Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods

cnn.com ^ | August 18, 2009 | Shelby Lin Erdman

[Free ThinkerNY]

(CNN) -- Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth's climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Primitive slash-and-burn agriculture permanently changed Earth's climate, according to a new study.

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia's Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate.

Lead study author William Ruddiman is a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a climate scientist.

"It seems like a common-sense idea that there weren't enough people around 5, 6, 7,000 years ago to have any significant impact on climate. But if you allow for the fact that those people, person by person, had something like 10 times as much of an effect or cleared 10 times as much land as people do today on average, that bumps up the effect of those earlier farmers considerably, and it does make them a factor in contributing to the rise of greenhouse gasses," Ruddiman said.

Ruddiman said that starting thousands of years ago, people would burn down a forest, poke a hole in the soil between the stumps, drop seeds in the holes and grow a crop on that land until the nutrients were tapped out of the soil. Then they would move on.

"And they'd burn down another patch of forest and another and another. They might do that five times in a 20-year period," he said.

[colorado tanker]

This isn't the paper, but it summarizes it:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/co2_report_july_09.pdf

[SunkenCiv]

The political seduction of the sciences continues.

[Teacher317]

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia's Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere.

Absolute horse-puckey. Ancient man had no need to burn forests, since space was abundant. There were no suburbs and urban areas to work around. Forests were an incredibly valuable resource, for meat, building materials, and firewood. With no global scarcity of space for farming, there's no reason whatsoever for them to burn their resources to find something that was already plentiful: open ground.

(And, if I recall correctly, there are more trees in the West today than a century ago.)

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !