Are we preventing a new ice age by burning greenhouse gases and increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere? Steve Vavrus presented a study at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting on Dec 17 suggest exactly that scenario. Furthermore, he suggested that humans started impacting climate thousands of years ago via deforestation and agriculture.
SAN FRANCISCO — The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.
But gathering physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world’s most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.
Using three different climate models and removing the amount of greenhouse gases humans have injected into the atmosphere during the past 5,000 to 8,000 years, Vavrus and Kutzbach observed more permanent snow and ice cover in regions of Canada, Siberia, Greenland and the Rocky Mountains, all known to be seed regions for glaciers from previous ice ages. Vavrus notes: “With every feedback we’ve included, it seems to support the hypothesis (of a forestalled ice age) even more. We keep getting the same answer.”
Link to the full article on EurekAlert here
