Effect of per-capita land use changes on Holocene forest clearance and CO 2 emissions
Abstract
The centerpiece of the early anthropogenic hypothesis is the claim that humans took control of greenhouse-gas trends thousands of years ago because of emissions from early agriculture ( Ruddiman, 2003, 2007). A common reaction to this claim is that too few people lived thousands of years ago to have had a major effect on either land use or greenhouse-gas concentrations. Implicit in this view is the notion that per-capita land clearance has changed little for millennia, but numerous field studies have shown that early per-capita land use was large and then declined as increasing population density led to more intensive farming. Here we explore the potential impact of changing per-capita land use in recent millennia and conclude that greater clearance by early agriculturalists could have had a disproportionately large impact on CO 2 emissions.
- Publication:
-
Quaternary Science Reviews
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.05.022
- Bibcode:
- 2009QSRv...28.3011R