ÖM - Welcome Professor Weisss, we’re very glad to have you here.
HW – Thank you very much, it’s my pleasure
ÖM –Açık Radyo listeners are quite familiar with your work through our various programmers talking about global climate change and especially the paleo climate as they call it and we have already talked about your articles, your research on the Akkadian, the end of the Akkadian Empire because of a sudden and abrupt drought. So we would like to ask you about your research and then maybe we could try to connect it with the current drought here in Mesopotamia and especially in Syria which is perhaps gradually becoming more of a threat in Turkey as well.
HW – Well, thank you very much. I am a great fan of Açık Radyo, Open Radio both in Turkey and in America. And I think that it’s an important and useful occasion to speak about this very serious situation faced both in the Middle East and globally. The situation of the climate change that we’re experiencing and how climate changes of the past can help us to understand what is our future.
ÖM – So, first question: How did you notice that the end of the Akkadian Empire was somehow related with the huge drought at that time?
HW – Well, first in the course of our excavations, our archeological excavations in Northern Syria near the Turkish frontier, we noticed that occupation suddenly ceased, terminated, both where we were working and also across the region and eventually we came to understand that this cessation of occupation, the disappearance of occupied settlements extended across into Turkey and to the west, across the Mediterranean and also to the East even to the Indus valley, and even to the southwest to Egypt. That is, we observed a regional, a regionwide disapperance of settlement at this period. And so we began to look for causes that might be effective across such distances. And we began to investigate the climate of that time through various paleo climatic instruments – we call them proxies, that is stand-ins, and substitutes for instruments. That is, in the modern times we have thermometers and barometers but for paleo times we don’t have thermometers. We call it the pre-instrumental period – before there were instruments. So we use proxies such as how much dust or how much of a certain isotope of oxygen which is only associated with dry climate and cool climate. These we locate in five different types of proxy records. We call them archives. They are marine and lake, glacial, speleothem and dendro-climatic.... So, marine is ocean cores, lake are lake cores, ... for instance, Lake Van....
ÖM- What is speleothem
HW – speleothem are caves
ÖM- Caves, yeah
HW – Which have stalagmites and stalactites and we can core them. That is the stalagmites and stalactites are actually annual laminations of drip water from the cave roof which have within them the dissolved records of the water that dripped. And the water drips on to the cave and the water evaporates and it leaves the minerals behind it. So that is a speleothem. So we have marine, lake, speleothem, glacial, and dendroclimatic... Glacials are annual laminations of snowfall and they go back ten thousand or more years. And in the ice laminations is the water from that year in the snow fell. So we can pull a microscopic amount of water out from a dated year. We know the annual date of the water.
ÖM – How about the tree rings?
HW – And of course the tree rings. In dendro, and in Northern Europe and in the South-Western United states we have very very long lived trees, whose annual growth rings overlap with each other so that we can construct a chronology of tree rings going back ten or twelve thousand years. And these tree rings, annual rings containing in them the record of precipitation, temperature, and solar variability all reflected in the variability of the tree ring width pattern. The pattern through time. So those are five archives which tell us about ancient climate. And they’re very very important because they allow us to understand ancient climate as a precursor of what modern climate is all about.
ÖM – The Akkadian empire was the first big empire in Mezopotamia as far as we know – first great empire in the area or perhaps in the history of civilisation as well, and you suddenly discovered that it was gone because of the climate, the dorught...
HW – Yes
ÖM – And you you say that it’s rather in a jiffy to speak in geological terms in a very short time
HW – ... Abruptly
ÖM – ... Abruptly the whole thing collapsed. Elizabeth Kolbert, who interviewed you for one of her books, talks about the curse of Akkad: This text says that, and I quote:
“For the first time since cities were built and founded,
The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,
The inundated tracts produced no fish,
The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,
The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow.
At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart,
One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . .
These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities!
He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,
He who slept in the house, had no burial,
People were flailing at themselves from hunger…”
So this is a real catastrophe, the real disaster. How did you find out about that?
HW – Well in the course of our excavations we located the area within the city we were excavating where the Akkadians literally placed themselves and their palace. When they came from southern Iraq, up to northern Mesopotamia to the region of the Syrian and Turkish border today. Near Nusaybin.
ÖM – Near Nusaybin, yeah.
HW – Near Nusaybin. Just 20 minutes South-east of Nusaybin, and we discovered the way which the Akkadians had come up to this region, conquored the local palace ... took over the local palace, and turned it into an Akkadian administrative center for their control of this very fertile region. Which is the region of Nusaybin, and Qamishli, and across all the way to Ninova, to Mossul, and across to the west in Turkey to Şanlıurfa, you know the Karababa region... So all of this region is a high rainfall, high wheat production region, and this sudden drought which occured 4200 years ago, we proved, is absolutely coincident, synchronous with the abandonment of this region by the Akkadians and also by the local population. Meaning, everybody left!
ÖM – And at first nobody would believe you I believe.
HW – This is true. We had a few difficulties in the beginning convincing my colleauges who had some intellectual challenges in this regard, but the evidence which we have accumulated over the past 20 years is very commanding at this point.
ÖM – And this was when ...when was the research started?
HW – The research was started in the late 80’s and early 90’s and we published our first attention grabbing report in the Journal Science in 1993.
ÖM – 1993. And then in 2012 you wrote another one. You edited a whole book on, which was called ‘The Seven Generations Since the Fall of Akkad’. It was edited by you and here in the preface you say that the regionwide collapse and abandonment at 2254 to 2220 B.C. which was very very important, and there was a mega drought, an abrupt high magnitude centuries-long event in West Asia and globally, with reduced dry farming agro-production, regional abandonment and the fall of Akkad, habitat tracking and the emirate resettlement.
HW – That’s it. You got it.
ÖM – Yeah
HW – You got it. That is the compressed version of the complete catastrophe. Yes. It lasted..
ÖM- It’s unbelievable!...
HW – This drought lasted for 250 to 300 years and actually there were similar mega-droughts still earlier, a couple of thousand years earlier, and there was another one that occured 1000 years later, and these each, of course, had very serious effects which we can observe in the archeological and historical records that are available to us. Particularly in the Middle East where the archeological and the historical records are so very plentiful and high resolution.
ÖM- So this really represents a sort of a paradigm shift – I mean, now we can’t ignore this kind of knowledge any longer, and we have to take urgent steps to prevent it. Now, if you don’t mind, I want to ask you if we can connect the climate change question to the recent civil war in Syria which is a significant disaster in itself. It’s even attained hellish proportions... It’s like the 4th Inner Circle of Dante’s Hell. Now William Polk, who is a very distinguished expert, diplomat, and journalist, recently wrote that four years of devastating drought in Syria beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood. About 200,000 simply abandoned their lands according to the Center for Climate and Security. In some areas all agriculture ceased, in others crop failures reached 75%, and generally as much as 85% of agricultural life stoppped. Many died of thirst or hunger, and hundreds of thousands of Syrian farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies.
And outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to extreme poverty. And they fled to the cities. There they had to compete with other refugees from Iraq, from Palestine... And formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. In the desperation of the times hostilities erupted among the groups competing just to survive. And in one small area, one small city, Dera, southwestern town of Dera, protests against government failure to help them eventually erupted into a huge civil war which we witness today.
HW- Yes I actually agree completely. That is you may recall that at the time the Russian Revolution, there was a famous newspaper from the revolutionaries, that was called ‘Iskra’. Spark. And I’m always reminded of that newspaper and ‘spark’ when I think about this situation because, of course, the farmers in the Syrian Jazira, the farmers in Hawran, in the South-west where Dera is located... all of these persons were very seriously effected, their jobs were lost, their livelihoods were destroyed, agriculture ceased. I saw this myself in Syrian Jazira at the time of the drought. Everything was brown whereas for years previously everything was green. So I think under the circumstances, it was to be expected that people would be angry when their government failed to provide any sustenance for them under these circumstances. And that unfortunately was the situation in Syria, that is the government response was, extremely, shall we say ... weak.
ÖM – And at the same time Polk again says that, Syrian government had set itself upfor catastrophe – we now know that, lured by the high price of wheat on the world market it had sold its strategic reserves in 2006. According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2008 and for the rest of the drought years it had to import enough wheat to keep its citizens alive. It’s crazy I mean.
HW – I would like to point out however, with this opportunity here at Açık Radyo, that this is the ‘spark’. But the spark would never had become a fire unless there were substantial background conditions that provided for that. That is you need to have an undemocratic and esentially oppressive government to have widespread disaffection that is susceptibleto a spark.
ÖM – So, what had begun as the food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religous cause as Polk says. ... So are you still going on with your research in the area, and in Syria as well.
HW – Not on the ground in Syria, of course. But our research is now focusing on the observation of similar conditions in the Mediterranean. And globally at this moment there was a drought 4,200 years ago, and we’re looking at the ways in which populations responded to this abrupt diminishment of precipitation across the Mediterranean and even on the new world, or even in the whole western hemisphere.
Jak Kori – I asked Harvey the other day what kind of courses he was teaching. And one of them, he said, he was doing a course on collapse. It’s not only this collapse. His research I believe is all over the world, looking for in time and different geographies in different times and different geographies to identify the outside causes of collapse, like a drought or a catastrophe or something like it. He has done research on that so his research is now not only on the ground in Syria but all over the world.
ÖM – Yeah, that’s a very important..I was just going to ask about how do you view the recent threat of climate change, especially the climate change in the area, especially for Turkey. Here this last year, especially these past three months or so there has been quite a lot of discussion among scientists, and journalists, about the imminent (yakında vuku bulmasından korkulan) drought in all Turkey. At the Radio, here in this program, we try to keep up with the records of local news outlets especially, and we see that in hundreds of villages, small towns people are praying for rain. How would you evaluate this? It’s officially still in the denying stage... but anyway.
HW – Yeah of course. Yeah, I’m particularly disturbed about this because there is a very significant difference between this current situation and the ways in which climate will be –and is–changing in West Asia, in the Near East, and the ways in which it changed in the past. That is, a fundamental difference is that, first ,the changes of the present are anthropogenic. That is, in their causality, in their nature they have been created and forced by human activities on the surface of the earth. Whereas in the past, these abrupt and major alterations in the climate were generated exclusively by natural forces. Which brings me to the second point, which is so more significant. And that is: In the past, nobody knew what was happening. In the present, we all know what is happening.
ÖM – So, that’s our sole responsibility right now.
HW – Precisely.
ÖM – So what are we going to do? There is a new documentary series. I’ve happened to see the first two episodes of this new series called ‘Years of Living Dangerously’. This is fantastic really. In the first part, Thomas Friedman from The New York Times looks at how the effects of the climate change make people poor, hungry and more prone to conflicts. He travels over here to Turkey and Syria to meet the very failed farmers -turned-fighters, and many of them recall the long drought that ended shortly before Syria’s conflict began. One fighter says that they used to swim in the river and now there’s no river. Friedman is aghast... So, to repeat myself, what are we going to do?
HW – Well, I think the forces of which we are all aware, that is the multitude of scientific data, advise us in great detail as to what the causes of the present rise in mean annual temperature for instance, and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. So all of the causes and the effects are known in great detail. And so it’s the responsibility I believe of citizens and their governments to take the obvious accessible actions which will control the situation if not ameliorate it, or if not, cancel it. That is, the forces of global greenhouse gas accumulation, the endless supply of carbon emmissions that we dump into our atmosphere every day and through our automobiles and our factories, and our energy production and our ceaseless and senseless use of fossil fuels. So these are all things which we are responsible for – we do these, therefore we’re in control of them. And we can either continue along this suicidal path or we can take the appropriate action.
ÖM – Actually during the past five years or so there has been this growing movement against climate change, against especially coal powered plants. They have sort of culminated in the long hot summer of 2013 Gezi Park revolt, I should say, and it is going on. It is the beginning of building a strong movement against this. Only, it didn’t take the form of a struggle against global climate change, but I think it’s on the verge of it. So, let’s hope for the best. I mean this radio station and especially this program has been working on this like mad for I don’t know how many years. Certainly more than 15-16.
HW - You have created a huge awareness for this. But there’s a big difference between awareness and action. Well I think, if you’ll allow me, I think it’s a truth of history that when the people lead, the leaders will follow.
ÖM – Yeah. That’s very true. Well Professor Harvey Weiss we’re very thankful for you for being with us.
HW – It was my great pleasure and honor to be on this radio station.
ÖM – My pleasure and honor too. Thank you very much. Jak Kori many thanks to you too.
JK - Thank you Harvey
HW – My pleasure.
ÖM – Any time.
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