Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

phys.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 80 posts

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#51

Post by tshanmu »

adreamingsoul wrote: post #38
jefflombardjr wrote: post #2

Anyone fascinated by this article, I highly suggest reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I just recently picked it up after seeing it recommended on a couple of threads here and it did not disappoint. Humans have been affecting ecology for a long long time. If you are like me, you're probably wondering what you can do to mitigate some of the effects, while legislation and societal action is important. I also recomme…

Instead of courses, I recommend to get a couple books on Permaculture and also look to see if any universities have extension courses for Permaculture or any topic related to it. Chances are, most of the teachers are now familiar with Permaculture and can speak to the “historical” methods and the “Permaculture” methods. Yes, a lot of people have been trying to make money of the cerificstion courses, which I think is…

hi, I am interested in permaculture, can you please recommend the books and contact info would be great!

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#52

Post by lacker »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #35
jefflombardjr wrote: post #2

Anyone fascinated by this article, I highly suggest reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I just recently picked it up after seeing it recommended on a couple of threads here and it did not disappoint. Humans have been affecting ecology for a long long time. If you are like me, you're probably wondering what you can do to mitigate some of the effects, while legislation and societal action is important. I also recomme…

Sapiens seemed very pseudo-scientific to me. It seemed like Hariri had one agenda and was trying to push that desperately.

He is a historian, not a scientist. I don't think there is a good way to analyze the past scientifically, because you can't run experiments.

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#53

Post by close04 »

wereHamster wrote: post #40
arethuza wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely anacdotal of course, but most of the really bad incidents I've been involved in with production systems were actually caused by a rushed response to an initial problem that seemed serious at the time....

Nobody is pushing for a rushed response. Just some fucking common sense, and scientifically literate people. And nobody can cry 'rushed response' anyway because the effects have been known (more or less accurately) for dozens of years.

If a sufficiently large mass of people can be convinced of something that's where everyone is going. So the result is that if a small group of people want to get somewhere all they have to do is convince a larger group. Sounds difficult but with today's tech and money concentration it's not hard to convince someone that "more CO2 is better".[0]

Regular people can't draw their own conclusions based on self study and own research. Scientifically literate is not enough when you rely on someone else's data and conclusions. So the only way is to present some evidence (plausible stuff) and the conclusion in a loud enough and convincing fashion. What you end up with is a great number of people who are genuinely convinced that global warming is a farce. They have scientists on their side so who are they to argue?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/scientist-who-thinks...

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#54

Post by george_kaplan »

Jamesbaxter29 wrote: post #46
adreamingsoul wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of courses, I recommend to get a couple books on Permaculture and also look to see if any universities have extension courses for Permaculture or any topic related to it. Chances are, most of the teachers are now familiar with Permaculture and can speak to the “historical” methods and the “Permaculture” methods. Yes, a lot of people have been trying to make money of the cerificstion courses, which I think is…

What books do you recommend do a university student without much familiarity in the subject looking for practical design advice?

Not OP, but I can recommend these two books:

"Making Small Farms Work" by Richard Perkins

and

"Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers" by Mark Shepard

Then there are the books by Bill Mollison that arguably started it all: "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual", and "Introduction to Permaculture"

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#55

Post by george_kaplan »

mooreds wrote: post #42
bambataa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. I’ve been interested in permaculture since coming across it at festivals but I’ve been put off how everyone seems to be selling courses. This is the first free one I’ve found. It feels a bit like minimalism where everyone tried to practice it by selling ebooks about minimalism.

I took two courses. It is electrifying, and a great new way of looking at the world. But of course, when I was done with the course, I looked at where I could make some money doing permaculture. There were, as far as I could see, two ways: * teach * do landscape design The first is much much easier to get into and isn't as hard as the latter. I think that is why you see so many courses. I have applied permaculture to…

Check out Richard Perkins of Ridgedale Permaculture. While he also does offer courses and has written a book (which I can recommend), he also puts out a lot of information for free on Youtube.

A major emphasis of his work is to run his farm as a profitable business while using Permaculture design principles.

Is Regenerative Ag Profitable? Looking at Return on Investments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A0uNUN9UG0&ab_channel=Richa...

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#56

Post by TSiege »

hinkley wrote: post #49
TSiege wrote: post #47

This new research is definitely intriguing, but at the same time I think it's fair to be skeptical of this new science. During the times of increase in global temperatures, human populations are estimated to be between 5 to 20 million for the whole planet. That is a very low density. Not to mention human farming began before the Younger Dryas (a sudden return to cold temperatures), which briefly ended agriculture for…

There’s some evidence that the Little Ice Age was caused by a sudden decrease in farm acreage cause by sudden depopulation during the Black Death. I hesitate to call it anthropogenic because it’s the opposite of that. I suppose the delay of the cold period counts, though.

Good point!

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#57

Post by danjoc »

coldtea wrote: post #12

If indeed ancient farmers (that were like 1/100 our population) already had "profoundly changed Earth's climate", so much for the "human activity couldn't be the reason for climate change today" argument...

Logically speaking, this is incorrect. Both could be true given a circumstance, like say, the sun goes red giant in the later case.

Furthermore, "the reason" can usually be whatever you want it to be if you go far enough back in the chain of causations. My hands were wet this morning when I dropped the jelly jar. But that wasn't my fault, it was the water company's fault for supplying the wetness on my hands. Or perhaps it was the Roman's fault for kickstarting the whole thing with aqueducts. But that's really just mankind's fault for existing, so human activity is at fault for my loose grip on the jelly jar today.

Overall, I found this article interesting, and frankly: Go mankind! We averted an ice age and certain death/destruction with farming. If we want to talk about problematic climate change, look at how living on top of a mile of ice works out for our species.

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#58

Post by wongarsu »

wereHamster wrote: post #18
gpm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main downside is that we are quite sure what would happen. The primary effect (a giant fucking algae bloom) is pretty well known. But the secondary effects are hard to predict and could be very negative. Running experiments on the planet we live on is usually frowned upon.

> Running experiments on the planet we live on is usually frowned upon. We are in a big fucking experiment right now: what happens if we release fucktons of CO2 into the atmosphere? Most of the developed world doesn't give a fuck.

> Most of the developed world doesn't give a fuck

Most of the world signed the Paris Agreement. The majority of the developed world thinks man-made climate change is real and is a threat. Conflicting priorities and systems of government that are set up for short term decisions make progress much slower than it should be, but saying that we don't care is very unfair to most of the developed world.

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#59

Post by specialist »

coldtea wrote: post #33
empath75 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody making those arguments is making them in good faith and no amount of evidence will stop them from making it.

Bad faith means not believing what you say ("with the intention of deceiving someone or doing harm"). One could very well imagine (and some of us actually know) people that legitimately believe that the climate change we're through is not man made -- they say it cause they believe it, they don't try to knowingly deceive anyone. It's another thing to say something because you do not trust scientists (including scienti…

I now believe, but cannot prove, that most people's professed beliefs are not rational, logical, reality-based, sensical.

Rather, beliefs appear to be more about identity, virtue signaling, and tribal acceptance.

If true, reason is impotent. To change belief systems, one must use psychology, rhetoric, propaganda, evangelism.

The lesswrong.com crowd is calling this "belief as attire". I don't know what to call "Popperian beliefs" (true until proven false) vs "aspirational beliefs" (make our own reality).

My greatest fear is that my self-image of being a Popperian is actually just aspirational.

Re: Ancient farmers spared us from glaciers but changed Earth's climate: study

#60

Post by Terr_ »

dalbasal wrote: post #45
Rubinsalamander wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That large band exists only for mediterran regions. Some regions are already living on the hot/cold edge

The band of "habitable by humans" is as wide as you could want. People live in Alaska and in Libya. The problem is that stuff is adapted to the way things are. Alaskan trees, bugs, mail services and whatnot are all adapted to snow and ice and such. Bugs go dormant, mailmen hibernate. Libyan mailmen would freeze to death is they got Alaskan weather. Alaskan trees would die if they got Libyan weather. Crops would fail,…

> Bugs go dormant, mailmen hibernate.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Post reply on HN