Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

From Wired: We’ve Been Changing the Climate for Eons, and That’s Reason for Hope

Global heating is a reality - and we need to act responsibly. Further, if every country in the world consumed at the level of the U.S., we’d need something like 35 planets to support us. That said, there’s hope…and fascination.

Here’s a snip from the above Wired essay to tweak your fascination:

…we humans may have been screwing up the climate for far longer than anyone thought. But that’s good — because if we could change things then, we should certainly be able to change them now.

The gist of Ruddiman’s argument is that 8,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began their sharpest increase in 350,000 years — a CO2 spike that correlates with the origins of agriculture. Then, 5,000 years ago, methane levels jumped — at roughly the same moment humans started growing rice in paddies (organic matter decomposing in water emits methane). By 2,000 years ago, agriculture and forest-clearing had added as much as 140 billion tons of CO2 to the air, enough to stave off what would likely have been another ice age.

I’ve also read that some think the mammoths were hunted to extinction (with flimsy pointy things, no less) by our ancestors…and a species of fish is still recovering (or not) from overfishing 10,000 years ago.

On my weekend reading list: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, in which he asks us to envision a post-human Earth. What would it look like? What would be our legacy? (Among other things, New York’s subways would flood in a matter of days.)

Have A Happy, Hopeful weekend! (We’re here now and everything (good and bad) changes…so let’s enjoy what we have now.)

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Tags: Friday martini time, Mary Schmidt, climate change, global warming, global heating