8,000 Years of Human-Induced Global Warming?
By
Jesse Ferrell, AccuWeather meteorologist
Published Mar 24, 2008 6:55 PM EDT
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Updated Mar 25, 2008 2:22 PM EDT
I'm substituting again for Brett Anderson again on our Global Warming blog tomorrow. Here's a copy of a post that will show up there Tuesday. You can comment on the article on our Climate Change Forum or on Brett's blog tomorrow.
Hi folks, Jesse here again. As I always do on the holidays, I curled up on the couch at my mother-in-law's house on Easter Sunday and read a paper (that's right!) edition of Wired magazine, a technological rag that I've followed since its inception in the early 1990's, AKA Ye Olde College Days. On page 25 (the online edition is not out as of this writing, check the Wired website in the near future for the article) was an article entitled "Cooling the Globe? Been There, Done That."
The article was about a fellow named William Ruddiman, a retired climatologist, who says that humans started influencing the environment as early as 6,000 BC and that one of their biggest contributions was dying en masse around the year 1600, which reduced CO2 emissions by 10 parts per million.
Rice Paddies - Big Offender? (AP Photo)Ruddiman's main points were that 1.) If we've been changing the climate that long, we should be able to steer it back on track and 2.) We should concentrate more on things like methane emissions from landfalls and rice farmers.
NOTE: Another article that I considered writing about was this one at MSNBC, where they say climate change is making Spring come earlier in the U.S., causing havoc for nature and humans - in the form of a longer allergy season (something I can relate to).
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