Words of warming: Tim Flannery looks at the latest books on the climate change crisis | Books | The Guardian

Just two years ago we received warning of an imminent disaster - a climatic shift that "could easily be described as hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive". The Cassandra was no deep green fundamentalist, but James Lovelock...
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But what is most remarkable about Ruddiman's work is the evidence it provides for an initial disruption to the climate system that occurred long before the industrial revolution - around 8,000 years ago.

It was then, at the dawn of agriculture, that the "wiggle" of the current cycle first departed from earlier patterns - for instead of cooling, Earth's average temperature remained remarkably stable. Ruddiman thinks that this was caused by carbon and methane being released into the atmosphere from early agriculture and the destruction of forests. In his account, human activity and the great cycles struck a delicate balance that allowed the flowering of civilisations. He also sees evidence in the ice cores for the consequences of the Black Death (a drop of around two parts per million of CO2 as forests grew over abandoned fields, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere), as well as other historic events.
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We can only project that if this summer's melt trajectory follows recent decades, by September this year the Arctic ice cap will have lost around half of its remaining ice, and be just 2.2m square kilometres.