“Uncovering the Hidden Legacy: How Ancient Roman Air Pollution Shaped Europe’s Climate and History”
While this discovery is impressive, it is utterly trivial when compared to our current, global emergency. In other words, the Romans had nothing on humanity in 2019. In fact, the cooling effect of the air pollution they produced would have proved to be irrelevant anyway as the climate was entering a warming phase during the empire’s height between 250 B.C. and 400 A.D.
Regardless, the study is a sobering illustration of how humans have been affecting their surroundings in Europe and South-East Asia as early as 7,000 years ago.
Wikimedia CommonsThe Ancient Romans burned so much agricultural matter that the resultant air pollution would have cooled all of Europe by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We looked for the first time at whether anthropogenic aerosol impacts had an impact on climate a long time ago,” Anina Gilgen of Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETC) explained.
Gilgen and her team took existing data on how much land the ancient Romans used to farm, as well as how many homes and other industries occupied their territory, to estimate the amount of air pollution the empire created from the land they had cleared.
They then factored that data into a model of Europe’s climate during that time.
Overall, the results showed that while deforestation and the release of greenhouse gases could have warmed temperatures by 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit, air pollution really would have produced a cooling effect. Ultimately, the empire’s activity led to an average drop of 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which lowered Europe’s temperature to 32.3 degrees on average.
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