Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
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Product Description
The impact on climate from 200 years of industrial development is an everyday fact of life, but did humankind's active involvement in climate change really begin with the industrial revolution, as commonly believed? William Ruddiman's provocative new book argues that humans have actually been changing the climate for some 8,000 years--as a result of the earlier discovery of agriculture. The "Ruddiman Hypothesis" will spark intense debate. We learn that the impact of farming on greenhouse-gas levels, thousands of years before the industrial revolution, kept our planet notably warmer than if natural climate cycles had prevailed--quite possibly forestalling a new ice age. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum is the first book to trace the full historical sweep of human interaction with Earth's climate. Ruddiman takes us through three broad stages of human history: when nature was in control; when humans began to take control, discovering agriculture and affecting climate through carbon dioxide and methane emissions; and, finally, the more recent human impact on climate change. Along the way he raises the fascinating possibility that plagues, by depleting human populations, also affected reforestation and thus climate--as suggested by dips in greenhouse gases when major pandemics have occurred. The book concludes by looking to the future and critiquing the impact of special interest money on the global warming debate. Eminently readable and far-reaching in argument, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum shows us that even as civilization developed, we were already changing the climate in which we lived.
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
One of the Best Explanations of how the Planet Warmed Up
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Comment:
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum is one of the most objective, detailed, excellent discussions of climate change you will read. No politics, no public policy, no annoying preachy undertones - just the facts on how our current global warming is occurring. Actually, the author William F. Ruddiman proposes the radical idea that humans have been changing the planet's climate for at least 8,000 years - ever since we started cutting down the forests, burning the grasslands, and planting crops. He makes a compelling case that small additional inputs of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmospheric system will eventually create large global warming effects. In fact, the author theorizes that if not for human intervention, we would currently be in a glacial building phase (onset of an ice age) right now.
The author discusses all the natural ways the climate can change - planetary orbital changes, change in solar radiance, volcanic activity, ocean currents, Milankovitch cycles, and other natural forcings. He also describes how agricultural activity and industrial practices leads to global warming. Interestingly, the author does not view global warming as big a threat to human health as the lack of fresh water for our everyday needs.
Written in simple, accessible language, and avoiding unnecessary technical and scientific jargon. Intelligent to the point of brilliant. Refreshing like pure air. The author succeeds where a divisive figure like Al Gore does not - the author studiously avoids any hint of telling us what we should do (there are plenty of books out there for that). He just tells us like it is.
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Summary:
for information, not pleasure
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Comment:
very technical but very informative. Provides an interesting perspective on the emergence of excess greenhouse gases
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Summary:
Great present for the naysayers
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Comment:
This short and very readable book is one of the latest in a long line of interdisciplinary works that takes research from such diverse fields as geology, biology, history, epidemiology, and climatology, and puts forth a substantial model of how human activity has changed the climate of the world over the past 10,000 years. The book is written by a scientist, and is written such that a layman can understand it. The different chapters focus on specific ways in which humans affect climate, such as thru agriculture, deforestation, fossil fuel consumption, etc... Read from start to finish, they provide a chronological history of man's affect on earth.
The book itself is quite compact and puts forth its arguments succicintly. The author also cites the major arguments against the idea that man can affect nature, and weighs the merits of these arguments. The author cites a lot of primary research done by others before him, and also cites major books in this subject, thereby offering the layman a great source of reading material. The only drawback I could find with this book is the paucity of illustrations. There are many plots of parameters, such as the amount of methane in the atmosphere, over time. However, many of the concepts mentioned in the book could have been better conveyed using images. A good example would have been an illustration show how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. But overall, a great book.
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Summary:
Interesting, but.....
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Comment:
Ruddiman presents an interesting hypothesis, but his reasoning leaves out too many factors, and does not give enough weight to unknown factors.
Milankovitch cycles are explained extremely well, and Ruddiman attributes ice ages and glaciation periods almost exclusively to these cycles. It is true that ice age/glaciations line up with the Milankovitch cycles, but... we know that further back in planetary history there were Milankovitch cylces that did not result in ice ages. This would indicate that other factors may be required to set off such a radical change in global climate. Ruddiman does not address this, to the detriment of his hypothesis.
Ruddiman also states that orbital changes control monsoon cycles, yet research has shown that monsoon cycles can change more rapidly and more often than the long orbital cycles would indicate. Ruddiman also attributes monsoons to heat, stating more heat, more monsoon. This is not an adequate explanation of monsoons. Areas that were very wet 9,000 years ago are undergoing increased desertification today, with increasing heat.
Entirely too much is supposed in terms of early human development, the amount of agriculture practiced, and it's effect on climate. As one example, Ruddiman supposes that early nomadic humans spaced children four years apart. There is absolutely no evidence cited for this supposition, and given the high mortality rate and shorter life spans, this type of "spacing" may not have been enough to maintain populations. Too little is known about prehistoric agriculture and population levels to come up with a reliable formula on amount of acres farmed for each person, and amount of methane released per acre.
In matching plagues with CO2 levels, Ruddiman does not acknowledge that many climatologists and anthropoligists place cooling weather before the plague events. CO2 levels would have been reduced before as well as durring the plague events.
Ruddiman does not give climate enough weight when considering human development and population levels, as well as when considering extincition events at the end of the pleistocene/start of the Holocene. Studies of central american and mesopotanian civilizations have shown that climate changes have had a huge impact on humanity. Climate change has also been linked to the extincions mentioned above. Humanity played a role, but the size of that role is debatable.
Ruddiman relies far too heavily on the reasoning that "the only difference was humans, so we must have caused it". This is false logic, as there could have been any number of differences that we can't or haven't picked up on. Given the number of variations possible, it is naive to think we were the only one.
The portion of the book that deals with politics is severely lacking. Ruddiman repeatedly takes "alarmists" to task, yet fails to identify the alrmists or the specific claims that are out of line. Same problem with the contrarians. This portion of the book is far too simplistic, and seems to be there only to demonstrate what a reasonable guy Ruddiman is.
Lastly, I think Ruddiman goes out of his way to soft-peddle the changes in store. He ignores problems already being seen, such as persistent droughts, in Africa, the U.S. and Australia, to name a few places. Ruddiman also ignores the possibility of rapid climate change. Studies that predate this book have shown that climate can and does change rapidly. Not to be hysterical, but this is something that needs to be considered.
Despite what I think are some serious shortcomings, I would recommend this book as Ruddimant is not afraid to put out a hypothesis that is somewhat radical. There are too many unsupported leaps in reasoning, but the overall hypothesis may have some validity, and definitely is interesting.
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Summary:
Interesting, but be really careful
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Comment:
"Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate" is a controversial extension of anthropogenic global warming back as far as the earliest farmers ten thousand years ago. Ruddiman argues that human effect upon carbon dioxide and methane concentrations between around eight thousand years ago and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was as great as that observed since 1800.
In the first part of "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum", Ruddiman looks at early human history and the evolution of the human species. Whilst his overview is far from illogical, I must disagree with him about the evolution of human intelligence, which he says was not helped by the cold and frequent climate change. Cooling of the planet is undoubtedly decisive in evolving highly intelligent beings: Tim Flannery shows how environments without glaciation have extremely infertile soils and oceans so that species of human-like intelligence could never evolve. Frequent climate change would probably actually necessitate a better knowledge of the variety of possible conditions and still larger brains.
Ruddiman's explanation of how Milankovitch cycles cause glacial/interglacial cycles on Earth is clear and efficient, with a very good number of graphs even if most are rather coarsely drawn. Nonetheless, he does not take into account how very ancient records show temperatures can change without the levels of carbon dioxide changing or vice versa - even if this does not contradict anthropogenic global warming as sone assume. Ruddiman's claim that continental drift cannot have played a role in causing climate change is however doubtful. The creation of a north-flowing current from the formation of the Isthmus of Panama is known to have increased snowfall in eastern North America. Without warm air from the south northeastern North America would probably receive too little snow to form large glaciers. (Ruddiman does not mention, as a serious student of Ice Ages should, how Siberia, lowland Central Asia, Manchuria, parts of Alaska and the Yukon, plus Argentine Patagonia, have always been too dry for glaciers).
Recent refinement of glacial/interglacial cycles strongly disputes his claim that the interglacial corresponding to marine isotope stage 11 can definitively show human influence before the Industrial Revolution. It also disputes his temperature graph and predictions of further long-term cooling because between 900,000 and 450,000 years ago it is probable areas like Nunavik and the areas of Baffin Island he mentions were never deglaciated.
Ruddiman the goes on to show quite skilfully that modelled concentrations of carbon dioxide do not agree with calculations based upon previous interglacial cycles. "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum" argues that anthropogenic emissions of methane from rice paddies and carbon dioxide from forest clearing account for the rises in greenhouse gases since eight thousand years ago when wet-rice cultivation began. He then suggests they have stopped ordinary accumulation of ice in northeastern Canada, from which the Laurentide Ice Sheet spread southward to around New York and Omaha. This part is not badly argued, but as I mentioned earlier recent research does question what he is saying.
When Ruddiman turns his attention to plagues supposedly having caused the Little Ice Age, he becomes even more dubious. For one thing, the falls in carbon dioxide he observes correlate very poorly with known coolings during the Dark Ages and Little Ice Age. Whereas Ruddiman says they are linked, in fact cooling began long before every pandemic he mentions struck and did not increase following it. Although I do agree with him that it is unlikely drought followed by famine could cause the same population reductions pandemics can, my knowledge of climate records suffices to view his claim "the likelihood of drought striking vast areas of Eurasia simultaneously is unlikely" as more or less false, especially should ENSO combine suitably with other influences. In the summer of 1911, for instance, deficient rainfall affected the vast bulk of tropical and temperate Eurasia from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
The last part, dealing with the influence of fossil fuels, is extremely bland compared with the rest of "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum". He suggests, reasonably, that the effect of burning all the fossil fuel we have is quite uncertain and that there is potential for vast warming to be followed by a gradual natural cooling once the fossil fuels run out (reminiscent of Tim Flannery).
All in all, whilst Ruddiman has plenty of ideas, he does often go too far about trying to criticise humanity. "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum" is an interesting and very easy read, but there are a lot of problems that could almost serve as ammunition for sceptics of global warming.
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