[....and I've always said that our best hope of surviving the next ice age is global warming.......Ed.]
Published January 20,
2016 FoxNews.com
A new analysis of
ice-core climate data, archaeological evidence and ancient pollen samples is
being used to suggest farming some 7,000 years ago helped put the brakes on a
natural cooling process of the global climate, possibly contributing the warmer
climate seen today.
But the study is
expected to raise a few eyebrows, given there were far fewer people on Earth
back then and industrialization – and the coal-fired power plants that come
with it - was still a long ways off.
A study was the work of
an international team led by William Ruddiman, a University of Virginia climate
scientist, who first grabbed attention a dozen years ago with a controversial
theory that humans altered the climate by burning massive areas of forests to
clear the way for crops and livestock grazing. Dubbed the “early anthropogenic
hypothesis,” Ruddiman and his colleagues found that that carbon dioxide levels
rose beginning 7,000 years ago, and methane began rising 5,000 years ago.
It sparked heated debate
back then and continues to be debated among some climate scientists.
In the latest paper,
Ruddiman and his 11 co-authors from institutions in the United States and
Europe conclude that that accumulating evidence in the past few years,
particularly from ice-core records dating back to 800,000 years ago, show that
an expected cooling period was halted after the advent of large-scale
agriculture. Otherwise, they say, the Earth would have entered the early stages
of a natural ice age, or glaciation period.
“Early farming helped
keep the planet warm,” Ruddiman said in a statement, regarding the study that
appeared in a recent edition of the journal Reviews of Geophysics, published by
the American Geophysical Union.
“After 12 years of
debate about whether the climate of the last several thousand years has been
entirely natural or in considerable part the result of early agriculture,
converging evidence from several scientific disciplines points to a major anthropogenic
influence,” he said.
The Earth naturally
cycles between cool glacial periods and warmer interglacial periods because of
variations in its orbit around the sun. We currently are in an interglacial
period, called the Holocene epoch, which began nearly 12,000 years ago.
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