Top banner   Global Warming's Early Roots  Wolfgang Berger
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of
Climate. William F. Ruddiman. xiv + 202 pp. Princeton University
Press, 2005. $24.95.  In Franconia in southern Germany (where I
grew up), there are plenty of towns with names ending in reuth,
the best known of these being Bayreuth, famous for performances
of operas inspired by Teutonic mythology. Reuth denotes a
clearing—that is, a place ridden of trees. To the south we find
town names with the endings ried and reid, whereas going north
we note rode, roda and rade, until in Denmark we encounter roed.
Typically, the settlements so named are more than 1,000 years
old. In each instance the meaning of the suffix is the same.
Settlers would have had to clear forest not just for the towns
but for farmlands to support them.  The necessary amount of
clearing can be figured from the caloric requirements for food,
if one can estimate the number of settlers. Considering that we
know that Roman generals