Quick: which era would you consider the greatest in human history? I’ll give you a few moments to think about it.

…

…

…

What did you come up with? Did you choose the classical era, with the birth of modern philosophy, democracy, and classical art? Or perhaps you’re someone who appreciates the achievements of the modern world, in which the health and wealth of people around the world is greater than its ever been? Or did you focus on some other time? The era of revolution perhaps where men through off the rule of kings for representative governments?
Turns out you’re all wrong. It’s actually been all downhill since the Paleolithic…

IMAGINE a small group of farmers tending a rice paddy some 5,000 years ago in eastern Asia or sowing seeds in a freshly cleared forest in Europe a couple of thousand years before that. It is here, a small group of scientists would have you believe, that humanity launched climate change. Long before the Industrial Revolution—indeed, long before a worldwide revolution in intensive farming, the results of which kept humanity alive—people caused unnatural exhalations of greenhouse gases that had an impact on the world’s climate.

I imagine this is just the first step in a longer scientific trend leading to the conclusion that coming down from the trees was a bad idea in the first place. And of course this will be rivaled by the school of scientific thought contending that the trees themselves were a bad move and we shouldn’t have even left the oceans (a little inside joke there, from a book which rapidly seems to find it’s once absurd-seeming humor challenged by an increasingly absurd reality).

This entry was posted by by Bogus Doug on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under Global WarmingCoolingChange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.