So all this environmental posturing actually was about giving up civilization

The suspicion has been that all the Climate Change focus on Carbon Dioxide has been a trojan horse by the environmental movement to kill the western industrial economic system.  After all, Carbon Dioxide is about the least important of the greenhouse gases (typically hundreds or thousands of times less potent from a greenhouse perspective).  So why the focus on CO2?

Nonsense, say the Usual Suspects.  They're just trying to save the world because ZOMG THERMAGEDDON!!!eleventy!!!!

I mean, everything was all hunky dory before the Industrial Age.  Right?  Err, nazzo fast:

A period covering the heyday of both the Roman Empire and China's Han dynasty saw a big rise in greenhouse gases, according to a new study.
The finding challenges the view that human-made climate change only began around 1800.

A record of the atmosphere trapped in Greenland's ice found the level of heat-trapping methane rose about 2000 years ago and stayed at that higher level for about two centuries.

Methane was probably released during deforestation to clear land for farming and from the use of charcoal as fuel, for instance to smelt metal to make weapons, says lead author Celia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

"Per capita they were already emitting quite a lot in the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty," she says of the findings by an international team of scientists published today in the journal Nature (link to abstract).

OK - not only do the enviros want you to give up the internal combustion engine, central heating, the electric light, and the modern industrial economy, the implication is that they want everyone to go back to a pre-Roman standard of living.

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Now I'm sure that there will be all sorts of tut tutting from the Smarter Crowd over this.  After all, just like Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" graph tried to disappear the Medieval Warm Period (ca. AD 800-1300) to make recent warming look unprecedented, similarly this just tries to disappear the equally inconvenient Roman Warm Period (ca. 400 BC - 200 AD).

But the logic of how this will be used is the same.  The implication of the Hockey Stick was to de-industrialize, to allow the planet to "settle" back to a stable climate*.  So why not give up Roman (and later) technologies to let the climate "settle"?

The problem, of course, is that the global population 2000 years ago was only around 300 Million people, meaning 96% of everybody has to, err, go somewhere else.  Sadly, we've got an idea of where they'd like us all to go.

And so the Usual Suspects must now be viewed not simply as corrupting science, but as either tools of an evil ideology or active supporters of it.  Sad to feel so harshly towards a group of scientists who are likely just grubbing for grants, but there it is.

* Of course, it hasn't ever been stable.  The climate changes, and everyone knows that, which makes it funny that the Usual Suspects accuse skeptics of being "Climate Change Deniers".