Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods

cnn.com ^ | August 18, 2009 | Shelby Lin Erdman

[colorado tanker]

This isn't the paper, but it summarizes it:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/co2_report_july_09.pdf

[SunkenCiv]

The political seduction of the sciences continues.

[Teacher317]

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia's Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere.

Absolute horse-puckey. Ancient man had no need to burn forests, since space was abundant. There were no suburbs and urban areas to work around. Forests were an incredibly valuable resource, for meat, building materials, and firewood. With no global scarcity of space for farming, there's no reason whatsoever for them to burn their resources to find something that was already plentiful: open ground.

(And, if I recall correctly, there are more trees in the West today than a century ago.)

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !