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June 14, 2005 Liberal-leaning scientists have been blaming "global warming" on American electric power generation, automobiles, and similar industrial types of activity in the Western World. Now China and India are beginning to contribute to atmospheric carbon dioxide, but we and the Europeans tend to get the most blame. It is claimed that we already have a high standard of living, and we don't need to increase it further by our burning of so much "fossil fuel." The most recent scientific studies show, however, 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 important dates in human development can be seen by clicking on the following link: Timeline ). Worldwide agriculture led to cutting down the forest trees that ordinarily consume carbon dioxide. This is just as important as generation of the gas by automobiles, etc., when it comes to global warming. In order to get us back to massive reforestation, the world's human population would have to be reduced (more about that later). 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. This is especially true for those animals that can digest the cellulose in grass, and which don't need to be fed the starch and protein that humans need. The worldwide breeding of grass eaters such as cows, goats, sheep, and horses took off around 8,000 years ago, when global warming began to leave its signature traces in geological samples. (Increased methane concentrations also bagan to occur in bubbles within ancient ice around that time, according to deep drilled samples recently obtained from the Arctic ice cap.) Methane gas is a much more powerful global warming agent than carbon dioxide, although there is less of it in the atmosphere. Another large source of methane can be rotting biological waste material in dumps, which might also have been an early factor, and probably is important in modern times. Industrial activity certainly generates a lot of carbon dioxide. We are being asked to voluntarily become more efficient in our energy use, in order to minimize this, and maybe we should increase our efforts to that end. But would the China that pirates our DVDs and even steals whole automobile designs also comply? Probably not, although we are still working on improved efficiency, without actually signing the Kyoto treaty. 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 clicking on the following link: IceAge ). The Ruddiman article in Scientific American claims that human-induced global warming has prevented the next ice age. Nobody can be absolutely sure this is true, but the evidence looks fairly convincing. Of course, an ice age would be MUCH worse than excessive warming, although each one is very bad. In the previous glaciation, the ice in Massachusetts was a mile thick! 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 support of pensions such as Social Security, and for generally continuing our economic growth. However, it could really be done, voluntarily. 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. Let's hope it will not require Iran to set off a lot of "dirty" nuclear bombs, or require global warming to cause worldwide drought, or require China to have an avian flu epidemic that spreads everywhere else. ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email Dan Shanefield: shanefield@ieee.org Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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