This new research is definitely intriguing, but at the same time I think it's fair to be skeptical of this new science. During the times of increase in global temperatures, human populations are estimated to be between 5 to 20 million for the whole planet. That is a very low density. Not to mention human farming began before the Younger Dryas (a sudden return to cold temperatures), which briefly ended agriculture for over a millennia.
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.
but.. it wouldn't happen that way (like throwing a switch). Crops would rot in the field and then be replaced by native plants. Is this evidence presented in paper(s)?
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.
Anyone fascinated by this article, I highly suggest reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I just recently picked it up after seeing it recommended on a couple of threads here and it did not disappoint. Humans have been affecting ecology for a long long time.
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.
Instead of courses, I recommend to get a couple books on Permaculture and also look to see if any universities have extension courses for Permaculture or any topic related to it. Chances are, most of the teachers are now familiar with Permaculture and can speak to the “historical” methods and the “Permaculture” methods. Yes, a lot of people have been trying to make money of the cerificstion courses, which I think is a waste of money. I started with my backyard and have used Permaculture design to re-approach working with nature. My end goal is to have a diverse forest garden that has it’s own ecosystem. But, that’s at least 10 years of work to achieve, but well worth it. I’m almost two years into this and have zero regrets. If anyone is interested to know more, I can try to share what I’ve learned or answer any specific questions.
Apologies for the grammar and spelling issues, I wrote the original comment on my mobile phone and find that experience frustrating, and I usually miss things.
Thanks for this. I’ve been interested in permaculture since coming across it at festivals but I’ve been put off how everyone seems to be selling courses. This is the first free one I’ve found. It feels a bit like minimalism where everyone tried to practice it by selling ebooks about minimalism.
I took two courses. It is electrifying, and a great new way of looking at the world.
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.
Check out Richard Perkins of Ridgedale Permaculture. While he also does offer courses and has written a book (which I can recommend), he also puts out a lot of information for free on Youtube.
A major emphasis of his work is to run his farm as a profitable business while using Permaculture design principles.
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.
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.
The author just released a new book called "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". It's in my TODO pile so no comment on the content of it yet, tought you might wanted to know.
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.
>I think you may be confusing "agenda" with "perspective". He was pushing one perspective: his own, as all authors do.
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.
To be honest most of the times he lists the multiple concurrent theories and simply points out why he believes one of them to be closest to reality.
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.
A huge number of scientists analyze the past scientifically. Between dinosaurs dying, creatures evolving, continents shifting, planets forming, climates changing, and the universe beginning, we analyze a ton of the past scientifically.
The economic consequences would be absolutely huge. Take my native Canada for an example. There's breathtaking amounts of land that's currently of little economic value because of a shortened growing season and permafrost. A small increase in temperature would have a huge impact on the usability of that land. Conversely, other places in the world would suffer desertification and suffer greatly.
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.
Sorry that was me being lazy. On my dovark keyboard. C,0,2 are all right next to each other on my right hand and since numbers are behind the shift key, my left hand just holds the shift down. The alternative is a bit of a finger juggle because my caps lock is remapped as well.
The band of "habitable by humans" is as wide as you could want. People live in Alaska and in Libya.
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.
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.
I think the main downside is that we are quite sure what would happen. The primary effect (a giant fucking algae bloom) is pretty well known. But the secondary effects are hard to predict and could be very negative.
Running experiments on the planet we live on is usually frowned upon.
> Running experiments on the planet we live on is usually frowned upon.
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.
Purely anacdotal of course, but most of the really bad incidents I've been involved in with production systems were actually caused by a rushed response to an initial problem that seemed serious at the time....
Nobody is pushing for a rushed response. Just some fucking common sense, and scientifically literate people. And nobody can cry 'rushed response' anyway because the effects have been known (more or less accurately) for dozens of years.
If a sufficiently large mass of people can be convinced of something that's where everyone is going. So the result is that if a small group of people want to get somewhere all they have to do is convince a larger group. Sounds difficult but with today's tech and money concentration it's not hard to convince someone that "more CO2 is better".[0]
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?
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.
Indeed, and you don't need to start with a half-tanker, especially if you are not aiming for an ice age. You can start with a half-bucket and work your way up to a half-kayak, half-fishing-boat, maybe half-trawler.
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.
I know settling to the sea floor is the intended result, but locking up more carbon in the steady state biomass of creatures would do the trick too. If we did this continuously could we just grow the biosphere?
Geeze this conclusion seems rather counter intuitive, a much smaller human population's pre-modern agriculture had enough of an impact on climate so much as to prevent an ice age?
Mainly because of deforestation (one of the causes mentioned in the article). French Gaul in Roman times had already been largely deforested in the previous centuries, some historians even suggest that the process had been underway since Neolithic times, that’s about 4,000-5,000 years ago. It’s relatively unconmplicated to get rid of large swaths of forrest without having to have access to modern industrial tools, you just need to put some good old physical work into it.
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).
Sure, but the study places the "pivot point" much back in time in the 7,000 to 5,000 years ago range (probably give or take a thousand years):
>"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."
Yeah, I had noticed that, too. To give a totally unsubstantiated opinion (i.e. mine) I'd say that that only helps make the case for the massive deforestation happening as soon as the Neolithic Revolution got under way in earnest, starting about 5,000 BCE, that would explain the rise in CO2 concentration (also see the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_cul...). The rise in methane concentration which happened 2,000 years after that might be explained by people raising a lot more cows around 3,000 BCE (the start of "civilization" on the Nile and Euphrates, for example).
> It’s relatively unconmplicated to get rid of large swaths of forrest without having to have access to modern industrial tools, you just need to put some good old physical work into it.
Merely killing off predators like wolves will contribute to deforestation, because runaway deer populations will stop new tree growth.
They only argue that the impact was enough to offset a decline from 270 ppm CO2 to 250 ppm CO2 to instead wind up at 280 ppm CO2 at the preindustrial stage. Over about 8,000 years. Call it 40 ppm CO2 over 7000 years to make the number a little larger and its 0.005 ppm CO2/yr.
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.
Remember that modern agriculture is very efficient from a land POV. Historically slash and burn or other techniques just chewed up farmland and led to mass deforestation.
Consider Vermont, which was basically clear-cut in the mid 19th century.
If indeed ancient farmers (that were like 1/100 our population) already had "profoundly changed Earth's climate", so much for the "human activity couldn't be the reason for climate change today" argument...
Well the argument that human activity isn't the reason for climate change isn't completely ruled out by this historical evidence but I think it provides compelling evidence that only the dishonest can disregard.
Logically speaking, this is incorrect. Both could be true given a circumstance, like say, the sun goes red giant in the later case.
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.
Bad faith means not believing what you say ("with the intention of deceiving someone or doing harm").
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.
I now believe, but cannot prove, that most people's professed beliefs are not rational, logical, reality-based, sensical.
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.
As mentioned in the article, one of the interesting things about this is that it provides support for an earlier date for the start of the anthropocene, as opposed to a date in e.g. the 50s.
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.