Recent scientific studies show that global warming started about 8,000
years ago, long before the Industrial Revolution. An article explaining
this is on page 46 of the Scientific American magazine, March 2005, by
William F. Ruddiman. It turns out that human agriculture (planting
seeds, domesticating animals, etc.) really took off about the same time
that global warming started. (Archeological evidence of farming goes
back to 11,000 BC, in the Tigris and Euphrates deltas, but large scale
agriculture didn't get going in the Nile, Yangtze, Ganges, and other
big deltas around the world until a thousand years later. Some
im****tant dates in human development can be seen by clicking on the
following link:
http://historylist.blogspot.com
). Worldwide agriculture led to cutting
down the forest trees that ordinarily consume carbon dioxide. This is
just as im****tant as generation of the gas by automobiles, etc., when
it comes to global warming.
Large farm animals such as cows exhale carbon dioxide, but a worse
effect is the fact that their intestines exude huge amounts of methane
gas. Methane gas is a much more powerful global warming agent than
carbon dioxide, although there is less of it in the atmosphere.
By the way, looking at the repeating cycles of atmospheric temperatures
in the geological record, we are overdue for another ice age.
(You can see what I published on that subject, by searching google for
"shanefield ScienceNews" without the quotes.) The Ruddiman article in
Scientific American claims that human-induced global warming has
prevented the next ice age.
The only way we could stop the global warming and keep things stable
would be to decrease the world's population of human beings, in a
carefully controlled manner. That would affect both industry and
agriculture. It's actually possible to do that, because the
non-immigrant populations of the U.S. and Europe have been falling,
even without the famous means of "war, famine, or plague." In fact the
fast falling population of educated workers is a big problem for the
sup****t of pensions such as Social Security, and for generally
continuing our economic growth.
These points should be intensely discussed in high school science and
"social studies" courses, as well as in national governments. Whether
or not we can get poor countries to hold back their population growth
is unknown, but we ought to be trying harder.
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