drought the population wasn’t wiped out — their population doesn’t seem to have collapsed. The rainfall shift coincided with many cultural changes and even the development of rock gardens called lithic mulching – where farmers get desperate enough to use rocks as ground cover and a soil improver to keep the evaporation rates down.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02801-4/figures/3

At the same time as the rain declined, the people changed the way they live…

Notable cultural shifts also took place during […]

February 21st, 2026 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The Mayan climate extremes and megadroughts of the Medieval era

Bernard DUPONT: El Castillo Pyramid, western side – Tulum Maya site QR Feb 2020.jpg

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash

By Jo Nova

13 year megadrought during Medieval Warm Period may have finished off the Maya

A slightly spooky new paper shows annual rainfall patterns from a thousand years ago on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. It’s so detailed, they list every drought by year, including 13 unbroken years of drought from 929 to 942AD. It’s a bit like someone unearthed the Maya Bureau of Meteorology records from a thousand years ago (except it’s better, because it’s a rock with no politics).

This is one of the highest-resolution tropical stalagmite records ever published. Each year the stalagmite grew by as much as a millimeter, allowing for a year by year analysis — or indeed 12 datapoints within each year.

During this era of perfect CO2, for some reason that no climate model can explain, the poor sods in Maya suffered through extreme swings from wet to dry, stacked back to back. The climate was chaotic. Droughts were followed by floods. It’s uncannily like “climate extremes” we are told man-made emissions are going to bring.

It is sobering […]

August 20th, 2025 | Tags: , , , | Category: Anthropology, Global Warming, Holocene | Print This Post Print This Post | |

What if Easter Island was a sustainable success story instead of an ecocidal disaster?

Photo by Horacio_Fernandez

By Jo Nova

It was always the Posterchild Catastrophe of Doomsters, but two new studies suggest Easter Island might be (mostly) a story of remarkable human achievement instead.

In environmentalist legends, Easter Island was The Ecocide: they built nearly 1,000 giant stone statues but stupidly chopped down all its trees, and died in horrible wars. It was the sorry tale of ecological collapse and deforestation that we could tell small children at bedtime. After the last trees were sliced and diced, a catastrophe of horrors surely followed as the population of 15,000 people ran out of food and no one could make a boat to escape. Obsidian flakes across the island were interpreted as weapons of war and one anthropologist claimed there was a huge civil war that ended in the battle of 1680. Environmental hell on Earth was here…

But new research on the genomes of some islanders suggests that the population was probably small all along. When the Europeans arrived there were only about 3,000 people, and a genetic analysis suggests there are no signs of a recent collapse in the population. Another study of the fields suggests they made some very sophisticated […]

September 20th, 2024 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Rewriting the dawn of civilization

If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.

Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged in a circle. Around 11,600 years ago hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.

There are plenty of mysteries on this hill. Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings of towers. The people apparently, unthinkably really, were nomadic, as far as we know, they had no wheels, and no beasts of burden. True hunter gatherers, whose first heavy building project was not a home to fend off the elements, but a religious sacred site.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised, after all, we know the pyramids, the largest and oldest surviving buildings didn’t house people or grain either — the only humans they keep warm were dead ones. In a sense, the theme repeats. It takes extraordinary expertise and effort to move tons of […]

January 2nd, 2012 | Tags: , | Category: Anthropology | Print This Post Print This Post | |