Humans altering the land for farming steered the global climate off the natural course that was heading for another ice age, according to a new study. Compared with prior trends in the distant past, the Holocene about 5,000 years ago saw an increase in carbon dioxide and methane that prevented the spread of glaciers that had happened in previous solar cycles, according to the study, now in the journal Scientific Reports. Such findings seem to bolster the “Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis" that was originally proposed by co-author William Ruddiman, a paleoclimatologist at the University of V...