The Anthropogenic Era Began Thousands of Years Ago

The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun about 150 years ago when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 and CH4 at rates sufficient to alter atmospheric compositions. The hypothesis proposed here is that anthropogenic emissions first altered atmospheric gas concentrations (and climate) thousands of years ago. This hypothesis rests on three arguments: (1) Cyclic variations in CO2 and CH4 driven by Earth-orbital changes during the last 400,000 years predict decreases of both gases throughout the Holocene, but CO2 began an anomalous increase near 8000 years ago and CH4 about 5000 years ago. (2) Published explanations attributing these Holocene gas increases to natural forcing can be rejected based on available paleoclimatic evidence. (3) Archeological, cultural, historical, and geologic sources provide viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes that emerged from early agriculture in Eurasia, including forest clearance after 8000 years ago and lowland irrigation for rice farming by 5000 years ago. Prior to the industrial era, these emissions caused a mean-annual warming effect of ~0.8oC globally and 1.5-2oC at high latitudes. The early-anthropogenic warming counteracted most of a natural cooling that would otherwise have occurred, and it may have prevented a glaciation in northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO2 decreases as large as 10 ppm during the last 1000 years cannot be explained by solar-volcanic forcing without violating constraints imposed by reconstructions of northern hemisphere temperature. The CO2 decreases can be explained by bubonic plague pandemics that the caused widespread abandonment of western Eurasian farms documented in historical records. Rapid regrowth of forests on millions of abandoned farms could have sequestered enough carbon to explain the observed CO2 decreases. Plague-driven CO2 decreases were a significant causal factor in the cooler temperatures of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D.