Yesterday the Washington Post‘s David A. Fahrenthold had a solid head-scratcher for readers. He presents two camps in a debate whether early farmers kicked off a smaller round of climate change, much like today’s big one, by nudging CO2 upward through clearing of forests, slash and burn agriculture, and other practices.

The piece’s strength is its even-handed treatment of the two parties. His protagonist clearly has an uphill struggle, arguing that the relatively puny human population of thousands of years ago could not in any way alter the atmosphere the way modern, oil and coal-burning industry does. Arrayed against his small team is, apparently, almost the entire climatology establishement.

An unpersuasive section, and it’s not Fahrenthold’s fault because he had to pass it on, is that some critics of the idea fear that climate change skeptics will somehow distort the thesis. If we’re supposedly not changing climate now, then evidence that even farmers with wooden plows did it way back when seems  to argue for the ease with which modern  mankind might further mess up the planet’s thermostat.

A minor quibble: It might also have mentioned that Earth systems scientists have long held that mankind has had some climatic impact for quite awhile, largely by changing the albedo of significant stretches of countryside. Minoan-era deforestation of islands in the Mediterranean, the Tracker has read somewhere, can plausibly get the the blame for to a permanent shift to an arid climate in the region.

Pic source ;

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.