According to Lizzie Wade in “How To Survive Climate Change,” an unfortunately offline article in Archaeology (March/April 2018), the Moche were a South American empire in which the leadership depended on their communications and propitiation of the gods
Then climate change came in the form of droughts.
The Moche began to falter. Cities turned away from traditional Moche rituals and architecture, and new ceramic styles sprang up, [archaeologist Michele Koons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science] says. By the time El Purgatorio [a city located in what is now Peru] was built, around A.D. 700, after about 150 years of climate chaos, the Moche had definitively lost their grip within the southern part of their territory, which had once extended to just north of the Casma Valley. “If you have a government that is built on claiming to have control over what seem to be supernatural events, climate change can lead to real political instability, [Clemson University archaeologist Melissa] Vogel says. People start to say, ‘You’re not doing your job. You told us you could take care of us.
Vogel thinks the people living in the Casma Valley saw the need to do things differently. “They’re taking their lives back,” she says.[1]
They were succeeded by the Casma in Peru, who were less interested in the gods.
That really rings a bell for me. A substantial chunk of the United States, in denying that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, has effectively withdrawn from science. Where will they go? Religion, of course.
I wonder how long before a major American city is substantially affected by climate change. Will the deniers apologize? No. I foresee your big ol’ religious revival, instead, where they’ll try to pray away the problem.
And that’ll be a heckuva mess.
1Typos almost certainly mine.
