Klimabedrag.dk

It is fascinating, scary and sad, but getting fonds depends on selling your research to the politicians and to the green power.  The above title is a good example of that.  A university do some fairly interesting research and finds that forest burning in the old America caused large CO₂ contributions to the soil and possibly to the atmosphere. So far so good, but if the story ended there, it would not help the economy.  They had to make a fanciful bogus claim about "global warming".  Here is how the story goes.

On World Science they have just published the following:

April 15, 2010
Courtesy of Ohio University
and World Science staff

Early Na­tive Amer­i­cans caused more car­bon di­ox­ide emis­sions than pre­vi­ously thought—and they thus con­tri­but­ed to glob­al warm­ing even be­fore the in­dus­t­ri­al era be­gan, a new study sug­gests.

The in­dig­e­nous peo­ples burned trees as part of for­est-manage­ment strat­e­gies that ul­ti­ma­tely led wood­lands to yield more of the nuts and fruit that the peo­ples ate in abun­dance, ac­cord­ing to sci­en­tists. The re­sult: emis­sions of car­bon di­ox­ide, one of the key heat-trapping gas­es blamed by clim­at­ol­ogists for glob­al warm­ing.

“It was­n’t at the same lev­el as to­day, but it sets the stage,” said Greg­o­ry Spring­er, a ge­ol­o­gist at the Ohio Uni­vers­ity and lead au­thor of the stu­dy, pub­lished in the re­search jour­nal The Hol­o­cene.

The con­clu­sions are based on chem­i­cal anal­y­sis of a stal­ag­mite, or mine­ral growth, found in the moun­tain­ous Buck­eye Creek ba­sin of West Vir­gin­ia.

Na­tive Amer­i­cans “ach­ieved a pret­ty soph­is­t­ica­ted lev­el of liv­ing that I don’t think peo­ple have fully apprecia­ted,” Spring­er said. “They knew how to get the most out of the for­ests and land­scapes they lived in. This was all across North Amer­i­ca, not just a few loca­t­ions.”

In­i­tial­ly, Spring­er and col­la­bo­ra­tors from Uni­vers­ity of Tex­as at Ar­ling­ton and Uni­vers­ity of Min­ne­so­ta were stu­dying his­tor­ic drought cy­cles in North Amer­i­ca us­ing iso­topes, or vari­ants, of car­bon in stal­ag­mites. To their sur­prise, they said, the car­bon rec­ord con­tained ev­i­dence of a ma­jor change in the lo­cal ec­o­sys­tem be­gin­ning at 100 B.C. This in­trigued the team be­cause an ar­che­o­logical dig in a near­by cave had yielded ev­i­dence of a Na­tive Amer­i­can com­mun­ity there 2,000 years ago.

Spring­er re­cruited two Ohio Uni­vers­ity gradua­te stu­dents to ex­am­ine stream sed­i­ments. With the help of Har­old Rowe of Uni­vers­ity of Tex­as at Ar­ling­ton, he said, the team found very high lev­els of char­coal be­gin­ning 2,000 years ago, as well as a car­bon iso­tope his­to­ry si­m­i­lar to the stal­ag­mite.

This sug­gests Na­tive Amer­i­cans sig­nif­i­cantly al­tered the lo­cal ec­o­sys­tem by clear­ing and burn­ing for­ests, probably to make fields and en­hance the growth of nut trees, Spring­er said. It’s a pic­ture that con­flicts with the pop­u­lar no­tion that early Na­tive Amer­i­cans had lit­tle im­pact on North Amer­i­can land­scapes. They were bet­ter land stew­ards than the Eu­ro­pe­an colo­nial­ists who fol­lowed, he said, but they ap­par­ently cleared more land and burned more for­est than pre­vi­ously thought.

This long-a­go land clear­ing would have im­pacted glob­al clima­te, Spring­er added. On­go­ing clear­ing and burn­ing of the Am­a­zon rainfor­est, for ex­am­ple, is one of the world’s larg­est sources of green­house gas emis­sions. Prehis­tor­ic burn­ing by Na­tive Amer­i­cans was less in­tense, but a non-trivial source of green­house gas­es to the at­mos­phere, he said.

My answer to this article:

It is an interesting, but not surprising result.  Although I have not read the actual study, I believe it is all sound science up to the point where they conclude that the added CO₂ caused global warming.  What basis could they probably have to conclude this?

We know today, that at current levels a 10% increase in CO₂ is roughly causing ( 5 / 9 * 4.7 * ln(427/388) ) degree Celsius, namely about 0.25°C.  However, this is a bit extreme as negative feedback from clouds would reduce this number significantly and the question is if burning the forests in a controlled fashion would have caused a 10% CO₂ increase in the first place.

We work the same way with (more or less) controlled forest burnings today in many parts of the world.  If this is not a good idea, then it is for other reasons than CO₂ and "global warming".

We have to remember that with all the human activity we have today, we still only contribute 5% of the CO₂ according to the IPCC and a wild guess would suggest that we all-in-all produce more CO₂ today, compared to native Americans a few thousand years ago.

It is important to browse the proportions:  Yes, CO₂ has the capability of causing marginal warming; but the little we add to it and the little effect it has, will be completely hidden in variations caused by other sources.

Karl J. Hansen