For thousands of years, humans have been changing global climate, maybe even helping us avert the next ice age, all long before the Industrial Revolution.  Interested?  Then you should read Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by Paleoclimatologist Bill Ruddima... [More]

Millennia ago, our species reshaped the ecology of this planet and we have continued to reshape it ever more rapidly and intensively ever since.  Today, we directly use or alter nearly all of earth’s terrestrial ecosystems- the rest we alter indirectly through climate change.  I... [More]

Finally some good news about global change: globalization is making us cooperate!  This is no minor discovery.  Poverty, global warming, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss- all of these will only be solved when all of the people of all nations collaborate sustainably in doing ... [More]

When we change our landscapes, we change the clouds above and thereby climate - this from new evidence just published by Jingfeng Wang (Wang et al., 2009) and a team of researchers in Rafael Bras’s climate lab at MIT.  By observing cloud patterns and other climate parameters in defor... [More]

Diseases introduced by Europeans after 1492 are now known to have caused massive population declines in the Americas, and the failure of ancient agricultural systems across huge regions, many of which depended on the regular burning of forests.  Now, researchers, led by Richard Nevle and ... [More]

The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis holds that human alteration of climate began with forest clearing and rice production more than 6 thousand years ago.  Here are my personal impressions of recent work supporting this hypothesis, from last week's annual meeting ... [More]

We live in interesting times.  We've now realized that our activities are changing global climate and thereby harming both ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.  And we are begining to do something about it.  International efforts are assessing and attempting to manage our climate-... [More]

Appropriately enough, I'm going to begin with a thought that pushed me to start this blog, which I recorded on the morning of August 8, during the Ecological Society of America annual meetings in Milwaukee.  I was taking a break from the conference and reading an article in the New Yorker a... [More]