Humans have been messing with the climate for thousands of years.

Pedro_P

By clearing forests and raising animals, early farmers cranked up the global thermostat, possibly preventing another ice age.

Antique farming tools
Pixabay
▼ Thousands of years ago, ancient farmers grew oats, corn and wheat, just as they do today. They also cultivated rice and raised livestock. But a millennia ago, they cleared much more land than modern day farmers do, despite having fewer people to feed. That’s because farming was far less efficient. Mechanized harvesters didn’t exist, and growers had yet to develop crops that could be planted in tightly packed rows, yielding more food from less space.
All those years of agricultural inefficiency likely had a lasting impact on the planet. Early farming practices unleashed a potent combination of greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide from deforestation, methane from the rice paddies and livestock — that may have profoundly changed the Earth’s climate and kept the planet from moving into another ice age. In short, according to new research, if not for these earliest agronomists, Earth might be significantly cooler today than it is.
That doesn’t mean that, were it not for early farmers, we wouldn’t be struggling with the ravages of climate change, nor does it let modern societies off the hook for pouring carbon pollution into the atmosphere. Even if prehistoric growers had used less land, the Earth still would be heating up rapidly, but the warming trend would have started from a cooler baseline.

Ancient agricultural tools.
Carlos1966
“There is a huge difference between the very gradual and accidental warming trend that early farmers probably caused, versus the much more rapid climate changes that our modern industrial world is effecting knowingly,” said Stephen Vavrus, a senior scientist in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Climatic Research who conducted the study, which recently appeared in the journalScientific Reports.
His climate modeling suggests that the amount of warming caused by farming prior to the Industrial Revolution is similar to the amount of warming caused by industrialization over the last two centuries, he said. “So if you negate the contribution from early farmers, then the earth would still be warming up but from a cooler starting point,” he said. “In that case, the world would probably still be grappling with the same sense of concern about climate change, but Earth’s temperature would be lower than it currently is.”
Conventional thinking holds that early humans were too sparse and too technologically primitive to affect the global climate, “but this hypothesis argues otherwise,” Vavrus said. However, he noted, “A sobering corollary is that if the relatively tiny populations of the past could still generate significant global warming, then the massive number of people in the world today with our amplified carbon emissions must be having a huge climatic effect. From this perspective, our research findings underscore the reality and seriousness of contemporary climate change.” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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pvk_udt

This is an interesting article. Even early farming practices contributing to global warming is an interesting view

harpreetsembhi

That's interesting viewpoint but the scale nowadays is unprecedented ever before.