Did Early Global Warming Divert A New Glacial Age?

Kind of old (Dec 2008), but an interesting idea!

The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.

But gathering physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world's most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.

What's more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 190433.htm

I read an excerpt on that somewhere a few weeks ago, and it definitely is interesting. As long as man as around, we could keep the world in its current interglacial period, which isn't altogether a bad thing.

It reminds me of the book Fallen Angels by Larry Niven (and someone else I can't remember). In it, humanity has successfully created a zero-emission civilization only to usher in the next ice age. Maybe the book isn't too far off.