The Caveman Did It.

From Moonbat Central:

Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods

It seems like a common-sense idea that there weren't enough people around 5, 6, 7,000 years ago to have any significant impact on climate. But if you allow for the fact that those people, person by person, had something like 10 times as much of an effect or cleared 10 times as much land as people do today on average, that bumps up the effect of those earlier farmers considerably, and it does make them a factor in contributing to the rise of greenhouse gasses," (William) Ruddiman said.

Ruddiman said that starting thousands of years ago, people would burn down a forest, poke a hole in the soil between the stumps, drop seeds in the holes and grow a crop on that land until the nutrients were tapped out of the soil. Then they would move on.
"
And they'd burn down another patch of forest and another and another. They might do that five times in a 20-year period," he said.

My initial reaction to this study is that it's meant to give global warming theorists a way to explain the Earth's historical warming/cooling cycles, such as the medieval warming period.

It is estimated the Earth's population in 5000 B.C. was 5 million people. Sticking with Ruddiman's model that assumes they cleared 10 times as much land as they do today, then it would be the equivalent 50 million people - roughly the current population of Myanmar.

A few things to ponder ..

• The Earth's population is 1300 times greater than it was 7,000 years ago.
• Canada alone loses an average of 2 million acres per year to forest fires caused by lighting. Including areas of frozen tundra, it contains about 6% of the world's land mass. Extrapolating that to the globe, lightening caused fires burn off around 30 million acres of forest each year around the world. That's 6 acres - each year - for every caveman, cavewoman, and cavechild who lived circa 5000 B.C.
• How many acres would it take (would it even take one?) to feed a caveperson in 5000 BC, considering hunting and fishing had been around for tens of thousands of years? Even if the caveman had burned the hell out of the forests, what difference could it have made compared to naturally occurring fires or volcanic activity?

Fast forward in time to the year 2009. We are approaching 7 million people. Think of all the coal-fired power plants, jet airliners, and the hundreds of millions of tons of plastic produced each year. Consider that for each of the 5 million cavepeople who were burning trees 7,000 years ago, there are 150 automobiles burning fossil fuels today.

Global warming in 2009 is still only a theory. As much as the greenies want to say the debate is over - it isn't. The medieval warming period ended 500 years prior to the industrial era and it makes a good case that warming/cooling cycles are highly dependant on the Earth's relationship with the sun. If Ruddiman's beliefs had an ounce of credibility, Global Warming would have been an inconvient truth long before Al Gore was born.

Is Ruddiman's study an attempt to put an environmental spin on ancient world history? Perhaps that isn't his goal, but greenies have been eager to glob onto his theories to conveniently explain pre-industrial changes in climate.

William Ruddiman
It is worth noting, that CNN published the recent article as something new. The fact is Ruddiman has previously published his early anthropocene hypothesis - as early as 2003 . Ruddiman's hypotheses has long ago been ripped to shreds by his peers. Yet, he keeps rewraping them like an old fruit cake for republication, time and time again. This time left-wing CNN throws it out as news.