Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study
phys.org
phys.org
Also, during more recent times the earth has swung into cold spells that had dire consequences for human populations, such as the Little Ice Age which began in the 1300s and only ended during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It's likely Earth would have continued getting colder had it not been for the mass expelling of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere at that time.
So maybe humans had an impact on the global atmosphere during the second beginning of agriculture, but it's also possible other natural phenomena lead to an increase in CO2 and Methane that just haven't been discovered yet. And as a disclaimer, I personally believe that humans have had a major impact on shaping environments for as long as we inhabited them. I'm just a little skeptical until more research can solidify these findings and explain other changes in global temps in the opposite direction when there were more people and more intensive agriculture.
I hesitate to call it anthropogenic because it’s the opposite of that. I suppose the delay of the cold period counts, though.
a sudden decrease in farm acreage
The moment the farmer dies without an heir, his field is fallow. From that point forward, whatever germinates will grow if it can compete. So pioneer species get free reign and they can spread widely in only a few years.
The little ice age was almost 300 years. From a geologic standpoint or even a glacial one, trees sprouting up all over in a five year time frame is pretty sudden, but the sudden event I was talking about was acreage of unmanaged land.
If you are like me, you're probably wondering what you can do to mitigate some of the effects, while legislation and societal action is important. I also recommend checking out permaculture. Portland state has a great free online course [0]. I like to think of permaculture as ecosystem building, which you can do on a micro level. Enough microecosystems change the larger surrounding ecosystem.
"Making Small Farms Work" by Richard Perkins
and
"Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers" by Mark Shepard
Then there are the books by Bill Mollison that arguably started it all: "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual", and "Introduction to Permaculture"
But of course, when I was done with the course, I looked at where I could make some money doing permaculture. There were, as far as I could see, two ways:
* teach
* do landscape design
The first is much much easier to get into and isn't as hard as the latter. I think that is why you see so many courses.
I have applied permaculture to my land and my life, even though I can't make money from it directly.
A major emphasis of his work is to run his farm as a profitable business while using Permaculture design principles.
Is Regenerative Ag Profitable? Looking at Return on Investments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A0uNUN9UG0&ab_channel=Richa...
And the whole ebook thing is quite frankly off-putting. There is a ton of hive mind/group think in this field which I find very off putting as well... I was at a Native Plant nursery and asked if they had any apple trees. Now as a computer programmer, permaculture is a hobby to me, I don't have the time to study it full time. But if I'm interested in something, I do read as much as I can about the subject. I had just read "Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration" [0] which explores who defines native plants (pesticide industry) and why (to sell more pesticides).
So rather than having a friendly dialog, my request was met with a snarky and dismissive "Apple trees aren't native." I replied, "Define native." knowing this is actually a quite controversial subject.
But honestly permaculture is like any other field. There are some people who identify with their tightly held beliefs and don't question them. It bugs me but it doesn't take away from some of the great things are doing in this field. I've found that the best thing to do is to focus on people not topics.
For example, if someone asks me to learn Javascript. I tell them to focus on people like Eric Elliot, Douglass Crockford, Dan Abramov, etc. You will learn more doing guided learning from what they think is important than some random blog post on arrow functions. In the permaculture world, I recommend reading as much as you can from these people:
- Bill Mollison
- Elliot Coleman
- Mark Shepard
These people are great, and reading from them will produce more of a knowledge than any course. (Still recommend doing a course to meet other people interested in this stuff)... but some of the best recommended reading to me from permies wasn't about permaculture at all:
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows - It is dry but well worth it. Permaculture in a way is systems thinking applied to environment. Understanding the underlying science is the difference between knowing Javascript programming and just knowing one Javascript Framework.
- Hard Rain by Tim Egan - Beautiful anthropological history of the PNW.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/against-sustainab...
- https://grist.org/article/doe-reprint/
- https://e360.yale.edu/features/environmental_failure_a_case_...
- https://monthlyreview.org/2002/09/01/capitalism-and-ecology/
I've found that people willing to dive into the science and areas that influence permaculture is the difference between someone who actually cares and someone who is an instagram farmer. And speaking of which, beware of biodynamics, it's a total pseudoscience [2] that people are starting to conflate that with permaculture. Biodynamic farmers will often tell you stuff like "oh it's like organic farming" or "You can do both permaculture and biodynamics". Maybe. But to me, new age mysticism isn't going to fix the environmental problems we have.
At the end of the day, the best way to learn permaculture is to get your hands dirty and start caring for plants. Even if you live in a city apartment with hardly any sun, treat it as a environment and find plants like peace lily's and devil's ivy that will grow just fine.
[0] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/beyond-the-war-on-invas...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture#Effecti...
https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/...
I think you may be confusing "agenda" with "perspective". He was pushing one perspective: his own, as all authors do. But it's our job as readers to understand the author's perspective and recognize it as such.
Neither history nor anthropology permits storytelling without a perspective. There's always a perspective. Reading for learning means understanding that perspective and determining which aspects (if any) we'll choose to adopt ourselves.
If you're used to science, it can come as a surprise that a person can willfully ignore (not just focus away from, ignore), all but one option for an entire book, and it still be considered an intellectual effort as opposed to a sales pitch or campaign tool.
Of course, sometimes none of the theories can be proven or disproved. So unless you want to leave a black hole you simply choose the theory that fits best, with the risk of it being overturned in the future.
Like having a clima-council which votes to lower or rise the temperature. Would definetly cause conflicts between very hot and cold nations
As an amusing side-note I've pondered whether colder countries could/should/will intentionally spew C02 into the atmosphere to improve their own living situation. There's not a whole lot other countries could do about it except try and capture the C02 which is much more expensive than burning it. Obviously this doesn't take in effect other averse consequences from global warming but it was still an amusing train of thought.
The problem is that stuff is adapted to the way things are. Alaskan trees, bugs, mail services and whatnot are all adapted to snow and ice and such. Bugs go dormant, mailmen hibernate. Libyan mailmen would freeze to death is they got Alaskan weather. Alaskan trees would die if they got Libyan weather. Crops would fail, etc.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
There are a bunch bunch of ideas for how to build a "thermostat." Some of them might be affordable for even a mid sized economy. We could find ourselves in a world where 26 different countries have competing climate control agendas and toolkits. Presumably Vanuatu has a different take that Latvia.
Perhaps this will be the 22nd century's alternative to resource wars.
Running experiments on the planet we live on is usually frowned upon.
You don't like to test in PROD?
I feel that way myself, but I fear we aren't going to end up with any better choices.
We are in a big fucking experiment right now: what happens if we release fucktons of CO2 into the atmosphere? Most of the developed world doesn't give a fuck.
Regular people can't draw their own conclusions based on self study and own research. Scientifically literate is not enough when you rely on someone else's data and conclusions. So the only way is to present some evidence (plausible stuff) and the conclusion in a loud enough and convincing fashion. What you end up with is a great number of people who are genuinely convinced that global warming is a farce. They have scientists on their side so who are they to argue?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/scientist-who-thinks...
Most of the world signed the Paris Agreement. The majority of the developed world thinks man-made climate change is real and is a threat. Conflicting priorities and systems of government that are set up for short term decisions make progress much slower than it should be, but saying that we don't care is very unfair to most of the developed world.
Without another Earth to act as a control group, you could say experimenting is technically impossible.
You could but that hasn’t stopped anyone so far
Oh, wait. Some guy did just that in 2012 [1]. Some people claim it was an absolute success, while some others claim that more studies are needed (but they are not willing to fund them!), or we should not play with the only planet we have, etc, etc.
[1] https://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-danger...
As a reference, I’m doing a mapping of Southern Romania’s forrests as they showed up in a 1860s Austrian map (it’s a hobby project that I work on during my spare time) and it’s crazy when comparing it to more modern times. As early as the 1920s (that is in less than 60 years) 60-to-80% of the forrests from the plane areas had disappeared, and that was not because of the introduction of modern technology, because most of the tree-cutting was being done with good old axes, but only because Romania had entered the international agricultural markets and that land was more economically valuable with grain or cows on it compared to trees (the same thing is now happening in Brazil).
>"I noticed that methane concentrations started decreasing about 10,000 years ago and then reversed direction 5,000 years ago and I also noted that carbon dioxide also started decreasing around 10,000 years ago and then reversed direction about 7,000 years ago," says Ruddiman. "It alerted me that there was something strange about this interglaciation ... the only explanation I could come up with is early agriculture, which put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that was the start of it all."
Merely killing off predators like wolves will contribute to deforestation, because runaway deer populations will stop new tree growth.
We're currently increasing CO2 in the atmosphere by 2 ppm CO2/yr or 350 times faster.
So he's not claiming that pre-modern agriculture had a huge impact on CO2 levels, but that those CO2 levels do have rather large climate impact over time. He does this by comparisons with prior ice age due to similarities in the precession of the Earth. The paper is about MIS19 which is 18 interglacials ago, which provides a good analog in the orbital properties, and which there is CO2 data for in ice cores.
That can then be correlated with the paleoclimate record showing glacial inception happening ~10,000 years after the maximum in MIS19. Using the actual paleoclimate data from MIS19 to control a GCM for MIS1 they run the GCM forwards from the glacial maximum and find that the mean global temperature falls by 1.2K and that the high Arctic cools by 5-6K with 3K falls in temperature over most of the Arctic and Siberia.
That paints a consistent picture where by right before the pre-industrial revolution the Earth should have been cooler and continental shield glaciers should have started forming across Northern Canada and Siberia. And this matches the paleoclimate record of MIS19.
If this seems counter intuitive at all, then your calibration of how much human impact is necessary to produce global climate changes (particularly over thousands of years) is likely off.
That also means that the argument that climate change will be beneficial is correct in a way, but pre-industrial humans already made that impact. We're well beyond the climate impact that would produce a consistent, beneficial boost to global temperature and are blasting the furnace.
Consider Vermont, which was basically clear-cut in the mid 19th century.
Furthermore, "the reason" can usually be whatever you want it to be if you go far enough back in the chain of causations. My hands were wet this morning when I dropped the jelly jar. But that wasn't my fault, it was the water company's fault for supplying the wetness on my hands. Or perhaps it was the Roman's fault for kickstarting the whole thing with aqueducts. But that's really just mankind's fault for existing, so human activity is at fault for my loose grip on the jelly jar today.
Overall, I found this article interesting, and frankly: Go mankind! We averted an ice age and certain death/destruction with farming. If we want to talk about problematic climate change, look at how living on top of a mile of ice works out for our species.
One could very well imagine (and some of us actually know) people that legitimately believe that the climate change we're through is not man made -- they say it cause they believe it, they don't try to knowingly deceive anyone.
It's another thing to say something because you do not trust scientists (including scientific consensus) because e.g. you believe that they extrapolate from incomplete data and not enough understanding, or to prefer this or that fringe researcher to the majority opinion, and another to be in bad faith.
Rather, beliefs appear to be more about identity, virtue signaling, and tribal acceptance.
If true, reason is impotent. To change belief systems, one must use psychology, rhetoric, propaganda, evangelism.
The lesswrong.com crowd is calling this "belief as attire". I don't know what to call "Popperian beliefs" (true until proven false) vs "aspirational beliefs" (make our own reality).
My greatest fear is that my self-image of being a Popperian is actually just aspirational.