Person with masters degree in "Climate Change" from UEA says humans were big emitters of greenhouse gases thousands of years ago

Humans emitted greenhouse gases before industrial revolution: study | thetelegraph.com.au

Celia Sapart at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues analysed 56 ice core samples drilled in north and central Greenland for levels of carbon 13, a telltale isotope of methane.
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Big early increases coincided with the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) and the Roman Empire (27 BC to the last western emperor in 476 AD), which along with an advanced Indian civilisation at the time chopped down millions of trees to heat homes and power their metal-working industries, often to provide weapons.

"Based on archaeological metal production estimates, we calculate that the charcoal used for metal production at the peak of the Roman Empire alone could have produced 0.65 teragrams (650 million tons) per year of methane," the study says.

During the early medieval period, land was cleared for fields to help population expansion in Europe and Asia. In the Little Ice Age - a cold snap in the northern hemisphere in the 1300s and 1400s and again from 1600s to the 1800s that has been linked by some to changes in solar activity - the evidence points to another pickup in fire activity.
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The study was not designed to calculate the additional warming from the methane emissions, nor probe whether any warming affected weather patterns, but it has clear implications for work on climate change, said Ms Sapart.

"This study shows the urgency of controlling greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, because it shows that the disequilibrium in the climate system caused by humans existed for much longer than we expected," she said in an email exchange with AFP.

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[Celia Sapart] Postdoctoral researcher, IMAU, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, 2012-present.
PhD student and Teaching assistant, IMAU, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, October 2007-2012. Title thesis: “Variations in the methane budget over the last two millennia”, defended on the 22nd of June 2012
Master Thesis “Measuring methane concentrations and stable isotope ratios in ice cores”, IMAU, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, 2007.
Master in “Climate Change”, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UEA), UK, 2006-2007.