INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Environment: The capital city of a major power is abandoned as a result of climate change. No, it's not the final scene of 'An Inconvenient Truth.' It's the story of the heart of the Khmer empire — 500 years before the SUV.
At its height, the Khmer Empire was the largest contiguous empire in Southeast Asia. Centered in modern-day Cambodia, its hegemony extended over parts of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Its capital, Angkor Wat, home to 700,000 people, was mysteriously abandoned about 500 years ago, long believed to have been ransacked by an avenging Thai army.
But now a team of archaeologists from the University of Sydney has developed a different theory of the Khmer capital's demise. According to Roland Fletcher, associate professor of archaeology: 'It now appears the city was abandoned during the transition from the medieval warm period to the Little Ice Age.'
Based on satellite radar images, Fletcher says, Angkor Wat 'was the biggest pre-industrial complex on the planet' — 'the Los Angeles or greater New York of its time, covering an area of 1,000-square kilometers' by the time it was abandoned.
Fletcher says new discoveries complemented previous field work that led his team to conclude the city was abandoned when new monsoon patterns, caused by climate change, made the site unsustainable. (And here we thought the SUV caused hurricanes.)
So what brought about this climate change? Rising carbon emissions from belching smokestacks and SUV tailpipes? The Bush administration? Karl Rove? The operative word in Fletcher's assessment is 'pre-industrial.' Try natural forces.
Former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont, chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, has documented the quiet natural and often extreme climate changes Earth has experienced through its long history. Man's contribution has been relatively puny and relatively recent.
Du Pont notes that from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D. Earth experienced the Roman Warming period. Then, from 600 to 900, came the cold period of the Dark Ages. From 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period and then, from 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.
During the Little Ice Age, notes Timothy Ball, a Canadian climatologist who has received death threats for citing how Earth's history doesn't quite jibe with current prophecies of doom, 'there was three feet of ice on the Thames River in London.'
Before the Little Ice Age, according to Du Pont, Eric the Red brought settlers to the aptly named Greenland in 986. The climate there supported the Viking way of life based on cattle, hay, grain and herring for about 300 years, predating both the Industrial Revolution and both the sports utility vehicle and the stretch limousine.
By 1100, a colony of 3,000 people was thriving there, but then came the Little Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the advancing glaciers doomed the Viking colony.
So within human history, Earth's climate has swung between raising cattle in Greenland and ice fishing on the Thames. Earth has long been at the mercy of natural climate change caused by processes that man cannot control. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, and NASA reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades.
In 2005, data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed the polar ice caps of the red planet had been shrinking for the three summers in a row, and Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the simultaneous warming on both planets suggests a more natural cause — the sun.
'The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both earth and Mars,' he said. 'Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance.'
Other scientists have made similar observations, drowned out and vilified by a green gestapo that takes warming and its consequences as a matter of faith. One thing is for certain, though: The SUV is not what doomed Angkor Wat.
At its height, the Khmer Empire was the largest contiguous empire in Southeast Asia. Centered in modern-day Cambodia, its hegemony extended over parts of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Its capital, Angkor Wat, home to 700,000 people, was mysteriously abandoned about 500 years ago, long believed to have been ransacked by an avenging Thai army.
But now a team of archaeologists from the University of Sydney has developed a different theory of the Khmer capital's demise. According to Roland Fletcher, associate professor of archaeology: 'It now appears the city was abandoned during the transition from the medieval warm period to the Little Ice Age.'
Based on satellite radar images, Fletcher says, Angkor Wat 'was the biggest pre-industrial complex on the planet' — 'the Los Angeles or greater New York of its time, covering an area of 1,000-square kilometers' by the time it was abandoned.
Fletcher says new discoveries complemented previous field work that led his team to conclude the city was abandoned when new monsoon patterns, caused by climate change, made the site unsustainable. (And here we thought the SUV caused hurricanes.)
So what brought about this climate change? Rising carbon emissions from belching smokestacks and SUV tailpipes? The Bush administration? Karl Rove? The operative word in Fletcher's assessment is 'pre-industrial.' Try natural forces.
Former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont, chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, has documented the quiet natural and often extreme climate changes Earth has experienced through its long history. Man's contribution has been relatively puny and relatively recent.
Du Pont notes that from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D. Earth experienced the Roman Warming period. Then, from 600 to 900, came the cold period of the Dark Ages. From 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period and then, from 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.
During the Little Ice Age, notes Timothy Ball, a Canadian climatologist who has received death threats for citing how Earth's history doesn't quite jibe with current prophecies of doom, 'there was three feet of ice on the Thames River in London.'
Before the Little Ice Age, according to Du Pont, Eric the Red brought settlers to the aptly named Greenland in 986. The climate there supported the Viking way of life based on cattle, hay, grain and herring for about 300 years, predating both the Industrial Revolution and both the sports utility vehicle and the stretch limousine.
By 1100, a colony of 3,000 people was thriving there, but then came the Little Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and the advancing glaciers doomed the Viking colony.
So within human history, Earth's climate has swung between raising cattle in Greenland and ice fishing on the Thames. Earth has long been at the mercy of natural climate change caused by processes that man cannot control. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, and NASA reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades.
In 2005, data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed the polar ice caps of the red planet had been shrinking for the three summers in a row, and Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the simultaneous warming on both planets suggests a more natural cause — the sun.
'The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both earth and Mars,' he said. 'Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance.'
Other scientists have made similar observations, drowned out and vilified by a green gestapo that takes warming and its consequences as a matter of faith. One thing is for certain, though: The SUV is not what doomed Angkor Wat.
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