This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on William Ruddiman is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
William F. Ruddiman is a palaeoclimatologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is known principally for his "early anthropocene" hypothesis, the idea that Human-induced changes in greenhouse gases did not begin in the eighteenth century with advent of coal-burning factories and power plants of the industrial era, but date back to 8,000 years ago, triggered by intense farming activities of our early agrarian ancestors. It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of rises and falls that had accurately characterized their past long-term behavior, a pattern which is well explained by natural variations in the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovitch cycles. In his overdue-glaciation hypothesis Ruddiman claims that an incipient ice age would probably have begun several thousand years ago, but the arrival of that scheduled ice age was forestalled by the activities of early farmers.
The overdue-glaciation hypothesis has been challenged on the grounds that alternative explanations are sufficient to account for the current warm anomaly without recourse to human activity, but Ruddiman challenges the methodology of his critics. (see external links)
William Ruddiman is also known for his hypothesis in the 1980s that the tectonic uplift of Tibet created the highly seasonal monsoonal circulation that dominates Asia today.
He has also proposed that the uplift of the Tibetan and Colorado plateaus caused a reduction in atmospheric CO2 and was therefore a major causal factor in the Cenozoic Cooling trend that eventually lead to our current Ice Age1
He has written a number of books including "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate".
References
- ^ Ruddiman, W.F. and J.E. Kutzbach. 1991. Plateau Uplift and Climate Change. Scientific American 264:66-74
External links
- Home page
- How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?
- The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago; Climatic Change 61: 261–293, 2003
- Debate over the Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis
- Hazel Muir. "The ice age that never was". New Scientist Print Edition. 03 September 2008
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 5 September 2008, at 03:17.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "William Ruddiman".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.