Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate – Review
As stated more eloquently in supplementary reviews, this book puts forth the hypothesis that individual activities have eventually led to an interruption in the cold/intercold cycle that has been naturally occurring in the Northern hemisphere over the last 3-4 million years. The author’s management of the Milankovich orbital cycles will be instructive to those who have yet to be fully exposed to this data. It was restoring to see his hypothesis simply put forth in scientific dispassion vice the usual strident pro or anti climate change debate. In true systematic method, the author meets a hypothesis and meekly accepts that there must be debate, validation or refutation before his hypothesis can either be eventually discarded or generally accepted as theory. VERY refreshing. What I commonly found most interesting, however, was the adherence to scientific rigor in the debate and analysis of the hypothesis. This author is the first I have seen to essentially quantify the amount of the components to the carbon cycle. Instead of ranting about how the sky is eventually falling all because of individual activities OR ranting about how no matter how many humans there are there will be no discernable effects, the author actually uses metrics- how many acres are widely cultivated per person, how much CO2 an acre of forest unites or releases, how many people failed in the Black Death, how long it takes nature to reforest clear cut land, etc. He even bravely admits it when his figures drop short of a total match and offers alternative explanations. BTW- another critic of this book has incorrectly referred to CO2 levels 20X contemporary rates as having been newly discovered in ice core data. This is incorrect. Ice core data is limited to 400K years at the most- this from the Vostok cores in Antarctica. The Greenland cores (nearly 2 dozen) are both more accurately annually defined and are limited to 100K years. The 20X CO2 concentration is from the Cambrain period- 540 MYA- as in 540 million years ago. No ice cores operate back that far. This is an example of the unreferenced hype that the author considers pains to avoid.