A study by environmental scientists claims that prehistoric humans around around six thousand years ago started a wave of global warming due to their land clearing programs. (For background the study states this wave began before the bronze age, writing, and the start of Ancient Egypt). This era is the dawn of agriculture and featured a population boom of 5 million people seven thousand years ago to 27 million people five thousand years ago.
While it is true prehistoric man could do geoengineering, this claim is ludicrous. Look at the table of world population growth. At a ratio of 1:1290 and 1:238, there is no way bronze age man (with a good chunk of the population still in the stone age) could cause any real noticeable climate impact when today's (post-)industrial man's impact is still debated. If prehistoric man was the cause of the warming period at the dawn of the bronze age then today's man would have destroyed the world many times over without a doubt.
The problem with the study was that it was conducted by environmental scientists alone who see everything through a human-environment cause and effect. They are taught that nature is in an equilibrium. The radical and violent climate shifts of Earth's past tell us a completely different story.
1 comment:
It never ceases to amaze how the simple mention of global warming in a news story sets off a tsunami of rhetoric. It generally comes from a very vocal minority that would go to its grave swearing that the sum total of climate science is a liberal plot to enrich Al Gore. Alternately, we are told the Martian ice caps are melting, proof that solar radiation and sunspot cycles — and not greenhouse gases — are the cause of planetary warmups.
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