Human activities may have averted the next ice age. This conclusion from recent research is sure to make global warming alarmists cringe. Ongoing human activities during the past 8,000 years likely have served to prevent us from falling into an ice age, says William Ruddiman, former chairman of the University of Virginia environmental sciences department and his research team in Quaternary Research Reviews.. "Without any anthropogenic warming," they write, "earth's climate would no longer be in a full-interglacial state [warm period] but be well on its way toward the colder temperatures typical of glaciations."
The article has a couple of interesting graphs that show how CO2 and methane levels diverged from long term trends 8,000 and 5,000 years ago respectively, which seems to correspond with the advent of agriculture and then animal husbandry. |