The Historical Ecology of Global Climate Change

Brief summary of Historical Ecology a Multidimensional Ecological Orientation
In: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Chapter 1, Carole Crumley
Santa Fe: School of American research, 1996

Introduction
The assumption that "culture has triumphed over nature," is mistaken, and characterizes an outdated nature-culture dualism. While in Anthropological human evolution textbooks the first part of the story is couched in evolutionary and environmental terms, the second part denies the environment a meaningful role in human history. Instead values, beliefs and issues, history, and culture constitute the key elements of the explanatory framework. This also reflected in the disciplinary separation of archeologist/physical anthropologists versus sociocultural anthropologists: neither acknowledges their mutual reliance.

Few efforts have been made that incorporate information about how humans have altered the environment or about how environmental change revised human activity. Examples of such changes are subsistence strategies, demographical patterns, and perceptions. To achieve this, there exists a need to develop a multidisciplinary framework. Multidisciplinarity in science is, and has been difficult to establish (Snow). Anthropology plays an important role in the development of such an framework. Its current perspective is integrative and comparative; inclusive of temporal, spatial and cultural dimensions; and dynamic. It motivates an historical focus on the dynamics of change.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC) is an international environmental treaty produced at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to 14, 1992. The objective of the treaty is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.^[1]

The treaty itself set no mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries and contains no enforcement mechanisms. In that sense, the treaty is considered legally non-binding. Instead, the treaty provides for updates (called "protocols") that would set mandatory emission limits. The principal update is the Kyoto Protocol, which has become much better known than the UNFCCC itself.

Stop Australian & US GHG pollution

World Environment Day, 5 June, has been marked around the World by millions of decent folk participating in events demanding action on the worsening climate emergency. Unaddressed, man-made climate change is predicted to kill about 10 billion mostly non-European people or about 100 million people per year this century in what is described as a Climate Genocide. Already about 18 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation in the Developing World (minus China) and this is increasingly being impacted by global warming.

Both Dr James Lovelock FRS (Gaia hypothesis) and Professor Kevin Anderson (Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that fewer than 1 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming – noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050, these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims in a terminal Muslim Holocaust, 2 billion Indians, 1.3 billion non-Arab Africans, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis (for details Google “Climate Genocide” ).