Global warming is preventing another ice age

[Domen]

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112728799/carbon-emissions-global-warming-ice-age-110912/

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/081217_warming.htm

Man made global warming is preventing another ice age. The entire process started many thousands years ago, more or less with the development of farming. If not the Neolithic Revolution, we would be experiencing another ice age already for 2000 years and global cooling would still be progressing nowadays. That's what the websites above but also another, more extensive article I have read yesterday says. It also says that the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - such as CO2 and methane was already much higher in the pre-industrial era (ca. 1750 - 1850) than 12,000 - 10,000 years ago, before the Neolithic Revolution. For example large increase of methane in the atmosphere was connected with development of rice farming in China. In the evenining (now it is morning here) I will provide more details, citing the article and the scientists quoted / interviewed there. What do you think about this theory?

 

[ArneHD]

It's an interesting theory, but I don't think it has beaten out the null hypothesis as of yet.

 

[Old Hippy]

What do you think about this theory?

well if you compare NASA's latest datings of the little ice age(Medieval Climate Optimum) of about 1550AD and the recent confirmation of a civilized Amazon region at first contact in about 1500AD it would appear that a great disaster had wiped out a civilization in just a few years (that's us)returning the land to forest/jungle, as little sign of it was found on latter visits.... so one theory is that the reduction in the 'lost civilization's' carbon emmisions actually brought about the little ice age, which would tend to agree with your point that farming etc. had an effect on climate for along time.

Spoiler :

Decreased human populations

Some researchers have proposed that human influences on climate began earlier than is normally supposed and that major population declines in Eurasia and the Americas reduced this impact, leading to a cooling trend. William Ruddiman has proposed that somewhat reduced populations of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East during and after the Black Death caused a decrease in agricultural activity. He suggests reforestation took place, allowing more carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere, which may have been a factor in the cooling noted during the Little Ice Age. Ruddiman further hypothesizes that a reduced population in the Americas after European contact in the early 16th century could have had a similar effect.[78][79] Faust, Gnecco, Mannstein and Stamm (2005)[80] and Nevle (2011)[81] supported depopulation in the Americas as a factor, asserting that humans had cleared considerable amounts of forests to support agriculture in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans brought on a population collapse. A 2008 study of sediment cores and soil samples further suggests that carbon dioxide uptake via reforestation in the Americas could have contributed to the Little Ice Age.[82] The depopulation is linked to a drop in carbon dioxide levels observed at Law Dome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Spoiler :

One of the many inexplicable statements in historical literature is Gaspar de Carvajal’s description of his travels down the Amazon River with Francisco de Orellana. He says in numerous ways that the banks of the Amazon were stuffed with people, literally village after village for most of its length. No-one else reported this. All subsequent expeditions found the Amazon Basin much as it is today—thinly inhabited. Indeed it had to be this way, as Amazonian soils are notoriously poor for farming.

------------
This leads to terra preta de Indio, or just “terra preta” for short, the Brazilian Portuguese name for an unusual phenomenon. Good farming soils have many silicate particles, which trap the nutrients a growing crop needs. Amazonian soils are low in silicate and high in aluminum and iron oxide; those oxides have the opposite effect to silicate, making nutrients susceptible to leaching when the rain comes down.

But here and there through the Amazon are patches of terra preta (“black soil&#8221 that are extremely fertile despite being low in silicates as well. A high fraction of carbon particles from burned trees and plants, which also have nutrient-trapping properties, take their place. Furthermore, the carbon is buffered from rain by large amounts of crushed pottery mixed all throughout the soil. Some argue that terra preta patches are the remnants of Amazonian waste dumps and so happened by accident; the potsherds are just the broken leftovers of everyday items. Others argue that there’s just too much of it mixed in with the soil—that pre-Colombian Amazonians deliberately made pottery for the sole purpose of smashing it and using it to make farmable plots.

http://passingstrangeness.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/terra-preta-or-the-lost-cities-of-amazonia/

Spoiler :

The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building roads, causeways, canals, dikes, reservoirs, mounds, raised agricultural fields, and possibly ball courts, Erickson has argued, the Indians who lived there before Columbus trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. The trapping was not a matter of a few isolated natives with nets, but a society-wide effort in which hundreds or thousands of people fashioned dense, zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs (fish-corralling fences) among the causeways. Much of the savanna is natural, the result of seasonal flooding. But the Indians maintained and expanded the grasslands by regularly setting huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on indigenous pyrophilia
http://www.charlesmann.org/Excerpt-1.htm

but none of this takes into account the massive coal burning that started in about 1679....

Spoiler :

Thomas Savery was an English military engineer and inventor who in 1698, patented the first crude steam engine, based on Denis Papin's Digester or pressure cooker of 1679.
Thomas Savery had been working on solving the problem of pumping water out of coal mines

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsteamengine.htm

 

[tokala]

That's the Ruddiman hypothesis?

AFAIK he doesn't claim that historical greenhouse gas emissions and land change uses have inhibited an onset of glaciation that otherwise would have occured, but rather that the influence of orbital (Milankovic) forcing was demished far enough to generate a unnaturally stable climate, in which human civilization could thrive.

The latest holocene temperature reconstruction shows the orbital forcing influence just fine for the northern hemisphere, though (data for the last few centuries is "not robust", i.e. not reliable, and the graph is incorrectly labeled (should be 30N to 90N)):

It is still under scientific debate when the next glaciation would likely have started without human interference, but the question has become pointless, as the additional CO2 already put into the atmosphere by us is likely sufficient to prevent this for tens of thousands of yours into the future.
And humanity is working hard to make this hundreds of thousands of years.

 

[Conspirator]

If a few thousand Neolithic rice farmers were capable of reversing an Ice Age we'd be drinking mojitos in Siberia today.

 

[ArneHD]

Incidentally, the Wiki page for this hypothesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_anthropocene

 

[Midnight-Blue766]

This reminds me of that scene in Futurama where Global Warming got cancelled by Nuclear Winter, except backwards.

 

[Starke Von Oben]

Anyone seriously interested in the subject of Global Warming, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused.

It would be very sad if, as a result, it fails to reach a wide audience. I think anyone remotely concerned about this huge controversy should read this courageous piece of work.

I am not asking you to agree with everything in it, or assuming that you will. I am asking any reasonable person, who is influenced by facts and logic, to consider the case made here.

If you have had doubts but suppressed them for fear of being drowned in anger or contempt, buy this book to arm yourself. If you know any global-warming fanatics, buy it for them for Christmas and ask them, even beg them, to study it carefully.

At the very least, it should allow the debate on this subject to be conducted with more fairness and without such expressions as ‘denier’ being used.

What you will find out is this. That much of what passes for accepted truth is not. Facts have been ruthlessly twisted, suppressed or invented. Scientists are greatly divided on the subject. Many people – and bodies – presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it.

Hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) have latched on to it.

Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless windfarms, now depend upon it.

This particular frenzy, if not checked, could end by bankrupting the West and leaving us sitting in the cold and the dark whistling for a wind to power our dead computers – while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Real-Global-Warming-Disaster/dp/1441119701

 

[Ajidica]

while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.

Yep, right before they are faced with a refugee crisis in the millions as the low-lying costal cities are inundated by rising sea levels and changing weather patters render render previously fertile areas less fertile.

 

[Starke Von Oben]

Yep, right before they are faced with a refugee crisis in the millions as the low-lying costal cities are inundated by rising sea levels and changing weather patters render render previously fertile areas less fertile.

You can't predict the future.

Name me a single instance when anyone was able to.

 

[Ajidica]

You can't predict the future.

Name me a single instance when anyone was able to.

Isn't the author of the book you linked to predicting the future by stating global climate change isn't an issue and that by caring about it the West will be left behind?

We are already seeing wonky weather patterns developing in Africa and South East Asia that is damaging agricultural productivity along with rises in sea level.

 

[peter grimes]

Anyone seriously interested in the subject of Global Warming, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused.

It would be very sad if, as a result, it fails to reach a wide audience. I think anyone remotely concerned about this huge controversy should read this courageous piece of work.

I am not asking you to agree with everything in it, or assuming that you will. I am asking any reasonable person, who is influenced by facts and logic, to consider the case made here.

If you have had doubts but suppressed them for fear of being drowned in anger or contempt, buy this book to arm yourself. If you know any global-warming fanatics, buy it for them for Christmas and ask them, even beg them, to study it carefully.

At the very least, it should allow the debate on this subject to be conducted with more fairness and without such expressions as ‘denier’ being used.

I just checked some of the reviews on your conveniently provided link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2DWLXTMYJ5X99/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R2DWLXTMYJ5X99

Yeah, I'm not getting the impression that this book is quite like you described it.

 

[Old Hippy]

This particular frenzy, if not checked, could end by bankrupting the West and leaving us sitting in the cold and the dark whistling for a wind to power our dead computers – while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Real-Global-Warming-Disaster/dp/1441119701

one can only hope you have read china's assessment of the problems... just for balance

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/18/us-china-climate-idUSTRE80H06J20120118

but if not here is a link to their aims and targets for CO2, reduction 2012
http://www.c2es.org/international/key-country-policies/china/energy-climate-goals-twelfth-five-year-plan

note among the goals is to "gradually establish a carbon trade market." so i can only agree with you that we should have all the good sense of China

If nuclear targets are reduced, the share of renewable energy will need to increase even more than current targets propose.

Overall, China’s Plan represents many ambitious climate and energy goals, and lays out a strategic roadmap for the county to endeavor to pursue over the next five years

 

[Berzerker]

makes sense, widespread ag increases ghgs
but I'd like to see how the Earth's current orbital parameters should be driving a new ice age

the tilt is 23.4+ and 8 kya it was at a maximum of 24.2

the last ice age had a tilt of 21.6 and astronomers are predicting a more moderate 22.4 way off down the road

we gotta get close to that minimum tilt for ice sheets to grow and thats still a few thousand years from now