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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161247 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780691133980
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Is excellent reading for scientist and non-scientist alike". -- James White, Science

"The author details how humans helped the Earth avert a new ice age." -- The Futurist

Review
The activities of Stone Age farmers may have altered Earth's climate. This is the exciting but controversial theory conveyed by palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman in his well-written book Plows, Plagues and Petroleum. . . . [A]n excellent book summarizing and placing in context the age-old influence of humans on atmospheric composition, climate and global warming.
(Nature )

If you're not familiar with Ruddiman's hypothesis, you should be. . . . At a time when some scientist seem to fear that open criticism will give the public the impression that we disagree about the facts on climate change--that it is real, caused in part by humans, and increasingly unavoidable--it is good to read of Ruddiman's faith in the scientific method and his willingness to let the process unfold as it should. . . . Plows, Plagues and Petroleum is excellent reading for scientist and nonscientist alike.
(James White Science )

What William Ruddiman has done in Plows, Plagues and Petroleum, an attractive, well-written new book aimed at a popular audience, is to explore the geochemical and climatological implications of worldwide deforestation over the past several thousand years. . . . Ruddiman's argument makes it clear that there is no 'natural' baseline of climate in the late Holocene from which to reckon the human impact of the past two centuries.
(Wolfgang H. Berger American Scientist )

William Ruddiman's provocative but plausible conclusion is that the economic behavior of humans began to profoundly influence global climate roughly 8000 years ago. . . . Ruddiman's book has already begun to spark an important debate--a debate which economic historians should be eager to follow and join.
(Robert Whaples EH.net )

This well-written book does a great job of summarizing complex topics through simple calculations and examples, and provides the right balance of cultural background and scientific data.
(Matthew S. Lachniet Geotimes )

The book by Ruddiman is very enjoyable and easy to read. It also takes quite a unique perspective on the relationship between human societies and climate. For Ruddiman, rather than the climate being a determinant of the course of human events, the argument is turned on its head making human economic behavior a cause of climate change, even well into distant antiquity.
(Arlene Miller Rosen Nature and Culture )

Ruddiman's short book is an excellent primer on the various influences on global climate. He explains scientific concepts clearly and accessibly, and his melding of climate science and human history is fascinating. For these reasons alone, the book is worth reading.
(Erik M. Conway Journal of the History of Biology )

Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum is a primer on natural variations in Earth's climate and on how human activity is having even more of an impact. While some readers might find it disturbing that people have been influencing the planet's climate for millennia, others may be even more alarmed to think about climate changes yet to come.
(S. Perkins Science News )

[Ruddiman] reviews the ongoing debate about future climate change and provides a balanced and judicious assessment of the challenges ahead. This book offers valuable new insights into one of the world's most demanding environmental challenges.
(Population and Development Review )

The book is instructive and refreshingly non-technical in its prose. It also offers insight to historians as to how they might think about scientific and environmental processes . . . and draw on these materials to write history. . . . Given our contemporary industrial capacity, it rises some serious questions and concerns over the fragility of the physical environment and our relationship with it.
(Michael Egan Left History )

Review
Bill Ruddiman's provocative suggestion of early human influence on the atmosphere will draw fire. But I stand with Ruddiman: the simultaneous upward departures of CO2 and CH4 from climate indicators, unique in 420,000 years, is probably an early footprint of humankind.
(James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies )

Customer Reviews

This book is NOT about global warming.
This book is NOT about global warming. At least, not directly about the global warming of the Industrial Age over which extremists from both environmental and industry/government groups loudly wrangle about. Ruddiman's theme is global warming beginning far earlier -- 8000 years earlier. His expertise is in paleoclimatology, study of the climate in long-past eras. He presents a very persuasive case that starting about 8000 years ago, an increased "unnatural" output of carbon dioxide from early human agricultural endeavors began to measurably effect the earth's climate (with the effect intensified a few thousand years later by increased methane emissions from rice farming). It is Ruddiman's conclusion, very clearly presented and well supported with evidence, that this "extra" carbon dioxide has offset the "normal" global cooling that otherwise would have ended the present comfortable "interglacial" period and plunged us once again into an era of heavy glaciation. In short, into yet another Ice Age.

Ruddiman's work challenges us to jettison many comfortable myths, among them being that "Mother Earth" is naturally a stable benign guardian and that pre-industrial humans lived in some idyllic, low impact manner.

Like "Guns, Germs and Steel", this is a book that has fundamentally changed my perception of the distant past. It is both an important book and a book that makes for fascinating reading. I can scarcely recommend it too much. My advice: Buy it. Read it. Think about it.

Exceptional book; well-reasoned; exemplary science; accessible
Bruce Trinque's review said much of it, but here is more support. Ruddiman's work offers possible hypotheses to explain many puzzling effects. It is clearly written, accessible to non-experts, and of my 3-feet-wide bookshelf on climate issues, if somebody wanted one book, this is what I would recommend.

Ruddiman offers two basic hypotheses. The first, as Bruce described, is that humans have been modifying climate for 8000 years via forest-clearing and agriculture. This inhibited the otherwise-natural temperature decline back into an overdue glaciation, as compared with past inter-glacial periods. That's the good news.

The bad news, of course, is the current warming that will take us to levels of CO2 and temperature unprecedented for millions of years, and will do so even if we all stopped using oil/gas/coal tomorrow, and he discusses why.

The second hypothesis is the most plausible explanation I've seen for some of the puzzling short-term temperature/CO2 gyrations of the last 2000 years. He proposes that major plague pandemics have caused sufficient die-offs, abandoment of farms, and reforestration to temporarily lower CO2 and temperature. This could explain the later-Roman/Dark Ages lower temperatures, followed by the relatively disease-free Medieval Warming Period, in which Greenland was settled, and UK vineyards spread again to current levels, if not quite as far as early Roman. He ascribes the Little Ice Age drop to Bubonic plagues in Europe, and especially, to the death of estimated 50 million native Americans from smallpox and other European diseases. He does enough math to make these claims at least worth further study. He carefully observes that "correlation is not causation" and goes on to calibrate the mechanisms by which pandemic can lead to lower CO2.

Ruddiman refreshingly understands the differences between early hypotheses and well-tested theories. He often starts with an observed behavior, then carefully evaluates alternate explanations for it, rather than just offering an answer.

This is an exemplary approach to science, and while the hypotheses certainly need testing, this seems like a very productive line of thought that should incite useful further research. Climate analysis always faces the serious problem of extracting trends, and their causes from a very noisy signal. Compared to many competing hypotheses, Ruddiman's seem to be able to explain some gyrations that have often caused people to say "temperatures go up and down randomly anyway."

Finally, the book is clearly and calmly written, with careful delineation of facts and conjectures, with plenty of backup. Even more technical details can be found in his earlier articles.

Finally, I suspect Edward Tufte would be gladded by many of the charts, which are often simple, but compelling, and far better than words.

Very small print, good work, falls between big picture and farming
This is a fine book that ties with When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century and falls slightly below The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth and The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations all of which I read in this week-end's series. Better books in the larger scheme of things include E. O. Wilson's The Future of Life and J. F. Rischard's High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them.

The books is blessed with many useful figures.

The author focuses on farming, which requires deforestation through burning, as preceding the impact of cities on climate.

He titillates with his discussion of 6 billion humans producing methane in huge quantities via rice irrigation, livestock tending, biomass burning, and human waste.

I especially appreciated the author's discussion of climate studies as being relatively new, and his itemization of the number of specializations that now bear on climate study, including geologists, geochemists, meteorologists, glaciologists, ecologists, biological oceanographers, climatologists, etc.

The book is somewhat mis-titled in that the humans are not in CONTROL of the climate as much as impacting upon it in ways not fully understood but largely understood to be negative (e.g. hurricanes twice as intense as 30 years ago, witness New Orleans and KATRINA).

It takes 50 years to raise a forest.

Plagues are a form of natural control. People die, farms are abandoned, forests grow back, and emissions are reduced.

For a taste of the future, the author shows us the past, when Africa and India and China had much greater moisture across their regions. The author ably argues that the water cycle is as important if not more important than the energy cycle in relation to the future of life.

Page 152, the author provides a superb discussion of climate response time, noting that the land mass is much more responsive, which the varied layers of the ocean run from months-years at the top to years-decades in the middle, and centuries in the deep ocean--with the average being decades.

On page 182 the author demonstrates a lack of understanding of politics when he says "Politicians generally vote for policies their constituents want." Not so fast, bubba. Read Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders; Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It; and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) among many other works on corruption in Congress, where the bottom line is money from special interests, or privileges and committee assignments from the party that demands one vote the party line rather than as constituents' desire.

The author is the only of the four that I really felt made the point that BOTH extremes are bad: the extremists that deny climate change, and those that demand draconian corrective measures. He points out, in a very balanced way, that pollution is as old as the earth itself.

As with other authors who value the truth in this arena, this author makes it a point to lament the unethical and unreasoned "alternative universe" of industry-funded contrarians and the actively malicious mis-representation and disinformation they purvey. I was quite pleased to read his suggestion that citizens need to get organized and "follow the money" in order to out the connections from industry to "front organizations" to specific liars and agents of influence seeking to deceive the public.

He discusses the concept of ecosystem services and the costs to replace, something E. O. Wilson does in a more thorough and readable manner in The Future of Life but the coverage here is useful if you do not wish to buy many books.

Finally, the author concludes that global warming is not the most vital issue--that energy and then water scarcity are more important, followed by the issue of topsoil replenishment (no longer from clean natural ice melts, now from petroleum-based fertilizers).

There are no notes in this book, with disconcerted me a bit.