Genghis Khan, History's Greenest Conqueror

New research suggests that in addition to being one of history's cruelest conquerors, Genghis Khan may have been the greenest. It is estimated that the Mongol leader's invasions unintentionally scrubbed almost 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere. From the article: "Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests. In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan's unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere." I guess everyone has their good points.

Comments

Smooth Move

[Sponge Bath]

Way to go Mother Nature Network (MNN), you have tied Genghis Khan to environmentalism. Expect to see this quoted out of context on Fox.

Re:Smooth Move

[Solandri]

Way to go Mother Nature Network (MNN), you have tied Genghis Khan to environmentalism.

On the contrary, I think it's a connection which is both telling and needs to be made more public. The modern environmental movement and most people who are concerned about the environment have the same goal - preservation and conservation of the natural world. But they have very different opinions on the means to achieve those goals. Most people would prefer that preservation and conservation be achieved with as little inconvenience to our modern way of life as possible. Most hardcore environmentalists OTOH view controlling human population and consumption as the most effective means of achieving that goal. (Which is precisely what Ghengis Khan did through different means.)

The divergence is most telling with nuclear power. The only reason CO2 emissions are a tough problem is because of energy. CO2 is a byproduct of processes we use to extract energy. That puts the CO2 at a low energy state, and getting rid of it involves putting energy back into it. But putting energy back into CO2 defeats the purpose of burning the fuel which produced it in the first place. You'd be producing CO2 to extract energy which you then use to decompose CO2.

Nuclear doesn't have that problem. With a relatively cheap and nearly unlimited power source like nuclear, CO2 ceases to become a problem. We can build plants which do nothing but scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, pumping energy in to convert it back into oxygen and residual carbon (soot, which is a heckuva lot easier to sequester than gaseous CO2). The same thing for dangerous toxins like dioxin. They're only a problem because they're at a low energy state so natural processes (which generally don't have access to high energy levels) have a very difficult time breaking them down. With cheap energy, you can afford to run incinerators which atomize those compounds back into their constituent elements. These problems either go away or are greatly diminished with cheap energy, yet cheap energy seems to be one of the things the environmental movement vehemently opposes.

The same goes for population. Most of the developed world is close to zero population growth or even experiencing negative growth (families on average have only 2 or fewer kids). Nearly all of the world's exploding population growth is happening in undeveloped countries. Yet nearly every time you hear an environmentalist talk about overpopulation, they point to solutions involving changing what people in industrialized nations do, not changing developing nations where nearly all the population growth is happening.

We should be concentrating R&D on cheap energy sources for the future, not on cleaner but considerably more expensive "green" energy sources. It's only because productivity per person has vastly increased over the pre-industrialized era that we have the luxury to be spending time and effort doing things like worrying about the environment. But that increased productivity came about directly because of cheap energy. Make energy more expensive and our productivity goes down, meaning we can't afford some of our modern conveniences and/or we can't spend as much time and effort worrying about the environment. And we should be concentrating on modernizing and industrializing (and making contraceptives available to) undeveloped nations to arrest their population growth, not trying to get people in developed nations to adopt "low footprint" lifestyles similar to those in undeveloped nations.

Genghis Khan == a polluter

[JonySuede]

the CO2 in Genghis Khan time's was not a pollutant but the methane that the 40 millions rotting corpses generated was.

This "humor" brought to you...

[SuperKendall]

...by the same people who brought you the "hilarious" No Pressure video advocating a more personal approach to elimination of the un-believing infidel swine who don't ascribe to your exact brand of environmentalism.

Because it's just such a pleasant feeling to think of 40 million people hacked to death and then serving to fertilize our masters, the Trees.

I, for one, welcome our new Tree Overlords!

So how about Hilter, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin?

[darkmeridian]

Each of those dictators caused tens of millions of deaths ... why aren't they less "green" than Genghis Kahn? Did the article take into account the method of death used? I guess the Nazis used a lot of gas running the trains to the concentration camps, but what about Pol Pot or Stalin, who just starved tens of millions of people to death?

A better explanation is that this is a stupid article that makes no freaking sense.

Stupid article

[Geoffrey.landis]

The article is, of course, being stupid-- deliberately stupid, I expect, but still stupid.

The anthropogenic greenhouse effect was not a problem in the 13th century, and the the total amount of carbon dioxide that had been emitted by the entire human race at that point was trivial. To the extend that his conquests removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it was addressing a problem that didn't exist.

I will also point out that current carbon dioxide emission is about 30 billion tons per year. If the Mongols removed "700 million tons" of carbon from the atmosphere, then in the course of a century and a half of Mongol rule they accomplished the removal of an amount of carbon dioxide equal to about one week of modern emission.

Re:Stupid article

[d3ac0n]

I think it raises an even more important point than you have touched on:

The inherent genocidal madness of the modern "environmentalist" movement.

Think about it; This article actually tries to put a POSITIVE SPIN on GENOCIDE. I see this all the time from "greenies", who basically view all of humanity as somehow "unnatural" and a pox upon Mother Earth. They view humans as utterly expendable and particularly those humans who happen to disagree with their eco-religion. See the "No Pressure" videos created by the eco-militant 10:10 group as a fairly recent example. It's a twisted and evil worldview and any sane reason-based person should reject it utterly.

Or, at the very least, demand that they avoid hypocrisy and off themselves first as an example to the rest of us.

Re:Stupid article

[Geoffrey.landis]

So, uh, you are taking one article that is apparently written somewhat tongue in cheek, plus one (1) video, which has been disowned by pretty much every environmental group on the planet, as evidence that "greenies" "view humans as utterly expendable."

I think you could apply Niven's law to this. ("No cause is so noble that it won't attract its share of fuggheads"), not to mention Pournelle's corrolary ("...who will inevitably be the ones interviewed by the press.")

Re:Stupid article

[Solandri]

The anthropogenic greenhouse effect was not a problem in the 13th century, and the the total amount of carbon dioxide that had been emitted by the entire human race at that point was trivial. To the extend that his conquests removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it was addressing a problem that didn't exist.

I will also point out that current carbon dioxide emission is about 30 billion tons per year. If the Mongols removed "700 million tons" of carbon from the atmosphere, then in the course of a century and a half of Mongol rule they accomplished the removal of an amount of carbon dioxide equal to about one week of modern emission.

You're forgetting consequential effects. If he culled 40 million people from the population during the 13th century, he didn't just remove those 40 million people. He also removed all their potential descendants. Given that the estimated population of the world at the time was about 400 million, a 40 million reduction works out to about 10%.

Since percentages aren't distorted by exponential growth, that means he's responsible for a 10% reduction in the world's current population. There are nearly 700 million fewer people alive today because of him. If we go with your 30 billion tons of CO2 globally figure, he's responsible for a 3 billion tons of CO2 annual reduction here and now.

Re:Stupid article

[WinstonWolfIT]

Sorry that's a terribly unsubstantiated conclusion. The birth rate is tied directly to population density, economic and biological factors. Unkill those millions and you simply trigger an earlier birth rate decrease. The actual population would be somewhere between now and 10% more than now, closer to now than 10%.

Re:Stupid article

[antifoidulus]

Especially if you consider the fact that conquerers like that mainly killed men and the elderly. The fertile women were usually raped, married off, and/or sold as slaves for above purposes. So the overall effect on the population would be limited, he was just replacing one set of sperm with another.

Re:Environmentalism = genocide?

[BlackSabbath]

We don't need anyone to call for a mass execution. People forget that most systems self-regulate. Like the bacteria in the petri dish we will - at some point - get to the edge of the dish and find there's no more resources left. At which point there will be a massive die off. There may well be some of us left over to start again. Or not. Who knows?

And to those of you that think we can terraform Mars or something and just ship out there - I call BS. We can't do the basics on THIS planet economically. What makes it likely that we'll be able to do so on another planet where everything is X (where X>1) times harder?

Green Movement == Kill Yourself

[RJBeery]

Nothing illustrates the connection between being "anti-human" and being "green" more than this story. No matter what thoughtful precautions you can take to preserve Nature, the better alternative is that you never existed at all. In other words, kill yourself so that the world may remain a pleasant place for the animals. :)

Re:Hitler was GREEN

[shutdown -p now]

Hitler doesn't get a cookie because he used highly polluting methods of disposing with all those pesky humans, disposing high amounts of harmful chemicals such as carbon monoxide and lead into the environment.

In contrast, Genghis Khan responsibly used materials that are generally harmless, and either naturally compostable (e.g. wood), or easily recyclable (i.e. iron).