Mongol Empire rode wave of mild climate, but warming now might be tipping region into unequalled drought

Scientists staring at the rings of ancient trees in mountainous central Mongolia think they've already become in the mystery of methods small bands of nomadic Mongol horsemen u . s . to overcome much around the globe inside a length of decades, 800 years back. An upswing from the great leader Genghis Khan and the beginning of the biggest contiguous empire in history was powered with a temporary run of nice weather.

The rings reveal that exactly once the empire rose, the normally cold, arid steppes of central Asia saw their weakest, wettest weather in additional than 1,000 years. Grass production should have grown, as did huge amounts of war horses along with other animals that gave the Mongols their energy. However the tree rings, spanning 1,112 years from 900 to 2011, also exhibit an ominous modern trend. Because the mid-twentieth century, the location has warmed quickly, and also the rings reveal that recent drought years were probably the most extreme within the record -- possibly an unwanted effect of climatic change. Inside a region already tight on water, the droughts have previously assisted spark a brand new migration inside a huge region where individuals so far have resided exactly the same way for hundreds of years, moving herds around and residing in tents. Now, individuals herders are now being driven quickly into metropolitan areas, and there might be greater future upheavals. The research seems within this week's early online edition from the Proceedings from the Nas.

"Before non-renewable fuels, grass and resourcefulness were the fuels for that Mongols and also the cultures around them," stated lead author Neil Pederson, a tree-ring researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Energy flows from the foot of an ecosystem, to an advaced status to human society. To this day, lots of people in Mongolia live much like their forefathers did. But later on, they might face serious conditions."

Within the late 1100s, the Mongol tribes were racked by disarray and internal warfare, however this ended using the sudden ascendance of Genghis (also called Chinggis) Khan in early 1200s. In only a matter of years, he u . s . the tribes into a competent equine-borne military condition that quickly penetrated its neighbors and broadened outward in most directions. Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his sons and grandsons ongoing overcoming and shortly ruled the majority of what grew to become modern Korea, China, Russia, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, Persia, India and also the Mideast. The empire eventually fragmented, however the Mongols' huge geographic achieve as well as their ideas -- an worldwide postal system, organized agriculture research and meritocracy-based civil service amongst other things--formed national edges, languages, cultures and human gene pools with techniques that resound today. Genghis Khan's last ruling descendants went areas of central Asia in to the 20's.

Some scientists have postulated the Mongols broadened simply because they were running harsh weather in your own home--but Pederson and co-workers found the alternative. This Year, Pederson and coauthor Amy Hessl, a tree-ring researcher at West Virginia College, were studying wildfires in Mongolia once they discovered a stand of gnarled, stunted Siberian pines growing from cracks within an old solid-rock lava flow within the Khangai Mountain tops. They understood that on such dry, nearly soil-less surfaces, trees grow very gradually, are exquisitely responsive to yearly weather changes, and could live to fantastic age range.

In a number of expeditions, Pederson, Hessl and co-workers tried the pines' rings, sawing mix-sections from dead individuals, and getting rid of harmless hay-like cores from living ones. They discovered that some trees had resided in excess of 1,a century, and sure could survive another millennium even dead trunks remained largely intact for an additional 1,000 years before decaying. One wood they found had rings returning to around 650 B.C. These yearly rings change with temperature and rain fall, so that they could read past weather by calibrating ring sizes of just living trees with instrumental data from 1959-2009, then evaluating all of them the innards of great importance and older trees. The trees were built with a obvious and startling story to inform. The turbulent years preceding Genghis Khan's rule were stoked by intense drought from 1180 to 1190. Then, from 1211 to 1225 -- exactly coinciding using the empire's meteoric rise--Mongolia saw sustained rain fall and mild warmth never witnessed before or since.

"The transition from extreme drought to extreme moisture immediately strongly indicates that climate performed a job in human occasions," stated Hessl. "It had not been the only real factor, however it should have produced the perfect conditions for any charming leader to emerge from the chaos, develop an military while focusing energy. Where it's arid, unusual moisture produces unusual plant productivity, which means horsepower. Genghis was literally in a position to ride that wave." (Each Mongol warrior had five or even more horses, and ever-moving herds of animals provided almost all food along with other assets. The relaxation most likely relied around the Mongols' brilliant cavalry abilities, wise political controlling and savvy adaptions of urbanized peoples' technologies.)

The tree rings reveal that following the empire's initial expansion, Mongolia's weather switched to its more normal dryness and cold, though with lots of good and the bad within the 100s of years since. The Twentieth and early 21st centuries would be the exception. Within the last 4 decades, temps in areas go up as much 4.5 levels F -- more than the worldwide mean rise of just one degree. And, because the the nineteen nineties, the nation has experienced a number of devastating summer time droughts, frequently then a dzud -- an abnormally lengthy, cold winter. The tree rings reveal that the newest drought, from 2002-2009, compares long and paucity of rain fall simply to individuals from the pre-empire 1120s and 1180s. Possibly more essential: the drought from the 2000s was the most popular within the entire record. The warmth evaporated water saved in soil, ponds and plant life, and, in conjunction with repeated dzuds, devastated animals. The final dzud alone, in '09-10, wiped out a minimum of 8 million creatures and destroyed the livelihoods of numerous herders. Now, displaced Mongol herders have created a brand new invasion pressure -- this time around all headed towards the capital of Ulaanbaatar, that has inflamed to carry up to 50 % the nation's population of three million.

Climate models predict that because the world warms up, warmth in inner Asia is constantly rise substantially faster compared to global mean. Pederson states which means that droughts along with other extreme weather will most likely worsen and be more frequent. This might further reduce animals and hurt the couple of crops the location develops (only one percent of Mongolia is arable land). New mining endeavors along with other industrial activities may employ a few of the lots of people running the countryside -- however these also consume water, which is not obvious where which will originate from.

"This last large drought is a good example of what can happen later on, not only to Mongolia but in many inner Asia," stated Pederson. "The warmth is really a double whammy -- even when rain fall does not change, the landscape will get drier."

Previous studies by others have advanced the concept that climate shifts can alter history. Included in this are occasions like the disappearance from the Maya, the development and fall of Roman imperial energy, and, inside a separate Lamont-brought study, the thirteenth-century collapse of southeast Asia's Angkor civilization. Most concentrate on droughts, surges or any other problems that perhaps have stop empires the brand new study is among the couple of look around the more complicated question how climate may have invigorated one.

The scientists "create a compelling argument that climate performed a job in assisting the Mongol migration," stated David Stahle, a paleoclimatologist in the College of Arkansas that has analyzed the mysterious disappearance from the British Roanoke colony off New York, coinciding using what tree rings show would be a disastrous drought. "But," stated Stahle, "we reside in a ocean of coincidence -- something similar to that's difficult to prove. There might be lots of additional factors. They have provided a remarkably important climate record, and set the concept available, therefore it will stimulate lots of historic and ancient research."

The tree-ring study may be the first inside a related series with a bigger interdisciplinary team dealing with Pederson and Hessl. Hanqin Tian, an ecologist at Auburn College in Alabama who studies modern grasslands, is focusing on models to correlate ancient grass production using the tree-ring records of weather. In coming several weeks, team member Avery Prepare Shinneman, a biologist in the College of Washington, intends to evaluate sediments obtained from the bottoms of Mongolian ponds. These may be read somewhat like tree rings to estimate the abundance of animals with time, via layers of yeast spores living within the dung of creatures this could confirm whether animal populations did indeed boom. The overcoming Mongols left very couple of everything written down that belongs to them, but Nicola Di Cosmo, a historian in the Institute for Advanced Study in Nj and coauthor of the present paper, will study accounts of times left in China, Persia and Europe that may provide further clues.

View the original article here

U.N. report warns environment is at tipping point

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The earth's environmental systems "are being pushed towards their biophysical limits," beyond which loom sudden, irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes, the United Nations Environment Program warned Wednesday.

By Felipe Dana, AP

Brazil's Secretary of Research and Development Programs and Politics, Ministry of Science and Technology, Carlos Nobre, speaks during the launch of U.N. Environment Program Global Environment Outlook 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Wednesday.

By Felipe Dana, AP

Brazil's Secretary of Research and Development Programs and Politics, Ministry of Science and Technology, Carlos Nobre, speaks during the launch of U.N. Environment Program Global Environment Outlook 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Wednesday.

In a 525-page report on the health of the planet, the agency paints a grim picture: The melting of the polar ice caps, desertification in Africa, deforestation of tropical jungles, spiraling use of chemicals and the emptying out of the world's seas are just some of myriad environmental catastrophes posing a threat to life as we know it.

"As human pressures on the earth … accelerate, several critical global, regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded," the report says. "Once these have been passed, abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the life-support functions of the planet are likely to occur, with significant adverse implications for human well-being."

Such adverse implications include rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts, and the collapse of fisheries, said the report, which compiles the work of the past three years by a team of 300 researchers.

The bad news doesn't end there. The report says about 20 percent of vertebrate species are under threat of extinction, coral reefs have declined by 38 percent since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions could double over the next 50 years, and 90 percent of water and fish samples from aquatic environments are contaminated by pesticides.

It adds that of the 90 most crucial environmental goals, little or no progress has been made over the past five years on nearly a third of them, including global warming. Significant progress has been made on just four of the objectives, the report says.

"This is an indictment," UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said at a news conference in Rio De Janeiro, which is to host later this month a U.N. conference on development that protects the environment. "We live in an age of irresponsibility that is also testified and documented in this report.

"In 1992 (when the first of the agency's five reports was released) we talked about the future that was likely to occur. This report 20 years later speaks to the fact that a number of the things that we talked about in the future tense in 1992 have arrived," Steiner said. "Once the tipping point occurs, you don't wake up the next morning and say, 'This is terrible, can we change it?' That is the whole essence of these thresholds. We are condemning people to not having the choice anymore."

Steiner called for immediate action to prevent continued environmental degradation, with its ever-worsening consequences.

"Change is possible," he said, adding that the report includes an analysis of a host of environmental preservation projects that have worked. "Given what we know, we can move in another direction."

The United Nations' upcoming Rio+20 conference on sustainable development would be the ideal forum to spearhead the kind of global action that's needed if the worst is to be avoided, Steiner said.

However, the run-up to June 20-21 conference has been plagued with problems, as developing and developed countries continue to bicker over what the objectives of the event should be.

Speaking in New York on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that negotiations on a final document for the conference have been "quite difficult" but he said he was "cautiously optimistic" that the 193 U.N. member states will reach agreement.

"We live in a world of economic uncertainty, growing inequality and environmental decline," Ban told a news conference at U.N. headquarters. "This (conference) is a once in a generation opportunity. … We need leaders to have political commitment and political courage and vision. Short-term measures will not be the answers. You need to have mid- and longer-term visions for sustainable development."

UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said the agency deliberately scheduled the release of its report to coincide with the run-up to the conference.

"It tells, we hope in a polite way, but in a scientifically honest way, world leaders who are coming in a few weeks' time why they are coming and why they need to define an impressive outcome for everybody in the world," Nuttall said at the Rio news conference.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

View the original article here

Japan's post-tsunami revival plan reaches tipping point (Reuters)

TOKYO (Reuters) – Nine months after a historic magnitude 9.0 earthquake unleashed a deadly tsunami that wreaked havoc across Japan's northeast, the nation, armed with $155 billion in funding, is entering a critical stage of the rebuilding effort.

Damaged railways and major roads are mostly fixed with at least temporary repairs, two-thirds of ruined ports have been restored and 47,000 households moved from emergency shelters to temporary housing.

Of 22 million tonnes of rubble, two-thirds have been cleaned up, but final disposal remains a dangerous challenge because of concerns about radiation that spewed from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

All the recovery efforts were made possible by initial emergency budgets totaling 6 trillion yen ($77.19 billion).

Now Tokyo and local officials must produce a plan to "build better" to give the region, long beset by a shrinking and ageing population and lack of investment, a chance of revival.

The tsunami-hit area accounts for about 6-7 percent of Japan's economic output, but the stakes are high for the entire nation. Policymakers, investors and companies are counting on the rebuilding effort to give the $5 trillion economy a jolt needed to keep it from sliding back into recession under the weight of a global slowdown and fears of contagion from Europe's debt crisis.

People and businesses, pessimistic about the region's future however, are packing up. More than 38,000 residents left the area between March and August, the biggest exodus since 1969. Of those that remain, 180,000 out of the region's 5.7 million residents have filed jobless claims between March and October, 70 percent more than a year earlier.

"The people who evacuated the area after the disaster won't feel compelled to return unless they can find stable jobs, so reconstruction without job creation would be a failure," said Hideo Kumano, chief economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.

"That money will finally flow in is a good news, but it is not a guarantee of a self-sustaining recovery of quake-hit areas."

So far the news is not encouraging. Plans to modernize the struggling fishing industry or move coastal communities to higher ground, a precondition for large-scale rebuilding and investment, have been slow to materialize.

Overwhelmed local bureaucracies, opposition from fishing cooperatives and the need to win the hearts and minds of skeptical residents are getting in the way.

"Unless we can have accords with local people, we cannot proceed with rebuilding projects because there is a possibility of opposition," says a regional official in Miyagi, one of the three prefectures worst hit by the March 11 disaster.

That means it may take months before rebuilding funds start flowing to projects on the ground, local officials say.

OLD BUSINESSES, OLD PEOPLE

The national government is promising five-year tax holidays and light-touch regulation on fishing rights, land use and other issues to those who will invest in special industrial zones in disaster-hit areas. Foreign businesses are also eligible.

Industrial parks focused on automotive parts or medical equipment production as well as renewable energy projects such as wind farms are among ideas proposed by Tokyo.

The process of deciding what to build and where has only just started and only 10 out of 19 municipalities requiring rebuilding in Miyagi prefecture have reconstruction plans ready. In neighboring Iwate, eight out of 12 have such plans.

Reconstruction experts say a shortage of qualified planning professionals is one of the obstacles.

"The fact that many of quake-hit cities and towns are scarcely populated has made it difficult for local officials to create rebuilding plans on their own," said Yoshiyuki Aoki, a senior official of the government's reconstruction office in Tokyo.

He says that, whereas the 1995 Kobe quake hit residential areas constantly under redevelopment, much of the northeast has no recent history of re-zoning and city planning and lacks experts. Tokyo wants to rectify that by sending a team of specialists to help, Aoki says.

Re-establishing the fishing industry is another tough question facing planners.

Cooperatives are defending a system that only loosely ties fishermen with processing firms and retailers, but keeps rivals out and Miyagi governor's initiative to open the business to outsiders got drowned in protests.

Shigeru Tabeta, professor of ocean technology and environment at the University of Tokyo who is assisting with rebuilding of port towns, says preserving the status quo is self-defeating.

Tax breaks and incentives will only work if Japan opens its protected farming and fisheries to foreigners, experts say.

With no magic bullet in sight, spending more on a solid safety net may be the only way to keep communities intact until revitalization plans materialize, says Iwao Sato, sociology of law professor at the University of Tokyo.

His survey of the fishing town of Kamaishi showed more than a third of residents were out of work, compared with a fifth before the quake while the population of self-employed has fallen to 17 percent from 28 percent.

"The government has mostly focused on building seabanks, elevating land levels and other infrastructure development," Sato says. "But more attention is probably needed on supporting the livelihoods of people through direct assistance on employment and homes, or else people will leave."

($1 = 77.7300 Japanese yen)

(Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Matthew Driskill)

View the original article here