Columbus Blamed For Mini Ice Age

DesScorp writes "Science News reports on a story which blames a centuries long cooling of Europe on the discovery of the new world. Scientists contend that the native depopulation and deforestation had a chilling effect on world-wide climate. 'Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.' The story notes that the pandemics in the Americas were possibly an example of human climate manipulation predating the Industrial Revolution, though isotope measurements used during research have much uncertainty, so 'that evidence isn't conclusive.'"

Comments

Summary is incorrect

[Matchstick]

It should say "the native depopulation and consequent re-forestation" rather than "native depopulation and deforestation". In current models, it doesn't make sense that deforestation leads to cooling.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Jarik C-Bol]

I was noticing that. the summary contradicts itself. It says that the discovery caused cooling, then says that the trees reduce carbon, which reduces the heat trapping of the atmosphere. If the trees where removed and burned, increasing carbon, would not there be a warming effect from the increased heat trapping? Bad summary i suspect, but it still does not make sense to me.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming the theory was true, the deforestation prior to Columbus' arrival would have happened over many hundreds of years since the advent of agriculture in the Americas, possibly during the rise of large cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan. This would have caused a gradual increase in atmospheric CO2, followed by a more rapid plunge as the once-farmlands were reforested and sequestered carbon.

Again, assuming the theory is true. It sounds farfetched to me, that so many new trees could grow in a hundred years.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[JoeMerchant]

Old growth forests don't capture as much carbon as new growth. Cut down a stand of 1000 year old trees and let them repopulate with all new trees and the new trees will capture carbon faster as they grow and add mass at a faster rate than the maxed out trees, while the old wood retains its carbon in the form of ships, buildings, tools, etc.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[necro81]

If the trees where removed and burned

A lot of the trees were not simply burned: they were used as lumber. Remember that by this point there was practically no virgin forest left in all of Europe, so finding a 20-50 m tall tree to use as the mainmast of a ship was difficult. And once you'd found the main mast, you still needed tremendous amounts of lumber for the rest of the ship. Mahogany and other tropical woods were highly valued for furniture; temperate hardwoods like oak and maple had uses for barrels, crates, and floors. (It is telling that, despite huge amounts of such woods in New England, the typical home was constructed and clad with conifers - spruce, pine, and cedar - because the hardwoods were in such demand and thus expensive.)

The general effect of this activity is to consume the forests, but not in a way that released a whole lot of carbon. Some of that carbon was eventually released (fires on ships was quite common) but plenty of it was sequestered at the bottom of the ocean (sinkings were also quite common).

Re:Summary is incorrect

[MBGMorden]

So the solution to global warming is to cut down all the trees of the world and let them grow back? :)

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Trees put on a growth ring pretty much every year. The density of the growth is also fairly standard, as Briffa has published. It varies somewhat with local conditions, but it seems to me that an old tree putting on a new ring will add more carbon than growth on a new tree, simply by virtue of the increased surface area!

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

"that evidence isn't conclusive" - meaning that it is more or less manipulated to mean whatever they want it to mean.

It's a world of scientific make believe.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[dogmatixpsych]

There were millions and millions of Native Americans here. The Native Americans died en masse due to disease; this disease spread quickly and advanced way ahead of the Europeans. By the time Europeans got to most areas of the Americas, native populations were reduced by as much as 90% (Source: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X). Due to the losses in Native American populations (who did not just live "harmoniously" with nature like people are taught in school - they clear cut trees, redirected rivers, and did many things not that different from what we do today) the native management of the environment was disrupted. All the trees that they had cleared out started growing back. Increase trees-->decrease carbon-->decrease heat.

I'm not saying I think the research is sound - I have no idea, I haven't read the study - but the hypothesis is not far-fetched. The /. summary is confusing though.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Will.Woodhull]

Remove a 200 year old oak tree, and it will be replaced by a dozen conifer saplings, each one adding new biomass much more quickly than the old oak that was taken away. A ton of mature oak does not have a 10th of the surface area of all those light weight saplings.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Mr_Perl]

As long as none of them are allowed to decompose or burn, yes. =)

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Dunbal]

but it seems to me

Speaking as the owner of over half a million reforested trees, it seems to me that you have no idea what you're talking about. GP is correct, new growth will capture CO2 at a higher rate than old growth. While trees add rings every year, the actual living portion of the tree remains fairly fairly constant once it reaches maturity. You can't look at the thickness of the trunk and assume that it's all living tissue because it's not. And only the living tissue requires CO2 to be converted to sugars for metabolism.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[ceoyoyo]

Old trees also die and decompose. Old forests are stable, new growth and decomposition happen at the same rate. New forests do much more growing than dying.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[cusco]

The "discovery" of the Americas brought diseases that made the Black Plague look like a case of the sniffles. Between 70 and 90 percent of **EVERYONE** between Tierra del Fuego and Point Barrow died in the course of 150 years. By the time of the founding of Virginia most of the Great Dying was already over, the huge population centers of the Atlantic Seaboard and Midwest were gone and had reverted to forest long before the English and French even started their colonization effort. The British had to hand out blankets from smallpox and TB infirmaries to wipe out native villages, because those people were at least slightly resistant already. The Spanish just had to sneeze 500 kilometers away to depopulate a region.

I wish more Americans knew that their history started well before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Sigh.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[CAIMLAS]

You're incorrect. The current model is roughly the same as the one from 10, 20, 30 years ago (and probably longer): we humans are not only capable but fully responsible for whatever disaster befalls us through way of the earth's climatic changes, and OMGTHESKYISFALLING.

The general theme is, "I don't know what causes it, but man - specifically, the white man - is responsible for all bad in the world". Global warming? Climate change? Global cooling? Regional desertification? IT's the evil West, the White Man, the Christian. Whatever's convenient at the time. (Interesting how the current climate change is only getting the negative press, without mentioning that the Sahara is re-vegetating and getting a fair amount of moisture.)

The irony is that more deforestation and occurred in the century prior to Columbus than in the century after. There were a lot of people in the Americas. They used trees. Contrary to popular belief, they did not reduce, reuse, recycle: indigenous would use up an areas resources (animals, wood, water) and move onto the next location. So, he may have been correct, sorta, despite blaming the white man.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

Actually, one of the best things we could do to get rid of a lot of carbon fast would be to start using wood for building everything, and use as much as possible. Fast growth lumber really sucks the CO2 out of the air, so if we ramped up the amount of wood used in our buildings, etc, we would literally start sequestering CO2 in every new home we build. Of course, "save the trees" greenies that don't understand science don't like that idea, because of course cutting down trees is BAD...

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Pino Grigio]

It doesn't matter. It's ridiculous and a very good example of the unbelievably stupidity masquerading as "science" put out by the so-called consensus on AGW. It amounts to around 6ppm CO2 in the atmosphere if it's correct. Are you seriously entertaining the suggestion that the climate is that sensitive to CO2? All current research points to doubling being around 1C, some think less, some more.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Pino Grigio]

It doesn't have to be living tissue to contain carbon. The carbon doesn't magically disappear until the tree itself dies. So your claim to authority on this matter is somewhat tarnished by making such a silly comment. Perhaps you should take more interest in your half a million trees.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Marc Madness]

Of course using wood extensively as a construction material as a way of doing carbon sequestration has a big risk factor associated with it (See the Great Fire of Chicago). Seems to me it would be less risky to periodically cut down the fast growth lumber and send it into the sun. Then again, that sounds slightly James Bond supervillain insane (I say this while petting a white cat).

Re:Summary is incorrect

[angel'o'sphere]

"Don't like that idea" is not the point I think.

I advice you think a bit deeper, and start applying math.

How much would do you need to grow to "suck" one ton CO2 out of the air?

How much CO2 was produced by burning oil/coal the last 150 years?

How many trees and how much area is that?

I bet the whole planet (deserts included) is by far not enough to suck out even a quarter of that amount of CO2.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Myopic]

Is "he" suggesting? No, I think the world's climate scientists are suggesting. The only refutations to that consensus is that either the evidence is terribly misleading, or there is a huge scientific conspiracy. You seem to be suggesting both (correct me if I'm wrong), but I don't find either criticism plausible. It's fine if you do find them plausible, I simply think you're wrong, as you do me. Or rather, I simply think my caricature of you is wrong, but my caricature could be wrong.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Myopic]

It may be the case that the save-the-trees greenies are concerned about more than one environmental problem, for instance both global warming as well as biodiversity. Have you ever considered that the problem is your mis-characterization, and not their ideology or ignorance of science?

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Slashdot and the submitter of the article were more interested in spreading AGW propganda than getting the summary correct? You don't say.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[pspahn]

There are trillions of Lodgepole, Ponderosa, etc in the Western US that are already dead but still standing due to Mountain Pine Beetle. These trees will release massive amounts of CO2 back into the atmosphere when they burn or decompose.

Current efforts to harvest these trees to be used in construction of furniture, homes, etc is meeting opposition, of course, even though the benefits are quite clear. Reforestation, CO2 sequestering, water runoff and erosion control, economic stimulus, the list goes on...

Re:Summary is incorrect

[roc97007]

Good idea, but environmentalists will never ever go for it.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[jc42]

I wish more Americans knew that their history started well before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Sigh.

Yeah; there's a lot that hasn't reached the public mythology. Some decades ago, I read an interesting article about the Portuguese fishing industry's post-Columbus explorations. Part of the story was quotes from trip records in 1500, describing a North American coastline with a village every mile or so, and lots of the local people out at sea, fishing. The records from 1520, however, described a coastline nearly devoid of human settlements, and very few local boats coming out to greet them. In those 20 years, nearly everyone along the coast had died.

Another bit of interesting history is that by 1520, the Portuguese fishermen understood the "North Atlantic Gyre". They routinely sailed southwest to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands, then caught the westward North Equatorial Current across to the West Indies, where they turned northwest. They then sailed up along the Bahamas and the North American coast to Nova Scotia, catching fish and preserving them in salt. Then they sailed across to the Azores and northern Spain, and south to home. They understood that this was much faster than sailing clockwise. Modern North Americans generally give Ben Franklin credit for discovering the big Gyre, but the Portuguese were using it 250 years earlier. Some of the ships' logs are still available in Portuguese and Spanish archives.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Thuktun]

FTA:

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[cowboy76Spain]

Between 70 and 90 percent of **EVERYONE** between Tierra del Fuego and Point Barrow died in the course of 150 years.

Wow, people really lived a lot of years then... Nowadays, in 150 years, the mortality rate is 100%.

Yes, I know you meant that 70-90% died of Old World diseases... but I saw your wording and could not resist, sorry.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[cowboy76Spain]

In fact, even Columbus "tried" to get into that route. Another smoking gun pointing to the possibility that there had been previous travellers.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[cowboy76Spain]

Well, maybe it is just my ludite side showing up, but I think that the first step should be stop unearthing and burning all the carbon already sequestred (sequestrated?) underground.

If you want to improve it, then just get the carbon out of the trees (pressure + heat with no oxygen) and bury it.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[cowboy76Spain]

Living or dead tissue, the carbon remains in the tree.

IMHO, the real issue is that young trees grow both horizontally AND vertically. There is a limit as how tall a tree can be (difficulty in getting water to the top, structural tensions).

Re:Summary is incorrect

[cowboy76Spain]

Compress and heat it without oxygen, get carbon, bury the carbon.

Of course it would make more sense if we stopped unearthing the buried carbon first.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[ultranova]

I advise you to think of how all that oil/coal was formed in the first place. Of course the planet is enough to suck out all that CO2, especially if you start sequestering wood in mines and such (much easier and safer than sequestering raw CO2).

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is the solution to kill of 90% of the population? :-p

Re:Summary is incorrect

[ultranova]

Interesting how the current climate change is only getting the negative press, without mentioning that the Sahara is re-vegetating and getting a fair amount of moisture.

Do you have any links? Because Sahara should be getting even wider and drier as global temperatures rise (it was last green in the ice age).

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Pino Grigio]

No, the world's climate scientists aren't suggesting anything of the sort. Nobody in climate science is putting out the line that a change of a few tens of parts per million in CO2 can cause major shifts in climate, such as LIA, nobody, except crackpots who want to make political statements, rather than scientific ones. Even the IPCC think that doubling CO2 will cause only a 1.4K increase. This is almost certainly an over-estimate; the IPCC is a political organisation, not a scientific one. It's interest is in continuing this fraud. But thereafter such a small increase in temperature, we factor in all of the outputs of the climate models. These are conceptual representations that so far have utterly failed to show any predictive power whatsoever.

The problem here is that you assume something is "scientific" if a scientist says it is. I, on the other hand, tend to prefer the idea that the method and the facts are more important than the authority figure proposing them.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Carbon sequestration on that scale might well work, provided you kept the trees from decomposing, which puts carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. That's a pretty tough thing to do, however.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yeah; there's a lot that hasn't reached the public mythology.

Boy, that's a good way to put it. My daughter is in government schools, and they truly teach a form of historically-inspired folklore instead of history.

Flat-earth theory w/r/t Columbus, Lincoln started the Civil War to free the slaves, etc. etc. I've gotta do a round of deprogramming every once in a while.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic, but yes. Growing plants sequester carbon; mature plants (and trees) far less. So, if you cut down (not burn) a tropical forest, and replace it by fast-growing plantations, you create effective carbon sinks. Hell for biodiversity, though. Forests up north grow slowly anyway (not enough sun) so that's not as helpful.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[CAIMLAS]

From one of the biggest proponents of "climate change as social change", even: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html

It's simple really. A warming climate means more evaporation. Evaporation means more humidity and rainfall. More water means more plant growth. The only real thing to differentiate the Amazon from the Sahara is, after all, rainfall. Topographically they're very similar.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[angel'o'sphere]

You forget one important thing: time.

For your idea to work you need to plant wood. Harvest it, and store it underground, air tight. And you need a few 10,000 years for that, if not millions of years. Otherwise you simply can not grow so much wood ...

So your plan sounds pretty impractical to me.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

Fast growth lumber has nothing to do with biodiversity - it implies that we are planting massive tree farms and harvesting full grown trees every few years. In that scenario, the only trees getting cut down are ones that we have planted ourselves, so there is no net loss of habitat or anything for the environment.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

"Fast growth" lumber is what I stipulated. There are trees out there that go from planted to harvestable in 7 years. Trees are largely made out of carbon, so they are literally taking CO2 and turning it into a solid form. Which can then be buried, used to build a house, or whatever you want. We're spending all sorts of money on technology that can take CO2 out of the air when we have a perfectly good solution staring us right in the face.

If you want a rough estimate of how effective it is, figure out about how much a tree weighs, and that is approximately how much carbon you remove from the air every 7 years, per tree. I'd wager it ends up being a lot cheaper and more effective than just about anything else people have come up with, at least in terms of carbon sequestration. Plus, it creates a useful byproduct that can be sold for profit.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

I advice you think a bit deeper, and start applying math.

I bet the whole planet (deserts included) is by far not enough to suck out even a quarter of that amount of CO2.

Math, you say?

Fast-growth Paulonia trees mature in 7 years. In this time, they produce 122 board feet of lumber. 110 trees grow per acre. Their density is 17lbs/cubic ft. I found these figures on the internet, and I'll leave the various unit conversions as an exercise to the reader - I get 19,000 lbs/acre/7 years, or 2700lbs/acre/year. Human activity produces about 5.94*10^13 lbs of CO2 annually. So, we'd need to utilize about 3.44*10^7 square miles to soak up that amount of CO2, which works out to ~60% of the Earth's land surface.

This is a very rough order of magnitude estimate, of course, but I think it illustrates the point well enough - planting an acre of fast growing trees will suck out a literal ton of CO2, every year. And, it will be profitable for whoever is doing it, and produce a useful product.

This isn't a be-all, end-all solution, because clearly we can't devote 60% of our land mass to just growing trees. However, if we combined this strategy with aggressive CO2 reduction measures, it could certainly have an impact. What's your alternative? And how are we going to pay for alternatives, like expensive carbon sequestration technology that isn't self supporting?

p.s - I apologize for using inelegant standard measurements, but that is what my sources provided, and so I just stuck with it. The conclusions should be the same either way.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, but as I said, you miss the point. You can suck perhaps one years CO2 production out of the air with that (over a 7 years growth period) AND you have to make sure that the wood farmed by this is never decomposing.

So, what is with the rest of the CO2 produced the previous 150 years?

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

Yeah, but as I said, you miss the point. You can suck perhaps one years CO2 production out of the air with that (over a 7 years growth period) AND you have to make sure that the wood farmed by this is never decomposing.

So, what is with the rest of the CO2 produced the previous 150 years?

No, the figures I included are annual - so, with that amount of trees, our net CO2 contribution every year would be 0.

Like I said, this isn't a complete solution, but it could certainly be part of one. Look at it this way - if we cut our CO2 production dramatically, these trees would be removing CO2 from the atmosphere faster than we put it in, so it would start to decrease. Also, it took 150 years to put that amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, so I don't think it is reasonable to expect a solution that is going to fix it in a year. Finally, if we have that amount of CO2 sequestration going on, decomposition is something that can be dealt with - bury part of the trees to turn into more fossil fuel down the road, etc.

All that said, I'm not convinced that we even need to start removing CO2, but if we do, we need to be pragmatic about how we get it done. Pie in the sky nanotech systems and massive sequestration plants don't really make sense until we've started doing the cheap, foolproof systems first.

It's all good and well to criticize other people's proposals, but let's see a better alternative, or your own numbers. I highly doubt that any other sequestration scheme can compete, especially in terms of cost.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[angel'o'sphere]

sorry, you have a big big big misconception there:

No, the figures I included are annual - so, with that amount of trees, our net CO2 contribution every year would be 0.

The figures cant be annual. They are ONCE. ONCE you have the amount of area filled with the amount of trees THEN you have ONCE drawn out the CO2 from the atmosphere needed to let those trees grow. AFTER that there is no further CO2 sucked out of the atmosphere because it is ballanced with further tree growth and tree death.
So to continue your idea, you have to harvest the trees, store them away, so that they can not decompose and produce CO2 again, and continue with that for at least 150 years. And AFTER that time you are back on 1890 levels, and only if CO2 exhaust (world wide!) is NOT increasing.

The misconception is that trees would annual remove X amount of CO2 ... they don't. A growing tree is EATING CO2 until it is grown out, a wood is when it is not expanding and becoming bigger, CO2 neutral.

However I'm all for more forests, I like trees ;D

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

sorry, you have a big big big misconception there:

No, the misconception is yours. After you grow the trees, you cut them down and sell them. Wash, rinse, repeat. There are plenty of wood-based buildings that are over 150 years old, so there's no reason to think that the carbon is going to be released right back into the atmosphere. That might happen in a forest where the trees mature and die and decompose, but clearly you wouldn't let that happen.

Plus, if you drop them all in a deep coal mine somewhere and seal it off, I don't see any reason that the CO2 would be released at all. It is in there permanently until we go dig it out again.

Again, this ISN'T about planting forests. This is about systematically growing and harvesting trees, and then either putting them in permanent storage or doing something with them that is similarly long-lasting.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[angel'o'sphere]

The misconception is still at yours, as you simply repeatedly forget about the factor: TIME.

To have a notice able effect you have to store wood 100 years in mines ... or where ever you want to store them.

So, it takes you 7 years to have a forest that sucks out one year of CO2 production ... (that was your math).

Then you harvest it, and store it in a mine. Then you need another 7 years to get out another one year production. (Bluntly: that is absurd, you never gonna do that in just 7 years).

Now we have spend 14 years to get rid of 2 years production ... I fail to understand why you don't see this is not gonna work ...

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

Sahara was last green 8000 years ago, well, after the ice age ended and into the holocene. Catastrophic climate change made it into a desert, which is why the Old Egyptian Kingdom arose in the Nile valley (that's where the people who had lived on the Savannah fled to). Another catastrophic climate change (cold) then brought down the Old Kingdom and other large civilizations in that region 4000 years ago.

The climate is always changing.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[werepants]

You do not understand math. One acre of trees consumes ~19000 lbs of carbon in 7 years. That works out to 2700 lbs of carbon, EVERY YEAR. 19000lbs/7yrs = 2700lbs/yr. Also, the Paulonia trees I used as a reference DO regrow every 7 years, and DON'T EVEN HAVE TO BE REPLANTED. They regrow from roots, to the full height figures I quoted.

So, there is a constant, sustainable carbon sequestration of 2700 lbs, per year, per acre. This is doable for several decades with a single planting. 5 minutes of googling would make this painfully clear to anyone, so please do me the favor of taking the time to understand the argument before you bring another objection.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[JoeMerchant]

I own 20 acres in Florida that was logged of old-growth pine in 1880-1890, it was used (along with a few thousand other acres of timber) to build a town about six miles down-river. In 19 O something, the town burned down, releasing the sequestered carbon. The woods have been fire-suppressed ever since, so the pine was out-competed by oak, oak that burns to the ground fairly easily (as a 1/4 acre clearing that was burned and stopped by human action in about 1970 attests to.) Also, Hurricane Charley came through and ripped out about 50% of the oak canopy, throwing it to the ground, I think that was a carbon neutral event, as the canopy rotted, undergrowth exploded in volume, making much of the land unpassable on foot now. 40 or 50 years from now, the oak will regain canopy shade status and suppress the undergrowth regrowth rate, unless another big storm or fire comes through.

All in all, I'd rather have 1000 year old pine trees on the land, but I'm not likely to live long enough to see that.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[JoeMerchant]

Well, maybe it is just my ludite side showing up, but I think that the first step should be stop unearthing and burning all the carbon already sequestred (sequestrated?) underground.

If you want to improve it, then just get the carbon out of the trees (pressure + heat with no oxygen) and bury it.

Until we have surplus clean energy to create that pressure and heat, it's probably better to not use the energy on carbon sequestration. I believe if you bury the wood below the water table (a mostly anaerobic environment), it will retain much of its carbon for a long long time.

Re:Summary is incorrect

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry, you seem completely miss my point: you have to HARVEST the trees and store them away, do you get that?

And to clean the air to a level of 1850, you have that for millennia.

Right now we burn coal and oil per year that spill 15 million tons of carbon into the air. This is 30 thousand millions lbs. Or in digits: 30 000 000 000 lbs. (Rounded down to your favour) divided by 3000lbs/yr we get 10 000 000 acres needed to compensate for the current exhaust. To start reducing CO2 levels we need more than that ofc.

All numbers given on the numbers you gave, no idea about those trees.

If you have so many acres handy, feel free to plant trees, afaik there is no law against planting trees anywhere ...

Re:Summary is incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the trees were not simply burned: they were used as lumber. Remember that by this point there was practically no virgin forest left in all of Europe, so finding a 20-50 m tall tree to use as the mainmast of a ship was difficult.

There was lots and lots of 20-50 m tall trees in Europe, just not some parts of Europe. One reason of Denmarks military dominance over the seas was their supplies of timber from Norway and Skåneland. Swedens dominance as a military power on land, was due to almost unlimited supply of wood, iron ore and copper ore, they were the only nation that could produce weapons to an army as big as all of the other European armies put together, as well as having farmland enough to feed it. In the south was the Ottoman Empire, although with decreasing natural resources, still enough to uphold an empire. The Ottoman Empire had at least enough wood to build ships to control the Mediterranean (tiny in comparison to Denmarks water domains). Some hundred years later came the new challenger from the NorthEast, in the form of Peter the Great's armies, also with almost untouched vast natural resources to back them up (but with trouble to produce enough food to feed its huge army).

In the middle was a lot of weak states, fighting endless petty wars over the few bread crumbs that was left for them (mostly with weapons and bullets made of Swedish steel, iron and brass, since Sweden produced most of the iron, steel (only s small operation in Spain could provide steel good enough to match swords made of Swedish steel, and only in very small quantities) and copper used in Europe, and often feeding their armies with food imported from Denmarks domains), using most of what they could pillage and tax from their dominions to bribe their more powerful neighbours to leave them alone. That is, until they started to explore and concur areas outside Europe, where they weren't the weakest and least technically developed. When the goods from the colonies outside Europe started to come, the power balance of Europe changed (but, e.g., Great Brittain would still pay lots of money to Sweden, Norway and the Ottoman Empire to leave them alone, well into the first half of the 19th century).

Re:Summary is incorrect

[bane2571]

I tried pointing this out to a few people about paper recycling. You get some odd looks when you tell someone recycling is potentially worse for the environment.

Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is truly the most idiotic thing I've ever read.

And I've read a Creationist textbook.

Re:Wow.

[myurr]

Wouldn't we also have seen a big dip around that time in all the CO2 graphs climatologists have been throwing around showing how CO2 has massively increased in the last few decades? I don't remember any such fluctuations specific to that period, so either this new theory is wrong or those graphs (and therefore data in the climate models) have all been wrong.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. The OP has hit the nail on the head. This is more unmitigated bollocks from the CO2 botherers, paid for with your tax dollars.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting. You do know that there were more people living in the America's (north and south) at that time than Europe right? That is, until the europeans killed them off. Most of the forested areas, even now, were farmland back then.

Re:Wow.

[MrHanky]

From TFS: "Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries."

So yes.

Re:Wow.

[Jarik C-Bol]

really? i was under the impression that a major portion of the native american population was at least semi nomadic, with only a small portion being agrarian societies. If you can show me solid evidence that I am miss-informed, I would be most appreciative.

Re:Wow.

[demonlapin]

This is a roundup of a lot of scholarly work on what the Americas were like before Columbus. In short, the book contends that there were an awful lot of people in North America prior to the Age of Exploration who were extraordinarily susceptible to European diseases. While many practiced straight-up agriculture, a lot of others essentially "farmed" wild game - early European colonists into the Ohio Valley noted that the land often looked like European parks (i.e., trees spaced far enough apart that wagons could easily be driven between them, with occasional copses, making perfect habitat for deer), and that an extraordinarily high percentage of the trees that were there were nut-producers (i.e., they planted those and cut down anything else). It also argues that the early explorers (especially de Soto's expedition) weren't making things up when they talked about cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants lining the sides of rivers. When they died en masse, the "old-growth" forests arose.

Re:Wow.

[djmurdoch]

You can see such a dip in the first graphic associated with this paper:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html

Re:Wow.

[myurr]

From TFA that 'sudden drop' in CO2 levels equates to 6 - 10 ppm. Given that the current atmospheric concentration is 392 ppm, and in 2009 CO2 levels increased by 2ppm, we're talking about tiny quantities well within the margin of error of the measuring methods used. At worst we're talking about an equivalent to 5 years of increase, based on the 2009 figure, and that was enough to trigger a mini 'ice age'? This is junk science.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

My ancestors used to use fires to clear areas to promote certain types of animals and plants over others.
When the diseases hit, the population any many areas was reduced to 10% of the original quantity.
End of "wildlife management" practices resulted.

Re:Wow.

[MrHanky]

It might be, but if the reforestation alone can account for that drop in atmospheric CO2 (that's a lot of forest!), then the change in the landscape itself would certainly have an influence on local climate, possibly enough to influence Western Europe.

Also, don't be so quick to dismiss research based on an article in a popular science magazine: most journalists are incompetent, and will try to get a sensationalist angle out of anything and nothing.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

'the dip' being a single data point?

Re:Wow.

[nedlohs]

The current value and a yearly change have little bearing on the margin of error. Sure when the measured change is very small compared with the total value then measurement error comes into play but 3 significant figures isn't exactly an unheard of level of precision.

Sure that may be well within the margin of error but given you provided no evidence of that being the case and I'm too lazy to do any research myself I think I'll take the word of the Standford University geochemist over a random slashdot post.

Re:Wow.

[djmurdoch]

"a single data point"

The point before the lowest one, and the 6 points afterwards.

Re:Wow.

[siglercm]

Thank you! You made my point better than I could have.

Re:Wow.

[cusco]

The CO2 concentration at the time was less than half of what it is today, and the normal yearly variation was less than half a ppm. That's a very large change on that scale.

Re:Wow.

[Pino Grigio]

No it isn't. It's around 6ppm. That is not enough to account for anything, unless the climate is a few orders of magnitude more sensitive to carbon than we think it is, which it is demonstrably not.

Re:Wow.

[Blakey Rat]

At the time Cortez entered Tenochtitlan, it had a population greater than that of any European city at the time, and was possibly the most populous city on the planet.

There's a lot of misinformation about native pre-Columbus native societies, one of them being that they were universally hunter-gatherers who lived "in harmony" with nature. Not true. They cut down forests, they slashed and burned, they caused the extinction of numerous species in both North and South America.

Cooling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't removing all the trees ect have caused a warming? Not cooling...

Title seems backwards.

Now i'm gonna go discover my neighbors house and take all his stuff and kill his family. In 100 years i'll have a day named after me.

Re:Cooling?

[maxwell demon]

Wouldn't removing all the trees ect have caused a warming? Not cooling...

Title seems backwards.

No, the title is right, the summary is wrong in writing "deforestation" instead of "reforestation".

Re:Cooling?

[jd]

Not that it makes much difference. There are two things that are commonly ignored by TMITS when looking at climate - regional climate isn't the same as global climate (you can have cooling in a region when the global temperature is rising, and vice versa) and neither is a linear system (warming can include periods of extreme cooling, and vice versa; transition temperatures are another source of non-linearity).

CO2 is also not the only thing that is changed by deforestation/reforestation. You alter the reflectivity and therefore air temperature and air currents, you alter the water cycle and you radically alter rainfall patterns. This is why climate models are complex.

The practical upshot is that summaries about climate are always going to be bad. Anti global warming fanatics often latch onto a summary and argue that because it doesn't match every single data point that the science itself is wrong. Which, of course, is BS. Summaries in global climate aren't meaningful most of the time because they're talking about the mean change over a very long time of the sum of patterns that have pseudo-random variations within them over the short timeframes that the human mind can actually grasp, where no individual pattern need have any obvious relationship to the mean change even if you were able to filter out the fluctuations.

What about the plague?

[maxwell demon]

If this theory is right, I think a similar effect should have occurred after the black death in Europe. Does anyone know if it got colder at that time?

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

It did. However, the Black Death also happened to occur at the tail end of the Medieval Warming Period that lasted from about 900 to 1300 AD.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

The MWP didn't exist. Michael Mann proved it by fiddling with his hockey stick.

Re:What about the plague?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

I don't get it, if this deforestation had such huge effects, then why haven't we seen this happen in temperature graphs a dozen times ? The Sahara was ~30% forest in Roman times, so why didn't that register ?

The same question can be asked about European and Chinese forests, which came and went, or close to natural disasters that significantly shrunk forests.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause and effect. You have them the wrong way around.

Re:What about the plague?

[Tomato42]

Because whole "climate science" has just as much science innit as finance: "I think this may work, so I'll publish my thoughts as indisputable fact."

If someone missed it, they don't do the "experiment" stage of real science.

Re:What about the plague?

[maxwell demon]

Cause and effect. You have them the wrong way around.

No. The argument in TFA goes as follows:

Europeans arrive -> Native Americans get decimated -> Native Americans destroy less forest -> forests grows -> less CO2 -> colder climate.

Now replace the first step with black death, and Native Americans with Europeans:
Black Death -> Europeans get decimated -> Europeans destroy less forest -> forest grows -> less CO2 -> colder climate

Same line of reasoning.

Re:What about the plague?

[tbannist]

It's the reforestation that had the huge effect, and who's to say we haven't?

I think this one might be particularly important because of the magnitude of the disaster. It wasn't just one deadly pandemic, it was half a dozen of them sweeping the Americas one after the other. The article says they estimate that close to 90% of the Native American population was wiped out over the course of less than a century by disease.

Re:What about the plague?

[dr2chase]

Except you have to fill in numbers. The book 1491 (mentioned above) suggests that Native American deaths from disease may have been as high as 95%; their civilizations vanished. It's an extraordinary claim, there is support in the book. The upper bound on Black Death mortality (Wikipedia) is a 60% reduction in population, which is pretty darn awful, but civilization did not vanish.

Re:What about the plague?

[maxwell demon]

But 60% less humans still need 60% less wood, right? And also they use 60% less land for agriculture.

Re:What about the plague?

[KermodeBear]

Percentages are interesting and all, but what about absolute numbers? 95% of a million people is 950k people leaving. 60% of 10 million people is 6 million. Guess which drop in population is going to have a larger effect on resource usage? I don't have the numbers but it would be interesting to see them.

Also, more trees may have pulled more carbon, but with so few people alive and no coal power plants, factories, and automobiles, was there a significant amount to pull out in the first place? Yes, the people in the Americas burned down some forest for farming land, but it isn't as if those were the only forest fires happening at the time. Natural fires happen regularly and they're sometimes massive.

Also, "There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake." Emphasis mine. And just below that:

Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

There's so many variables going on here that saying, "Oh, people died, and stuff happened" is a huge stretch. Would there have been an effect? Probably. Technically my breathing affects the environment. But a noticeable one? I highly doubt it.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not conclusively see Justinian's plague (550-700) and the Black Death (1350-1500) in the temperature record.

I do know that some argue that the Black Death increased the productivity of agriculture in Europe, leading to greater wealth, more freedom, the Renaissance, etc, because labour temporarily became scarcer and more valuable than land. From this perspective it is not surprising why Europe repopulated very quickly: more land means more people have children.

Re:What about the plague?

[dr2chase]

We don't know that it was 60% -- that was the upper limit -- and I think a reduction in population, that still farms and maintains cities, is different from the collapse of civilization and the transition to a not-very-agricultural nomadic life.

The one solid interesting thing in TFA is that the CO2 blip and isotopic change is consistent with a whole lot of plants pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. The cause and effect, I don't think we're quite so sure on. Presumably someone is looking at historical records and trapped gas records to see if there are other interesting coincidences out there.

Re:What about the plague?

[dr2chase]

Same book, contains estimates that at their upper limits puts the New World population pre-Columbus above Europe at the time, so it could be a big deal. You should find a copy and read it, it is very interesting, and might even be true.

Re:What about the plague?

[Dunbal]

Native Americans destroy less forest

Yeah, because the Europeans didn't deforest at all.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

*If* there is no evidence of this, I would speculate that since the majority of Europe's decimated population at that time lived in close communities with stone streets and buildings. And even if entire villages were wiped out, it would have been more difficult for re-forestation to occur simply due to the permanence of the settlements themselves.
 
Everything that's known about the Native American die off (which many suggest was MUCH larger than the Black Death in sheer numbers) was that the large forested areas between settlements, most of which were made of wood and organic materials, would have spread much faster than comparatively smaller forests in Europe. Plus, the trees would have found it easier to push over or through wooden structures compared to stone.
 
But that's just speculation, it would be an interesting theory to investigate.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there was a mini-ice age that proceeded the black plague. I watched a documentary on the history channel and am going off of memory. Basically this mini ice age caused crops to fail which led to people starving and being in a weakened state. This made them more susceptible to the black plague which was able to spread quickly. I think the ice age lasted a few years, then the plague showed up. It lasted long enough that (france I think) started planting more potatoes and less wheat.

It was an interesting documentary about the dark ages and medieval times and I think they spent a small portion of their time on the mini ice age and black plague.

Re:What about the plague?

[jd]

And you'll observe that not long after the Roman period, there were human migrations northwards. So, yes, we have seen this happen.

Understanding of human-caused changes to climate is over 100 years old, largely because people were able to map human activities to climate changes by the historical record alone. (They weren't really up to doing mass spectrometry on ice cores in the first decade of the 1900s.)

Re:What about the plague?

[jd]

Well, no. Ships were becoming gigantic at that time. Not sure of the exact date for the Mary Rose, but you might want to compare it to the Viking Longships in terms of wood consumed per person and then interpolate what it might have been during the Black Death. 60% fewer people might not have significantly altered wood consumption at all, due to the increased inefficiency.

As far as agriculture is concerned, this was after most European countries had some form of Enclosures Act. As a result, the land usage would have been more-or-less identical. It wouldn't have increased as population regrew, it just wouldn't have shrunk as population declined.

Re:What about the plague?

[jd]

The Europeans didn't deforest. Well, not after they'd destroyed the forests, that is. You can't subtract from nothing.

Re:What about the plague?

[Dunbal]

So they came to America and immediately established national parks eh?

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this theory is right, I think a similar effect should have occurred after the black death in Europe. Does anyone know if it got colder at that time?

It went the other way around. Cooling starting around 1300 lead to mass starvation and mass susceptibility, which allowed Black Death to run rampant through an immune-suppressed population starting in 1348.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

The death rate for the black death was not near 90% - not at all. There might be a reduced effect but European civilization did not fall as a result of the black death - it did change but it kept going.

Re:What about the plague?

[riverat1]

Try comparing the area of Europe and the area of the Americas. Hint, counting Europe as going clear to the Ural Mountains it's still less than 1/4 the area of the Americas.

Re:What about the plague?

[d34thm0nk3y]

Because whole "climate science" has just as much science innit as finance... If someone missed it, they don't do the "experiment" stage of real science.

I guess this isn't an experiment then?

If only there was some way to measure the effect of extra carbon dioxide in the air.

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if the climate got cooler, but I have seen a documentary which stated that huge areas in Europe occupied by man became forests again. And the wild animals recovered their populations.

Re:What about the plague?

[Tomato42]

Last time I checked, meteorology was a study of atmosphere, you know, the stuff that's 100km thick and covers gigantic heat sinks in form of continents and oceans, is highly susceptible to amount and type of solar irradiation, force of solar wind, is influenced by presence and type of condensation nuclei, mountain ranges, etc. etc. it isn't a simple cubic container with largely uniform gas composition warmed by a uniform heat source warming it in whole at the same time.

Besides, the "experiment" you linked was testing just thermal properties of air using a single data point, without controlling the environment (placing a thermally susceptible experiment over a CRT screen, please...).

And no, I do not negate the results in the performed experiment, they are in line with widely accepted theories. Thing is, there is a much more potent and present in higher quantities greenhouse gas in the atmosphere: water. Atmosphere is too complex and we can't predict what temperature will be next Friday, let alone in ten years. There are too many unknowns and our computers are too slow to create good-enough models. As long as this doesn't change climate science will be just wild speculation, just like finance -- we are able to predict only general trends, in short time frames, when there are no large disturbances present. Shit hits the fan and the "experts" are either off by hundreds of miles (see recent tornadoes warnings) or sign (Polish GDP growth rate during the world crisis).

Re:What about the plague?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not- there was significant depopulation, and some areas went from agriculture back to forest etc but I think the difference would be fire.
Native American cultures used fire under a number of circumstances- flushing game, slash and burn agriculture, possibly even large-scale environmental modification (eg burning the understory in mature forests). I dont think fire was used often at a large scale in the more developed agricultural communities of 14th-century Europe.
Of course, the black death extended beyond Europe, so there's that too.

Global warming will compensate...

[unixisc]

... thereby completely undoing Columbus' environmental misdeeds!

Oh lord

[arse maker]

Just reading part of this is bad enough. We dont need more stupid news to feed climate change skeptics.

The maunder minimum was a local effect, not global. Also removing CO2 at that level is hardly likely to create such dramatic and localized effects. Why dont we have dozens of these drops with mass forest burning now?

Re:Oh lord

[Hentes]

There are clues of the Little Ice Age in Antarctic ice wich suggest that it was global.

Re:Oh lord

[Curunir_wolf]

I was sure when I saw the summary that it must be some article from "The Onion" or some similar site.

Yawnsies, more ecomental white self hatred?

[Rogerborg]

Must be a Friday, when all the non-stories get dumped. Is it even worth challenging the "science" in this claim? I'm just so tired of it.

Re:Yawnsies, more ecomental white self hatred?

[TerranFury]

You're responding to the summary. The article at ScienceNews has a different flavor.

This hypothesis builds on a previous idea that, after disease-resistant Europeans met native populations, diseases spread throughout the New World in simultaneous epidemics. There is evidence for this, including a pattern of entire New World civilizations, far inland from where Europeans settled, collapsing within a generation of their earliest arrivals. For a comparison, the Plague in Europe is known to have killed between 30% and 60% of the European population, and this is thought to have been much worse.

As the native population dropped, so too did the demand for food and consequently arable land, and as a result there was an abrupt decrease in slash-and-burn clearing of forests. The hypothesis here is that the resulting re-forestation sucked CO2 out of the air and caused cooling.

One of the confusing things about this article is that it doesn't fit the popular narrative, and "good" and "bad" are all mixed up. First, the major culprit here is not European guns -- though they effected terrible things later in history -- but European germs, for which Europeans themselves are not responsible per-se, so "good" and "bad" are complicated here. Second, we usually think of reforestation and CO2 sequestration as a "good" thing, yet here it caused too much cooling (for human populations in Europe). And finally, we usually think of Native Americans as being stewards of forests, and Europeans as being their destroyers, yet here, inadvertently, it was Europeans who caused the forests. You see how none of this matches the popular narrative?

Re:Yawnsies, more ecomental white self hatred?

[heathen_01]

You see how none of this matches the popular narrative?

No. Who the hell have you been listening too?

Re:Yawnsies, more ecomental white self hatred?

[cusco]

thought to have been much worse.

Yes, just slightly. 70-90 percent fatality rate through most of the Americas. It was almost 1970 before the population of Peru recovered to the levels it had under the Inca, and there are entire civilizations in the Amazon that only now are being discovered because by the time the Europeans arrived in those areas the forest had already taken over.

The Europeans themselves may not have been deliberately responsible for the diseases, but their lifestyle certainly was. Medieval Europeans may have been the filthiest people in the history of civilization (really). When disease and pestilence preceded the Spanish advance by weeks (and sometimes years) the Dominican priests were quick to proclaim that they were the representatives of a vengeful deity, punishing the native peoples for practicing unholy lifestyles (such as regular bathing and exterminating fleas) and worshiping false gods. The surviving locals, not having any alternative explanation for why almost everyone they had ever known was dead and not having seen any protection coming from their own deities, grabbed onto those claims like a shipwrecked sailor to a life raft and the rest is (sort of) history.

What's the fascination with Columbus?

[fantomas]

Do the majority of US citizens still believe Columbus discovered America in 1492?

Basically, I guess it's just a crap headline to draw the audience in? The article itself indicates that a mini ice age looks to have been *delayed* by European invasion, by wiping out the local population (both on purpose and accidently), they created a carbon sink of trees growing up in deforested areas, which they them later cut down. So I guess after a while the landscape looked closer to how it had been before the Europeans invaded?

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[HBI]

Short of briefly mentioning Leif Ericsson, yes, they do. That's all they'll learn in school. Confirmed with my 17yo and 14yo within the last few years, 2 different school systems, different states (MD and NJ).

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[demonlapin]

Forgive me for being a bit undereducated on this point, but in what way is Columbus not hugely significant in the European discovery of the Americas? Sure, there's L'Anse aux Meadows, and I've heard (though never actually read) that fishermen had discovered the Grand Banks and traded with Newfoundland, etc. But none of those were publicized and none kicked off larger rounds of exploration and colonization, so it's a bit like saying that James Watt invented the steam engine. He didn't, but he made it a lot better - turning it from an interesting contrivance into something that could drive the Industrial Revolution.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Christopher Columbus - A wonderful national hero - Hawked his widely discredited and since proven wrong theory (short route to China) around all the people with money to fund his project for years until he found someone gullible enough to fund it, found a small island in mid ocean, and claimed he was right, even in face of the evidence, failed to find the whole rest of the continent, and still gets all the credit ...

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Short of briefly mentioning Leif Ericsson, yes, they do. That's all they'll learn in school. Confirmed with my 17yo and 14yo within the last few years, 2 different school systems, different states (MD and NJ).

I have always been interested in how the overwhelming mass of US Americans manage to completely block out the obvious fact that Native Americans were there when Columbus arrived and they were also already there when Leif Ericsson arrived. The people who discovered the Americas were ice age hunters who arrived in N-America either over land via Beringia or by boats down the coast.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[HBI]

You left out the genocide he was directly responsible for, according to Las Casas and other commentators of the time.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[msauve]

"Do the majority of US citizens still believe Columbus discovered America in 1492?"

Are you saying he didn't get to America? Or, he didn't in 1492? Or, he already knew about America, so it wasn't a discovery?

That Columbus discovered the Americas doesn't imply that he was the first to discover the Americas. The first to discover the Americas were very likely Asian, and were already here (now called native Americans) by the time any known Europeans arrived.

Since you don't know, and are asking, the fascination with Columbus is that it was his discovery of the Americas which started the large scale European colonization/settlement of the Americas. I thought that was pretty common knowledge, but maybe it's not taught where you are.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Columbus did discover America in 1492. Discovery implies dissemination of the knowledge. If nobody but yourself knows where you got, or even yourself, then as far as the rest of the world is concerned you haven't discovered it. You might as well mention the basque whalers as contenders for the discovery. If you want to follow the route of the "first to get there" as discover, then you have to stick with the Native peoples who were after all the first to reach the continent, before any European did.

Without archaeologists nobody would know that Leif Erikson came anywhere the Americas. As far as anybody else was concerned he went on a trip, and cool adventures "somewhere" and came back. Europe did not discover America until Columbus did not only stumble upon it but returned with the information so that others were able to follow. That's why Columbus gets the credit for the discovery.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Anonymous Coward]

found a small island in mid ocean, and claimed he was right, even in face of the evidence, failed to find the whole rest of the continent, and still gets all the credit ...

Actually, on his third and fourth voyages, he did make it to the mainland.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, for a moment there, I thought maybe that the shuttle did something like Tambora did. Would have made more sense than that headline. I think most Americans are getting better at recognizing Columbus wasn't really all that but it's still hard to get that rhyme from kindergarten out of my head.

Seriously though, this article makes a LOT of assumptions. Plus, I'm not too comfortable with the implication that genocide would solve global warming...

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Antisyzygy]

There is evidence there was also a European migration into North America, though their contribution to the gene pool may have been not incredibly significant. Anthropologists have found tools from the west coast and east coast of North America, and have found that the west coast tools were based on Asian designs, and oddly enough, the east coast designs bared remarkable similarity to some European group's tools. There was an ice bridge between Europe and North America that people living like Eskimos could have crossed during the last major Ice Age. I don't have a reference for this off hand, but I took a Phsyical Anthropology class in undergrad where the professor posed the question. The tools pretty much were the only evidence he sighted for a "possible" Proto-european colonization, however he said it wasn't cut and dry. Just thought I would share.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Rude Turnip]

In the Northeastern US, the Italian-Americans will act like you just ate a live baby if you don't trump up Columbus as a hero and have a day off in his honor.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[kannibal_klown]

It varies on how grade/age you are. A friend informed me, though, that at his child's school they try to set the record straight(er) in the early grades now, compared to back when we were kids but it was just in brief conversation.

Decades ago when I was in grade school, then yes... in 1st and second grade (around age 6-7) it was Columbus that discovered America and proved the world was round, the story of the bug and the orange (or whatever)... sigh. They mentioned he was trying to get to Asia, but kind of swept it under the rug that he made a mistake... or that he spent most/all of his life thinking he reached Asia. And as someone else mentioned, we also learned about Leif Erikson.

As you got older, the myth is washed away in later grades / years. Other explorers at the time, how "educated cartographers did NOT think the world was flat," how early explorers / settlers were not such shiney examples of civilization, how Columbus thought the wrong thing, etc.

I guess they tried to "keep it simple" in the young years so they could side-step the uglier sides of the era.

But that was a WHILE ago. I have no idea what is thought now, just that a lot of things are different. Heck, my youngest brother learned different / weird ways to do simple arithmetic than I learned back "in the day."

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[gr8_phk]

I have always been interested in how the overwhelming mass of US Americans manage to completely block out the obvious fact that Native Americans were there when Columbus arrived and they were also already there when Leif Ericsson arrived.

You have to make those people insignificant in the story, otherwise you can't downplay the subsequent invasion and killing. I really don't know why people can't accept that and just tell it like it was.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Curunir_wolf]

Short of briefly mentioning Leif Ericsson, yes, they do. That's all they'll learn in school. Confirmed with my 17yo and 14yo within the last few years, 2 different school systems, different states (MD and NJ).

Well that's the difference between history (that is, "Recorded History") and archeology (what we can learn from what ancient dead people left behind because they didn't write anything down).

We have histories wherein we can discuss actual people and what they did, because we know their names, many people wrote about them, etc., etc.

I don't think anyone is trying to hide the historical facts as we know them, or confuse where people came from, but the fact is the Native Americans didn't really maintain much of a historical record, just some folk tales handed down by oral tradition. There was a lot of that kind of story-telling in other cultures, too, but what is typically focused on are the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Sir Robert Bruce Cotton because it's on survivable media.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[mjr167]

That's cause we don't care about the natives. You'll notice that the natives didn't found the USA and are not actually a dominate population presence here. What's really funny is how anti-immigrant we can get since we are all basically immigrants. History is written by the winners.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[VolciMaster]

Christopher Columbus - A wonderful national hero - Hawked his widely discredited and since proven wrong theory (short route to China) around all the people with money to fund his project for years until he found someone gullible enough to fund it, found a small island in mid ocean, and claimed he was right, even in face of the evidence, failed to find the whole rest of the continent, and still gets all the credit ...

He knew he wasn't right - he had a map of the Americas when he set sail in 1492. Also, 1492 wasn't his first voyage of "discovery".

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cusco]

The map that he had showed Japan as running east to west, instead of north to south. He really did mistake Cuba for Japan, and the rest of the Caribbean islands were the "Spice Islands" (Philippines). Unfortunately his map seems to have been lost during the Franco years.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cusco]

Oh, by the way, he was using Ptolemy's estimate for the circumference of the Earth, which would have put the east coast of Asia just about where the east coast of Central America actually is. He never was exposed to any real evidence to the contrary, and died believing that he was right.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[kevinNCSU]

Cuba and Hispaniola are not "a small island" nor are they in the middle of the ocean. Cuba alone is larger than England and together they're nearly the size of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). Furthermore they are both considered part of North America. Everyone else rightly assumed the Earth was much larger and he'd run out of food before he got around to India. In his "wrongness" he ran into a gigantic new landmass full of riches and resources to report home about leading to European Colonization. So yea, he gets credit for starting that time period.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cowboy76Spain]

Columbus is the first recorded traveller to America.

Lots of facts points to previous knowledge:

• He disregarderd the scientifical knowledge of his time, that knew that the Earth was too big and Asia would not be reachable by the West, with their ships.
• Instead, he defend an Earth size too small but that situated Asia East coast where America was.
• Even in his first voyage, he aimed for the more favorable currents.

IMHO, Americo Vespuccio (the man who realized that those lands were not Asia) should deserve more credit.

That said, do not subestimate Columbus. Getting in the ships of these days and getting deep into the ocean, hoping that the data that has arrived to you is correct and you do not die of starvation, thirst or scurvy is not a little show of courage...

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cowboy76Spain]

Yes, but the question is that at the time Ptolomy had been corrected. By the knowledge of the era, there was nothing but sea there.

The fact that he had a map and chose to use Ptolomy data points that someone got there and reported land. Not knowing better (and because everybody wanted to get to Asia), they just labelled that land "Asia" and then chose the theory that would prove them right.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cowboy76Spain]

Because the official history is the Europeans built a country in a place where there was nothing before them.

If you do not phrase it correctly, then history could point out that the USA has the same legality than, say, the German occupation of Poland, and far less than Vichy France.

Anyway my point is not against the USA (you could say exactly the same of all of the countries in the world). My point is that some people thinks (rightly?) that the mass of the people need a "polished" story, with good vs evil and that kind of things. And then, later, the mass of people goes to vote on election day....

Sad.

Side note: Here in Spain, at school we are reminded of the heroic history of Numantia, an Iberian city who chose to die before surrending to Romans. There is even a football club by this name, "Numancia". The funny thing is that, if the Numantines died to the last and romans won, then we are descendent of the Romans and no one is descendent of the Numantians... :-D

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cusco]

That would probably have been the west Africans, but since they didn't leave much of a written historical record after the destruction of the Library of Timbuktu it's hard to be sure.

Ptolemy's estimate may have been 'corrected', but map makers like Gerard Mercator were still using it fairly frequently since so many of the historical maps used it. I suppose the alternative when reproducing one of those maps would have been to leave a big empty space and note "Here there be Dragons" or something. Interestingly, Mecator's pre-1492 maps of the Americas were more accurate than the ones from later that referenced the explorers' logs.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[demonlapin]

Mecator's pre-1492 maps of the Americas

If you're talking about Gerardus Mercator, he wasn't born until 1512. Clarification?

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cusco]

Oh, crap. Benincasa, then? Beheim? Memory is one of the first things to go . . .

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[demonlapin]

Not finding it, but genuinely interested if you do track one down. As I noted in another comment, I've heard it mentioned that fishermen and whalers had contact with North America (the Grand Banks, Newfoundland, etc.), from the 1300s on, but nothing more than that.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[cusco]

The Chinese apparently traded with the coast of California, there are anchor stones of a type used in the early 15th century sunken off the coast and a possible teak wreck in San Francisco Bay. I *DO* remember the source for that, Gavin Menzies' book '1421, The Year China Discovered America'. Interesting if speculative work. The other was probably from Charles Hapgood's 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings', which I loaned out and lost years ago, but I'm not sure. Used to be interested in cartography.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[demonlapin]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll check it out.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there were Europeans going to America for some time, but Columbus opened America up to the imperialists and mass exodus from persecution. Mostly the imperialism though.

Re:What's the fascination with Columbus?

[stillnotelf]

IMHO, Americo Vespuccio (the man who realized that those lands were not Asia) should deserve more credit.

Well, it is called America, not Columbia...

Re:bull pucky

[EdZ]

- First, this is all predicated on Europeans moving on a massive scale to the Americas. The author writes "By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas." Given that Columbus sailed in 1492, does anyone seriously believe tens of millions of Europeans moved to the Americas in the next 8 years? Even in the next 100 years? Completely nonsensical numbers.

The 40-80 million population refers to the natives, not the settlers.

- Third, they got the direction wrong: if forests were chopped down, they would have been burned and not allowed to regrow - thus increasing CO2, not decreasing it.

If you read the article, you;d know that the effect is due to the growth of trees in cleared areas, not the burning of trees that occurred prior to that.

Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, if true.

This means we don't have to worry about global warming. If shit happens, we'll just plant a buttload of trees (which will grow fast in the warm climate) to cool things down.

Awesome, if true.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Gideon Wells]

No, this is quite interesting.

If true, this means in less than a hundred years enough CO2 was pulled out of the atmosphere to affect the environment. If proven this adds to the evidence that the climate is pretty darn fragile. I haven't read the TFA because I am getting ready to work, but there is one rebuttle and pone possible way to "test" this hypothesis off the top of my head.

The Rebuttle: I thought previous studies claimed the Little Ice Age was more regional than global. I know it affected Europe and played a hand in colonies.

The possible test: Parts of the North East U.S., namely Pennsylvania, were heavily deforested. During the Great Depressing the government sponsored Civilian Conservation Corps. walked across Pennsylvania and replanted large tracks of forest. A half of state worth of new forest popping up should at least have a little blip on CO2 level measurement, right?

You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Shivetya]

Some are worse than others. Some love to paint with a broad brush using open ended phrases like your "Climate Change Skeptics".

Skeptic about which claims? There are hundreds of climate change issues and there equally hundreds of opposing opinions. Each side has their facts so where does a skeptic fall? I tend to agree with some and disagree with others yet under your banner I am lumped in with the kooks.

There is a whole industry out there which only tries to assign guilt, much of it to gain moral superiority but quite a bit is built on making a profit. Climate change discussions didn't get very far until some very large companies learned how to use politicians to make a lot of money off of it. Look at GE, poster child of abusing this process, we give them two billion dollars to further develop wind technologies which is already in their best interest to do so? They then pile on the deductions to have nearly an effective zero rate of taxes?

The real climate skeptics should be applauded because most of science is being used to hide an agenda whose only goal is to pad specific pockets. Its well funded and marketed and much of it has governments behind it because the politicians love money.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how 'some people are padding their wallets' is somehow a valid argument against the predicted models of current and future climate change.

It isn't, and if you're still alive the next 10 or 20 years you'll feel rather silly. (and guilty)

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right. "Greed" is only an argument when it's used to promote nutty conspiracy theories AGAINST the "climate deniers" and how they're all Big Oil shills.
You just keep telling them that they're going to look stupid when we all die in a decade, like you've been doing several decades. Meanwhile, you won't need to wait that long.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

I just find most people disagree on whether it's equally valid in economics as in climate science ...

And, like in any other science, there are plenty of valid reasons to disagree with established theories. The sad fact is that's less and less tolerated. One gets villified for accurately describing the state of climate science, and agreeing with historical trends while maintaining that predicting climate is impossible. Even after illustrating that obvious fact by comparing past published predictions to reality.

There are climate predictions, the first from the IPCC was made in 1990, and it claimed the "temperature anomaly" in 2010 would exceed 4 degrees +- 0.3 degrees, in business as usual scenario. The reality ? Less than 0.25 degrees, despite worldwide co2 emissions going up quite a bit. And of course, it's kind of a fair question to wonder why every IPCC report has erred on the same side, until AR4 dropped that nasty business of actually predicting climate ... And it's fair to compare the budget of the IPCC with e.g. Unicef, which has a scarily accurate track record when it comes to predictions, don't you think ?

And as for what this means ? I don't know. Well, except for one thing, of course : it means the IPCC is hopelessly inept at predicting climate.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

There are climate predictions, the first from the IPCC was made in 1990, and it claimed the "temperature anomaly" in 2010 would exceed 4 degrees +- 0.3 degrees, in business as usual scenario.

No it didn't. It projected an average warming rate of 0.3 degrees C/decade for the 21st century (range of 0.2 to 0.5 C/decade) under business-as-usual emissions, with the actual rate being lower than the average during the early decades and higher during the later decades. See Section 1.0.3 of the report.

I don't think they explicitly spelled out what it would be in 2010, but you can see projections under high, medium, and low sensitivity scenarios in Figure 6.11.

Look at the "BaU" curve in Fig. 6.11b, the middle scenario. (This is "business as usual". I don't know whether their BaU scenario agrees with the actual emissions since 1990.) Eyeballing the amount of warming from 1990 to 2010 looks like about 0.25 C warming, to my eye, when I zoom the figure. Much closer to the actual warming than your claim.

And of course, it's kind of a fair question to wonder why every IPCC report has erred on the same side, until AR4 dropped that nasty business of actually predicting climate

No they didn't. They said that what they do is projections not predictions, which means that the predictions are conditional on assumed emission scenarios. This is the same as what every IPCC assessment report has done.

Anyway, I see two main possibilities here: (1) you're lying about what the IPCC said, or (2) you're uncritically repeating someone else lying about what the IPCC said. In either case, you're "not accurately describing the state of climate science", and perhaps you can see why such statements get "villified".

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[AlamedaStone]

You're absolutely right. "Greed" is only an argument when it's used to promote nutty conspiracy theories AGAINST the "climate deniers" and how they're all Big Oil shills.
You just keep telling them that they're going to look stupid when we all die in a decade, like you've been doing several decades. Meanwhile, you won't need to wait that long.

Money is a good way to determine motives, which can call claims into doubt. The problem with your skepticism is that there's also 50 years of a working theory based on testing and evidence - commonly called facts. Sure, there are people who make money from AGW, but that doesn't change decades of science.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[riverat1]

AC parent is informative.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

GP post may have overreacted (by a factor of 10), but he's still got a point

1) actual emissions exceeded business as usual scenario (Co2 addition 2011 was > 12 Btc which the ipcc only expected to happen in 2025)
2) actual value of the temperature increase since 1990 = 0.201... degrees
3) prediction of the IPCC : 0.6 degrees
4) "confidence interval" (95% ?) given by the IPCC for 2010 according to the 0.2 - 0.5 per decade assumption : 0.4 - 1.0 degrees

So the IPCC overestimated warming by a factor of 3 ...

And we're a factor 2 below the bottom of their confidence interval for 2010. So in other words, not only was the prediction itself far over the top, the confidence interval given by the IPCC was completely untrustworthy. Their numbers had less than a tenth the accuracy claimed (assuming normal distribution)

Does it really need to be said that this is an extremely bad prediction ? Do you have the numbers for the other reports ?

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't pay attention to my post.

The prediction of the IPCC for BAU emissions 1990-2010 was not 0.6 C, but more like 0.25 C, as I said (for the medium sensitivity scenario; see Fig 6.11b). This is close to the actual warming 1990-2010.

You are presumably multiplying 0.3 C/decade by 2 decades, but this is not how the IPCC calculated the warming. 0.3 C/decade is the average for the 21st century, and as I said, the warming in the early part of the century is below this average, while the warming toward the end is above this average.

To see the actual amount of warming predicted for a given time, you can't use the average rate, but have to look at Figure 6.11.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

The prediction states 0.2 - 0.5 per decade ... of course there's been 2 decades, not one ... how am I reading this wrong ?

The chart is unreadable for the resolution required, reading off the exact number is not really doable. But I'm certain the gradient of the BaU scenario is far more than 0.2 degrees/decade (I made a quick measurement with the graph zoomed and it looks a lot like the incline is very close to 0.5/decade. Maybe they plotted worst case ?), and it's obvious that incline starts between 1975 and 1980. So it would apply to 1990-2000 just as well as to 2000-2010.

The average rate given by the IPCC is 0.3 degrees. I used the 0.2 degrees rate, which is a factor 2 too high, compared to reality. The 0.3 rate, their average, is a factor 3 above reality. Their 95% confidence interval was 0.2-0.5 degrees/decade. In order for that interval to be correct, only 1 decade in 20 can be below 0.2 degrees/decade (95% = 19/20), there are only 11 decades until 2100, and 2 have been far below their confidence interval (and that's an absolute worst-case scenario. While not theoretically impossible, let's not forget that these 2 measurements are the first 2 and only 2 measurements they have. The chances of the first decade warming outside of the interval are 1/20, the chances of the first two intervals to both be below spec are in reality less than 1/400 (=(1-95%) * 5%)). That 1/400 is the chance that the IPCC made a correct prediction, unless I've overlooked something.

How exactly do you make the data fit ?

I'm still curious, do the next reports have a better prediction ? The post that started this discussion claimed they don't.

Re:You do realize their are kooks on both sides

[Anonymous Coward]

The prediction states 0.2 - 0.5 per decade ... of course there's been 2 decades, not one ... how am I reading this wrong ?

I don't know how many times I have to say this. The prediction is for the 21st century AVERAGE. Because the warming accelerates over time, this means that early 21st century warming will be LESS than average (and late 21st century more than average). The prediction for 1990-2010 is therefore NOT 0.2-0.5 C/decade. To find out what it IS, you have to look at the transient warming curve, not the century average. That's Figure 6.11.

The chart is unreadable for the resolution required, reading off the exact number is not really doable. But I'm certain the gradient of the BaU scenario is far more than 0.2 degrees/decade

I came to a different conclusion. You're looking at the middle panel, right? And you're looking at the BaU curve, not the "BAU equilibrium" curve above it, right?

I had to eyeball it too, but I put a rectangular lasso around it with my PDF viewer selection tool to help. When I first did it it looked like about 0.25 C warming for the two decades 1990-2010. I did it again, and now it looks like about 0.35-0.4 C warming for 2 decades to me, so about 0.18-0.2 C/decade. I could be off, but it's definitely not 0.5 C/decade. However, their plot doesn't give error bands, so it's hard to say what the range of predicted warming for those decades is supposed to be.

The average rate given by the IPCC is 0.3 degrees.

This is the wrong number to use, for reasons I've explained three times now, so I'm going to ignore most of the rest of your argument. But one comment:

The chances of the first decade warming outside of the interval are 1/20, the chances of the first two intervals to both be below spec are in reality less than 1/400 (=(1-95%) * 5%))

This assumes the trend errors are independent, when temperatures in successive decades are rather autocorrelated. (And of course it's based on the wrong interval in the first place.)

I'm still curious, do the next reports have a better prediction?

They have somewhat different predictions. It's hard to say whether they're better, because being newer, there are fewer data to validate their predictions. Also hard to compare directly to the first assessment report because they've changed their emissions scenarios from what they assumed in 1990 for BAU. (This also includes non-CO2 emissions; e.g., the newer IPCC reports include some cooling from industrial aerosols in the troposphere.)

The latest IPCC report projects about 0.2 C/decade for near term warming (so the next couple decades, not the 21st century average - and of course somewhat less than that for the last two decades). You can find plots of the projections if you dig around chapter 10; these plots also have error bands on them.

Re:bull pucky

[flaming error]

does anyone seriously believe tens of millions of Europeans moved to the Americas in the next 8 years?

No, people do seriously believe the European invasion killed off millions of indigenous people, who, after dying, stopped their agricultural activities, which allowed forests to regrow, which sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere.

This paper contends that that decrease in CO2 cooled Europe.

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

So the natives that were already living there before Columbus did anything?
And how exactly will growing a new forest remove more CO2 than burning it released in the first place.
Unless they started chopping down forests and just leaving the wood lying around.

Land use affects local climate

[Anonymous Coward]

Roger Pielke Sr. has, over the years in many papers, demonstrated that land use affects the local climate independent of whatever CO2 may be doing. Given that, deforesting North America would affect the North American climate and therefore the global climate if only by changing the average.
    http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/

So, tfa could be right about deforestation changing the climate and still be wrong about the mechanism. Having said the above, the little ice age definitely affected Europe. On the other hand, the last Viking was frozen out of Greenland well before Columbus discovered North America.

Climate science hurts my brain for sure. You can prove anything because there is so much conflicting evidence that you will find some data to support any theory.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[MaskedSlacker]

A better rebuttal: Old growth forests (like those deforested from the New World) have ZERO net impact on carbon dioxide levels. A mature forest releases as much carbon dioxide (from decaying organic matter) as it releases into the atmosphere. Removing a mature forest would have minimal impact on carbon dioxide levels.

Of course, I did not RTFA, so maybe the summary is just retarded.

Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Chrisq]

Well we have an easy solution to global warming then. Just depopulate America again.

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Chrisq]

Well we have an easy solution to global warming then. Just depopulate America again.

I know there are moral issues here, but I think these could be resolved by Harry Hill. I can just picture him now saying

I like Americans. I also like trees. Now which is best ....

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there are moral issues here, but I think these could be resolved by Harry Hill. I can just picture him now saying

I like Americans. I also like trees. Now which is best ....

Right. When could you ever imagine anyone ever uttering "I like Americans"?

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[JoeMerchant]

Well we have an easy solution to global warming then. Just depopulate America again.

America isn't the only potential candidate here... areas nearer to the equator will have a more dramatic effect since the vegetation will regrow faster. Putting an end to Brazilian cattle production would be a bigger effect than neutron bombing all of rural U.S.A.

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why not do both?

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that Brazil is part of America, right?

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Dunega]

Sure, you get to hold the target.

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[rockytopchip]

Properly managed rotational cattle grazing systems that mimic wild herds actually sequesters huge amounts of carbon.

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that this is the sometimes unwitting goal of this and similar environmental movements, don't you? To eradicate the human species.

Re:Well we have an easy solution to global warming

[JoeMerchant]

Properly managed rotational cattle grazing systems that mimic wild herds actually sequesters huge amounts of carbon.

What percentage of current cattle operations are "properly managed to mimic wild herds"? I've observed current governments being much more effective at banning land-use than telling users how to go about their business.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[TheRaven64]

Removing a mature forest would have minimal impact on carbon dioxide levels.

Unless you burn the wood. For fuel. As they did (except for small amounts used for building)...

And what about the trees in America, idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

So while the effect of them leaving Europe had a positive effect, them settling in America didn't have a negative effect too??
They had to build all buildings they needed in Europe in America too. And as far as I know, nearly all of them were built out of wood.

So in reality, the total net effect must have been negative!

This theory is seriously fuckin' stupid. It's as if they had never heard of the broken window fallacy.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[vadim_t]

I think you're mixing up something.

Suppose initially there's no forest. Over 100 years a forest grows, absorbing quantity X of CO2. This carbon is now locked up in the trees.

Now eventually it reaches a stable phase. Trees absorb Y amount of CO2, produce leaves, leaves fall and rot, release Y amount of CO2. Trees die, but get replaced so the forest neither grows nor shrinks. I guess that's what you mean. But the carbon that went originally into making the trees is still locked up in the forest. Burning it will most definitely release carbon into the environment that wasn't free before.

Real Science?

[Anonymous Coward]

How could this be? The science is settled, there is nothing new. We know it all. Mann definitively showed there was no Little Ice Age.

How could anyone take climate science, the ghastly predictions of doom or research like this seriously? These folks get publications, financial support for research and well paid jobs for this? And to think I wasted years getting degrees that required real results and verifiable research. This is really good for laugh.

it was volcanoes and solar activity

[circletimessquare]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora

Earlier midmillenial cool downs were due to a volcano in Iceland and other solar minimums as well.

Look, I'm infuriated by climate change denying morons myself, but rewriting history and ignoring basic science is not how you defeat those losers. Simple repetition of obvious scientific facts about man made warming is how you defeat oil and coal industry propaganda kool aid drinkers, not reimaging the plot of "Avatar."

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[JoeMerchant]

I'm infuriated by climate change denying morons myself, but rewriting history and ignoring basic science is not how you defeat those losers.

No, but slinging a little of their own style of rhetoric back their way once in awhile does keep them inline better than always, predictably, maintaining the scientific moral high ground. The Scopes monkey trial went so badly in part because the scientific representative just couldn't think outside of his world of solid scientific proof as the final word. I had a similar experience in traffic court when the officer opened with a reading of his notebook which contained a full accounting of what he imagined happened before he first saw me.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but slinging a little of their own style of rhetoric back their way once in awhile does keep them inline better than always, predictably, maintaining the scientific moral high ground.

Everything I have seen so far indicates otherwise.
To always stay on the scientific moral high ground and to methodically work through the arguments might not give fast results but following your suggestion have given us a situation where two sides states a mix of true and false statements and one of the sides suggests a much more convenient way of living.
Who do you think benefits the most when you exaggerate climate change? It is not the side you are arguing for.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[circletimessquare]

No, JoeMerchant is right.

As is occurring on the national stage with the feedback we are giving Obama, sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and go on the attack. Ideas, not people, that is, because you can't cede all bombast and fire in the belly to one side of the debate, or they dominate it.

Yes, in one regard, if one side is all zealotry and the other side is measured, people gravitate to cooler heads. On the other hand, as is the case with climate change deniers, cool heads do not sway emotional debates, and you need to equal the fire in their bellies, or cool heads just means quiet marginalized heads that lose influence, as with politics in Washington DC.

What I am saying to you is: it's ok to get heated. It doesn't make the way harder, it simply shows passion, and people respond to that too, just as much as they respond to cooler heads prevailing. It depends upon the arena, and it depends upon how emotional the topic is.

We can't let those who are inclined to drink Faux news propaganda purchased by oil and coal concerns dominate the debate. Politics is not an oak paneled study with pipe smoking professors, calmly discussing great ideas in measured undertones. Politics is verbal bloodsport, and, as a proud card carrying Liberal, I would say to other Liberals that it's time to show as much passion as those on the Right do, as with Occupy Wall Street, because measured academic tones do not win policy debates in this country anymore, I am sorry, but it's true. People ridicule Occupy Wall Street because they don't have a clue what they are fighting for. That doesn't matter. What they represent is passion and anger. And you need that just as much, if not more, than cold academic reasoning.

So you know what? Time for the zealots on the left to batter the zealots on the right (rhetorically, that is, real world violence is a definite loser). Show the passion. We need more howling zealots on the Left, the Left in general needs some more fire in the belly, whether you or they realize it or not. Cold impassionate United Nations style bureaucratic snoozefests don't win political battles. Time for verbal bloodsport. Time for verbal carpetbombing. Or the agenda of what makes sense is going to get shouted down by the corporation purchased and propagandized feeble dimwits on the Right.

We don't live in an Ivory Tower. We live down here, in the mud. So roll up your sleeves, and grab a rhetorical sledgehammer, or get out of my way, and let me do some verbal clobbering for you.

The Left needs more fire in its belly.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Antisyzygy]

I disagree completely. As far as science is concerned, making shit up only hurts it and gives both the right and left zealots more ammunition to act like idiots. How many times have you hear a Fundamentalist Christian point out one minor flaw in a scientific argument, or one minor oversight then balloon it into "SEE! They got this wrong, how do we know they don't get other things wrong? Obviously they don't even know what they are talking about!". Though this is totally flawed logic, if you make your arguments concrete they can't even begin to go down the road of fallacy without being obvious. The left is just as bad in this regard when it comes to things they are passionate about, like adopting exaggerated claims of climate change research papers and ballooning it using some similar, and some unique fallacious logic.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as a "climate change denier". There are people who deny that CO2 is the cause of the small, 0.6C degree increase in "global average temperature" seen in the 20th century. These people are better termed "realists", mostly because what passes for AGW research, peer review and scientific endeavour tends towards unmitigated bollocks.

Science progresses one funeral at a time. It's going to be a few decades before the paradigm is finally rejected, as I'm certain it will be.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[makubesu]

Ignoring basic science? Typical slashdot arrogance. This theory wasn't proposed by some hippy journalist. It was proposed by a guy with a PhD in Geochemistry from Stanford. It's a published journal article*. Just because it challenges what they taught you in high school, doesn't mean he's ignoring basic science.

*Also, apparently published in 2008. News for nerds!

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[BoRegardless]

So,fewer sunspots Galileo observerved were from deforestation & depopulation?

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[gr8_phk]

Simple repetition of obvious scientific facts about man made warming is how you defeat oil and coal industry propaganda kool aid drinkers

What are the "obvious scientific facts" exactly? No really, I'm asking for sources that aren't controversial or debunked.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Anonymous Coward]

But if those on your side are indeed willing to re-imagine the plot of Avatar for the sake of proving their (and your) point, why should those on your side of the debate be trusted to not resort to similar chicanery in less obvious, seemingly plausible ways? I think the subject is currently so polluted with political posturing and the politics of grant writing that an honest answer would be impossible to get to. Once this falls off the public radar, I'll find the debate more compelling and the findings more likely to reflect the truth of the situation.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly!! The climate change data is usually based on mere decades of data...a tiny fraction of earth's existence. Global warming? Global cooling? Make up your mind! The folks that are pushing climate change keep coming up with more and more theories and ideas to try and shore up their central theory.
I am still miffed about the great CFC debate some years ago - bad science, ramrodded by enviro-zealots, resulting in unneeded laws that end up costing us all! CFC molecules are huge and heavy - so how did they get up into the ozoneosphere, let alone stay up there!?

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[jwhitener]

From the article:

Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[roc97007]

So, you're saying that propaganda is a legitimate and moral tool? I'm thinking this won't end well.

At the very least, on the short term, making claims that are demonstrably untrue will be demonstrated untrue, hence damaging the case that might actually be true.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[roc97007]

Bingo.

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, I agree. Please give just the obvious facts that will put to rest any doubt about AGW from even the most creationist simple-minded skeptic.

Me, I dont have any list. As far as I know, it's all theory mixed with plenty of unknown or poorly understood cycles, influences and mechanisms. AGW theory doesn't get a free pass because most scientists agree.

And since when is skepticism in science a bad thing? Climate science is not as cut and dry as gravity. Gravity is easily predictable.

Climate science is losing the public opinion battle, and yes Mr. Smartypants, public opnion DOES matter.

This article does not help bolster public opinion. This study is a joke!

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[JoeMerchant]

So, you're saying that propaganda is a legitimate and moral tool? I'm thinking this won't end well.

At the very least, on the short term, making claims that are demonstrably untrue will be demonstrated untrue, hence damaging the case that might actually be true.

Legitimate? No. Moral? Absolutely not. It's already happening, and regardless of your stance or mine on the issues, we are powerless to stop it. Those claims that are demonstrably untrue will be proven untrue, damaging the position of the claimants in the eyes of the scientific community, but - if you haven't noticed - they're a minority of the actual powerbase that determines what happens in the world, used and abused by the decision makers to further their own agendae.

The ideal scenario is to build a solid scientific case quietly, while puffing out some very inflammable straw men to get the public's attention - the straw men can go up in smoke while gaining everyone's attention, but if the solid science is there to back up the basic premise, it will stand up just as well as it would have without the straw-men.

The problem is, both sides are buying the "best science they can afford..."

Re:it was volcanoes and solar activity

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly how many people do you hear say that the climate isn't changing? That the climate changes is obvious to EVERYONE! The real question is whether added CO2 will lead to excessive temperature increase. That IS controversial, and if you aren't a skeptic, then you have no place in this conversation.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[myurr]

Errr that would increase CO2, not reduce it as the article is claiming happened.

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

The native Americans systematically removed the forest over thousands of years to grow crops. Then people arrived from the old world and many/most of the natives died from disease or were simply killed or displaced. Then in the years before Europeans arrived in large numbers the forests regrew (in what would previously be cleared farm land from mostly slash and burn farming), reabsorbing all the CO2 that the ancient forest cover would have fixated but have been in the atmosphere for thousands of years due to actions caused by the natives. This is what they claim caused cooling.

Then obviously over the next few centuries the forests got chopped down again, but that was probably a much less dramatic change.

If this was the case, then there should be evidence for a significant drop in atmospheric CO2 levels over a generation or so.

Remember: there were anywhere between 40 and 80 million people in the americas before europians arrived. It wasn't just a few tiny pockets of tribes. They were basically nearly wiped out due to old-world diseases to which they had no immunity. Think death tolls even worse than the plague as Europeans at the time of the plague probably already had partial immunity due to previous epidemics and older slightly similar viruses.

Or think about it this way: Suppose 6 billion people die in the next few months. What would happen to the environment and therefore the atmosphere over the next century or two?

More global warming fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Right up there with the whole global temperature follows atmospheric CO2 level chart that Gore tried to sneak past everyone.

North Atlantic Oscillation

[Anonymous Coward]

The North Atlantic Oscillation flipped from the state that warms Europe to the state that cools Europe. This is per Brian Fagen's work on the subject.

Re:bull pucky

[Tim C]

Unless they started chopping down forests and just leaving the wood lying around.

For example, in the form of log cabins, fences, ships, etc?

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[TheRaven64]

Sorry, you're right. However, reading TFA, it seems that the summary is a little too abridged. Cutting down mature forests and then planting new trees does reduce the total carbon dioxide, and that's what they're actually talking about.

Type in the summary

[brillow]

As stated the summary is nonsensical. It says the massive deforestation caused more carbon to be pulled from the atmosphere and reduced the earth's cooling. This makes no sense.

Reading the article, its actually massive reforestation which was caused by all the suddenly depopulated native human fields and cities.

It's still absurd though. Historical questions should be avoided in the hard sciences. It's easy to make up stories to explain trends in data, especially when they can't be experimentally validated.

Re:Type in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Type in the summary

Typo in the heading </irony>

Re:Type in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar argument has been made over the Black Death a couple of centuries earlier. The (human) depopulation was responsible for abandoning and downsizing of settlements, which led in turn to a modest increase in the size of the forests, trapping more carbon and causing a modicum of cooling. No, I have no idea if it's true or not.

Re:Type in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

well said

Re:Type in the summary

[Chicken04GTO]

The whole article is silly...who depopulation native fields and cities? Europeans, right? Where did they live? They made their own towns and cities. They didn't just come over on boats, kill all the natives and sail back to Europe did they?

Re:Type in the summary

[alexibu]

I disagree - all science that relies on evidence is by definition historical.
It's a theory - we can look for evidence that supports it or disproves it, it doesn't make sense to just discount it because it is in the past.

Another line of evidence that would support such a theory:
It appears that there is historical evidence of large agricultural civilizations living in the Amazon basin before contact with European diseases and them all disappearing a short time after. This guy was the first European to sail down the Amazon river and described cities etc and then they could not be found later. So the humans die out and large quantities of fertile land return to rainforest from agriculture, sucking up huge amounts of carbon, reducing green house effect.
The soil improvements that they made remain and are called Terra Preta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta#Pre-Columbian_Amazonia

Re:Type in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:Type in the summary

[vadim_t]

The whole article is silly...who depopulation native fields and cities? Europeans, right?

No, the disease the europeans brought with them

Where did they live? They made their own towns and cities. They didn't just come over on boats, kill all the natives and sail back to Europe did they?

No, but bringing millions via boats takes an awful long time. They didn't just show up and replace millions of natives with millions of europeans in one day. Natives died first, their fields got abandoned and forests grew in them, and over the centuries the europeans bred and took over the space. But meanwhile the forests were happily spreading.

Re:Type in the summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what he means by "can't be experimentally validated" is that it's not reproducible.

Re:Type in the summary

[dogmatixpsych]

"It's easy to make up stories to explain trends in data, especially when they can't be experimentally validated." Welcome to the world of science. There are very few sciences that have that level of control over experiments. Your criticism could work for anything from environmental science to evolutionary science (and much of biology) to climatology to geology to psychology to much of physics (particularly theoretical, which is doubly interesting because I know some physicists who believe it is the only real science).

The hypothesis is not absurd at all. No hypotheses are absurd until evidence shows that they are not valid. Right now we are in the seeking evidence stage.

Re:Type in the summary

[dogmatixpsych]

I suggest you read 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann for a good summary of what was happening in the Americas before Columbus and what happened when he got here. Basically, estimates put that up to 75-85% of Native Americans in many areas died from the diseases brought by the Europeans. These deaths happened months and years and decades before the Europeans got everywhere in the Americas (diseases spread quickly). It took the Europeans a long time to come close to having the number of people in the Americas that were here before they got here.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[flyneye]

Yeah, environmental scientists are good at "accidentally" not figuring in criteria like that before crying out "the sky is falling".
Heat was pretty much exclusively fire ( or rubbing one bare bodkin again' another).
I like the old school thinking that the Earth has changed over time and continues to do so in spite of the money we throw at environmental research. Continents go sailing the waters,crashing into one another,pockets of elements are exposed,oil come burbling to the top,forests burn out of control over continents,volcanoes pop up spewing elements into the atmosphere,rotation reverses,poles move,comets hit, All this before man and most animals. So, now science finds life is not resilient, nor is the environment. I guess it got wore out before we got here....morons.
  Just give them more money,guarantee their careers and the Earth will once again be safe from the evil environmental scientists and we can all get some peace.

 

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

That might be technically true, but it would be a tiny drop in an ocean. Besides, the amount of co2 in the athmosphere is known to be a limiting factor in plant growth worldwide, so any burning of fuel would just lead to more plant growth elsewhere. A small increase might register, but it would drop back down in a few years at the very most.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

... during those 100 years, a huge amount of plant matter gets buried (because it grows under the soil for example), and most of that will never come back up without digging it up (which is why we have oilfields). This amount increases with every step you're talking about, so forests bury co2 in the ground.

There will be some tipping point, but burning an entire forest will not release as much co2 as was used up in creating the forest, without burning it as oil millenia later.

crickey...

[fantomas]

crickey, some way to go on improving the history curriculum then! Does history teaching start with the Europeans coming to the USA, or do they do go through earlier civilisations first?

Old stuff was always the most fun stuff for us here in the UK :-) loads of Celts and Romans and Saxons and Vikings charging round the place, invading and setting fire to things. A few fine castles and a couple more invasions then it all settles down to pretty boring political and social history by the renaissance... ;-) (I think folk were a bit sheepish about the Empire when I was at school in the 70s....)

Re:crickey...

[HBI]

They do a quick runthrough of the Clovis concept. They avoid the extinctions and don't permit much in the way of discussion about the various theories (ice free corridor? Boats?) and don't allow any potential pre-Clovis to leak into the discussion. The signs of pre-Columbian contact are similarly edited out, the first contact was Leif who stayed for a winter, and then Columbus.

I feel for authors of history books, after reading "Lies My Teacher Told Me", but things haven't gotten much better in the 15 or so years since that book.

Re:crickey...

[joocemann]

There is some focus on native americans in the curriculum. Depending on your age, you get a different hiSTORY. When you're young, its about the nina, pinta, and santa maria coming across with Colombus at the mast and a glorious friendly feast with the natives where the settlers learned about popcorn and fun feather headwear. When you get older, they tell you that the settlers moved westward and that some of the natives resisted it. When you're in high school, you learn that settlers actually killed people to make room for their settlements and that wars were waged in various ways regarding the settlement (with the french, with the natives, etc).

And then somewhere in college you learn it from the most honest perspective, which is that an ego driven maniac came to do serve as much plight and plunder as he could possibly achieve, enslaving and selling people -- that the settlers did the same, and that the history of the United States is consistently punctuated with extremely violent and immoral acts that are glossed over and downplayed in any history that was taught in public schools (k-12). You learn that its been done before, was done recently, is going on now, and will likely continue.

I like Chris Rock's analysis: "I just 'discovered' your car stereo!"

Re:crickey...

[cusco]

Most of it starts with the founding of Jamestown and the Virginia colony. The entire Spanish conquest rates part of one chapter.

Re:crickey...

[Belial6]

Funny how you list the "most honest" perspective that is as distorted as all the rest. The history of The Americas is consistently punctuated with extremely violent and immoral acts that are glossed over and downplayed in any history that was taught in public schools(k-12) as well as in colleges. Your comment shows that it is also glossed over in colleges by the fact that you seem to think that violent and immoral actions started with the Europeans coming to the Americas.

Violent and immoral acts have been happening in the Americas for as long as resources have been limited. It WAY predates the Europeans. The only thing that changed with the Europeans in that regard is that there was a new player in the killing, raping and enslaving. A new player that was better equipped, immune to various deadly diseases, and could be identified by the color of their skin.

Re:crickey...

[cowboy76Spain]

Yes. In fact the fast expansion of the Spaniards was helped by the natives civil wars and by the fact that many tribes chose to side with the Spaniards against the Aztec, Inca yokes.

I understand that to a kid you need to teach a simple history. I hope that when students grow older, these histories are improved by showing the hidden complexity, not by chosing just a different, simple, POV.

Re:crickey...

[demonlapin]

In fairness, the relevance of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America to the history of the United States is actually pretty small.

Re:crickey...

[demonlapin]

Is pre-Clovis really that important? I'm not a historian, not even a history buff, so I am merely parroting Jared Diamond's original assessment here, but if the pre-Clovis cultures were so small and materially insignificant as to leave almost no trace, why does it need to be covered in high school in more than one sentence? "There is evidence of some small settlements in the pre-Clovis era; however, Clovis cultures ultimately defined the continents' population."

Re:crickey...

[HBI]

That would work if they mentioned Clovis. The problem is that they don't. They speak with this deity-like authority tone about what happened "Native Americans came 10,000 years ago", and don't take into account that there isn't conclusive evidence for much that happened back then in the Americas. Our best guess is just that, a best guess based on patchy evidence. The kids might pay more attention if we let them know that there isn't total agreement about these topics, that they are subject to debate. And that new evidence is being unearthed constantly.

Re:crickey...

[joocemann]

So you challenge my point, then concede it because not only it, but others like it were happening?

What was so 'funny' then? You just said it happened all over, but started out saying that what I said was distorted....

Methinks you're confused. You agree that it happened all over, but think its a distortion, when talking about specific people, events, and places, that those atrocities occurred.

Funny how you contradicted yourself in one post.

Re:crickey...

[Belial6]

No. Your post implies that it was the Europeans that brought atrocity to the Americas. That is what is called a half truth, and what honest people call an whole lie. I don't contradict myself at all. I acknowledged the true facts you stated, but pointed out that how you put it out of context to produce an end result that is just as distorted as the stories that you complain about.

Do you deny that the European did not introduce "extremely violent and immoral acts" to the Americas, and in fact were late to the game?

Re:crickey...

[joocemann]

Lets go back to what I said that you're trying to misrepresent:

"And then somewhere in college you learn it from the most honest perspective, which is that an ego driven maniac came to do serve as much plight and plunder as he could possibly achieve, enslaving and selling people -- that the settlers did the same, and that the history of the United States is consistently punctuated with extremely violent and immoral acts that are glossed over and downplayed in any history that was taught in public schools (k-12). You learn that its been done before, was done recently, is going on now, and will likely continue."

This is in the context of talking about the history of Columbus and the 'discovery of america' story that surrounds his activity. As you see in what I quote, I point at the facts about US history --- revolution -- civil war -- french canadian war -- war with spanish -- war with natives -- slavery -- imperialism -- manifest destiny --- vietnam --- panama... etc etc etc.

What was your point again? You said I implied something, but I never said what you're fighting or took in implication. Reread it here and quit making crap up.

Re:crickey...

[Belial6]

My point is that when you point out "extremely violent and immoral acts" in the Americas, and specifically limit it to specific racial groups when those actions predate the group you want to villainize as much as they happened after the group arrived, you show your racism and bigotry. When you call your racist story "the most honest perspective" you tell a lie. Vietnam has no more to do with Columbus than the actions that Indians took against each other prior to his landing. You only see it as more relevant because you are a racist.

Do you deny that the Europeans did not introduce "extremely violent and immoral acts" to the Americas, and in fact were late to the game?

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[AliasMarlowe]

Now eventually it reaches a stable phase. Trees absorb Y amount of CO2, produce leaves, leaves fall and rot, release Y amount of CO2. Trees die, but get replaced so the forest neither grows nor shrinks. I guess that's what you mean. But the carbon that went originally into making the trees is still locked up in the forest. Burning it will most definitely release carbon into the environment that wasn't free before.

Thus producing the OPPOSITE effect to that posited by the story.

The story speculates that forest cover increased due to depopulation of North America by diseases and weapons brought by European settlers. The resulting increase in biomass was allegedly responsible for a reduction in CO2 leading to global cooling.

The whole conjecture sounds like BS with a politically correct slant. In Europe there was an ongoing deforestation which had commenced a century or so before Columbus, and a considerable deforestation of the Americas started a century or so later. Due to the time scales of forest growth and the probable extent of any net change in forest cover, the effect on climate would have been rather limited (probably negligible).

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Rockoon]

Heat was pretty much exclusively fire ( or rubbing one bare bodkin again' another).

Indeed, but there is no reason that I am aware of to believe that there was a significant change in the # of people burning logs.

The new world meant lumber (the primary export for so many years) used to build homes and navies in and for the old world, rather than to heat things. I'm not sure how the summary gets off with saying that reduced deforestation was happening because of the new world discovery.. the English and French, later America, were all about deforesting the new world with abandon.

Re:bull pucky

[AliasMarlowe]

The author writes "By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas." Given that Columbus sailed in 1492, does anyone seriously believe tens of millions of Europeans moved to the Americas in the next 8 years?

The 40-80 million population refers to the natives, not the settlers.

This will be a confusing revelation to some victims of the US educational system, who may think even the natives arrived with Columbus...

Re:bull pucky

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Actually Darwin's theory predicts exactly this happening : the island species in his theory.

If 2 islands are artificially separated, the species that get split up with it will start to diverge, culturally and genetically. Sometimes the species can specialize enough to be truly separate, but this hardly ever happens (and it takes hundreds of thousands of years).

So what happens in most cases if previously-split populations are reunited is that one side of the split dies off entirely : contact between genes does not result in an exchange, but in a total eradication of one side. A few studies even claim the same happens with cultures. Cultures don't merge and while cultures learn from other cultures, this can only happen through expeditions (a traveller goes out and comes back, and brings back a tiny -manageable- part of an external gene (through a viral infection with genes, through e.g. books in the case of cultures)). If all are brought in at once, one of the native species/cultures will die off at an astonishingly fast rate. Intermarriage vastly accelerates this process.

The strange thing is that sometimes temporary contact actually causes this. There's a split, but for some reason the split disappears for a short while, and then re-appears for some reason (e.g. flooding combined with rare draughts or vice-versa). This results in a short-term contact between species, which then get split up again along roughly the same lines, and this resulted in the disappearance of the species on one side of the split. The big question, of course, is why this happens. Maybe diseases are the answer, but if they are, that has managed to escape the attention of quite a few biologists who are supposed to be experts on that.

What's even weirder is that it has never once been observed that races merge, even when the initial population sizes are very close to 50-50 (except in the extreme short term: contact will result in a mixed species, but they disappear again in very short timeframes). Either 2 races (I'm talking races within species here, animals) grow completely apart (think lions versus tigers, although there's some disagreement whether they are truly separate species, google "liger", the big issue is that ligers can't reproduce) and they become able to coexist in the same place, or one side of the equation completely wins out, with at most very minor changes.

While Columbus may have done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

He did however whoop Captain Kirk's ass at a rap battle lately...

Re:While Columbus may have done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kirk owned him, dude. Columbus's nice accent was no match for Kirk's epic timing.

Re:bull pucky

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, the problem with this is more basic. No matter when you date the start of the Little Ice Age, the cooling started at least as early as 1300 (when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe) and probably around 1250 (when the North Atlantic glaciers started to expand).

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[flyneye]

I agree, what could the world population have been at the time? Probably not enough. Besides with naturally occurring forest fires or Indians accidentally starting forest fires( pine trees burn pretty colors for the bored, long before television, how many stories round the campfire can one listen to?). Who can say what massive CO2 blasts into the atmosphere do? Pretty good bet the sky isn't falling over it tho.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[vadim_t]

Thus producing the OPPOSITE effect to that posited by the story.

Er, no, it's entirely consistent. The important part is the forest growing. There was an X amount of CO2 in the air, trees grew and locked up a part of it. Where do you see the opposite effect happening?

The story speculates that forest cover increased due to depopulation of North America by diseases and weapons brought by European settlers. The resulting increase in biomass was allegedly responsible for a reduction in CO2 leading to global cooling.

Right, so how is what I said the opposite of that? The forest has to grow in the first place.

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the problem is even more basic than that: people are so stupid that they believe their actions even back in the 1400's could have global climatic consequences. Humanity is a thin layer of slime covering vanishingly small parts of a landmass which itself is only a small part of the the planet's surface.

Giant egos are giant.

The entire thing is a function of liberal guilt, liberal ego and the liberal love of a cause, any cause. That in itself is the most toxic thing on the planet's surface.

You have got to be kidding me

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking Warmers just wont quit.

Columbus caused an ice age. O M F G

Just one more chicken little the sky is falling story from you fucking warmers and I just know my head is going to explode.

They wonder why we wont listen to them anymore .... they spout nonsense 24-7 ... come up with ridiculous scare mongering, try to steal our money because that will fix whatever it is in their little heads they think is broken (cap and tax), ban our fucking light bulbs and now this ...

WARMERS ..... FUCK OFF

Was Colombus faster than light ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like all began far before Colombus discovery of so called "new world" (only new to European population).
- 1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
- 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
- 1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
- 1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
- 1650 for the first climatic minimum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#Dating

But human-driven climate change is so fashionable ...

Re:bull pucky

[zippthorne]

So, the vikings are to blame?

What about whaling?

[O('_')O_Bush]

I thought that during this period, one of the major sources of lighting came from whale oil and increased as colonies formed in places where whales were abundant. If reforestation on such a small scale affected the environment so dramatically, then surely so would increased CO2 release from the energy required in the progression of imperialism?

I think these theories are simply too human-centric.

Re:What about whaling?

[cusco]

Small scale? Almost everyone on two continents **DIED**, and the forests grew over the remains of their civilizations. I fail to see what is 'small scale' about that.

Europe + Americas != World

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Let's just say that a few millions folks died in the span of 100 years during the conquest of the Americas; either through disease, war, displacement, or famine. Say, a few thousand Europeans moved around (remember, it was pretty pricey to have this expeditions funded).

You're forgetting:
- the movement of many slaves from Africa to the Americas
- a MASSIVE population in south-east asia which at the time was growing substantially; exponentially larger than the devasted European populations by plague and coming out of the Hundred Years War
- a considerable population in Africa, which was growing somewhat, especially in Northern Africa

That would offset any losses in the Americas.

What a stupid idea.

Re:Europe + Americas != World

[dr2chase]

Except that the ice records show something consistent with large scale reforestation, somewhere on the planet. This is interesting. It's also less about the people, and more about the plants, and what land was cleared for new farms for new people in other places.

Re:Europe + Americas != World

[Lieutenant_Dan]

Before the Europeans showed up, many places that had the Incas and Mayans had large cities and vast expanses of cultivated lands, that were sparsely forested. A good read is 1491. Once the people were decimated a lot of it was re-forested. Same thing with central Europe and the black plague a century or so earlier.

So a decline of people means an increase in forests basically; I agree it's the plants that had the largest effect then before industrialization kicked in, but it was primarily humans impacting it, so there is a direct link.

What I was getting at, regardless what was gained in the Americas, there loses in forests in Europe and Asia, so whatever was gained there was lost elsewhere. Afterwards there has been a steady decline of forest lands and increase in desertification globally.

Re:Europe + Americas != World

[cusco]

As I noted above, most people are unaware of the extent of the Great Dying that followed the introduction of influenza, smallpox and TB to the Americas by the European barbarians. In a century and a half, over three quarters of everyone who lived on this side of the world died. Probably at least 40 million people. Yes, that's a "few" million people, considerably more people than the population growth of Asia during that time.

The movement of slaves from Africa to the Americas actually reduced the planet's population, since over half of them died in transit.

Prior art: The Norwegians

[jbarr]

Leif Ericson made it to America some 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

Re:Prior art: The Norwegians

[Anonymous Coward]

Since humanity is supposed to have evolved in the Middle East, there are clearly a bunch of Mesopotamians who got there way way way before Leif Ericson did.

Anyone who goes somewhere and finds other humans there is clearly not the first human to have discovered the place.

Re:Prior art: The Norwegians

[msauve]

The Asians made it to America some 20,000 years before Leif Ericson. Both the Asians and Columbus resulted in successful settlement. What's your point?

Re:Prior art: The Norwegians

[Myopic]

You only get credit for discovery if you successfully tell the rest of the world community about it. Many, perhaps most, inventions and discoveries were thought up or discovered by someone else before the person who eventually got the credit.

Re:Prior art: The Norwegians

[laejoh]

Americans are sissies that surrender to alien invasion even plus vite than the french?

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Joce640k]

I like the old school thinking that the Earth has changed over time and continues to do so in spite of the money we throw at environmental research.

True ... but the thing to remember is that it doesn't change without a reason as most anti-AGW thinkers seem to imply.

Most of the big changes seem to be down to changes in atmospheric composition and we're busy changing the composition.

After watching the arguments for 15 years I don't think the human race will do a damn thing about it. Doing something would require a change in lifestyle which people will resist down to the last bullet even if leads to long-term improvements. The USA is particularly guilty of this because it produces most of the CO2 and has the most bullets.

When the shit finally hits the fan there will be a massive effort to geoengineer the planet to fix things. This will lead to plenty of instability and extreme weather. Most of this will hit the USA (it has big oceans on both sides), karma will be served.

Solutions? Most of the CO2 comes from electricity generation (ie. coal/gas) so nuclear power is the best bet. See other threads for discussion of this.

what reforestation?

[Dr. Tom]

When the Europeans got to the new world they cut down more trees than ever! If there had been reforestation, where are those forests?

Re:what reforestation?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is more acreage of forests in the US now than before 1492. One common myth about the native Americans were that they were "one" with nature. Like low-tech populations throughout history, they had massively deforested much of the US, especially in New England, through their slash and burn farming techniques.

Re:what reforestation?

[coolmoose25]

I live amongst them, along with millions of other people. Here in New England, the history is this: Prior to European settlement, 75% of the land was covered in trees. The Europeans showed up, cut down the forests and made farms of the land. At this point, roughly 25% of New England was forested, the other 75% was largely farms. Later, the farmers moved to the mid west and west, abandoning the farms in New England, which were a bitch to farm because of the rocky soil. The farms were abandoned and trees grew up in their place. That's why you can hike through forests in New England and find old foundations and very long lines of stone walls in the middle of nowhere. Back in the day, those forests were "somewhere." Even with our "sprawl" in New England, roughly 75% of the land is forested. I can attest to this as I live in a forested burb. Deer, turkeys, foxes, etc. routinely walk through my yard. Don't believe me? Then just pull up http://maps.google.com/ and search on New England. Then look for deforested land... if you do the visual math, you'll see that it is mostly still forested here.

Re:what reforestation?

[Anguirel]

If there hadn't been reforestation, there wouldn't have been as many trees to cut down.

Look, good lumber can come from a 20 year growth of forest. Columbus (and all the others) land in various spots. Diseases start to spread, the native population is nearly annihilated. Colonies start to spring up along the coast, but that isn't until 100 years later that any real colonies show up (plenty of time for re-forestation to have happened), and serious in-land exploration and settlement doesn't happen for another 300 years (at least -- 1800 for the Lewis & Clark Expedition through mostly "unexplored wilderness"). Sure there was some logging along the coast for the initial colonies, but vast swaths of North and South America were left pretty much untouched by both Native American and European for a solid 300 years in the middle.

Re:what reforestation?

[ChrisMaple]

Fast growth lumber is hardly what I'd call good. It's the most economical method to meet building codes, but it's weaker than lumber from trees that grow more slowly (generally speaking and other things being equal).

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Only for the name you have on weekdays, not for the climate change. (Climate change correlates with pirates, not vikings.)

slow news day slashdot?

[lindoran]

really..

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[vadim_t]

No, not really. Experiments have been done and results aren't all that impressive.

Plants also need water and minerals, and space. They might grow faster for a while but eventually they'll just bump into another limit.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Joce640k]

Who can say what massive CO2 blasts into the atmosphere do? Pretty good bet the sky isn't falling over it tho.

I can!

Up to a point it makes the plants grow faster and increases the amount of algae in the sea.

After that it produces a warming effect called the "Greenhouse Effect". This has been known for over a hundred years and even Mythbusters have reproduced it.

What you're really doing is betting that the Earth has some as-yet-unknown magic trick to make it all vanish.

The wee little ice age.

[redwraith94]

It must have been all of those looters, and polluters leaving Europe, and moving to the Americas that caused Europe's little ice age. Yep, that must be it, blame the guys who lived half a millenia ago, and don't look at the sun too closely, it has nothing to do with this. I don't know why everyone thinks global warming is a bad thing. I can buy up low priced real estate that will one day be coastal property. I like coastal property, it's just too expensive. It really is a good thing overall...

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Doc Ruby]

And your scientific evidence or logic for that denial is...? Absolutely nothing.

This claim about the old climate change might or might not have some truth. But your denial needs no further investigation to prove exactly what climate change denial is made of: absolutely nothing but insistent ignorance.

The "politically correct" thinking on climate change is the denial. The polluters pay for politics to fight the science that might make them pay for the pollution. As usual, the "Conservative" agenda is to lie by attacking their opponent falsely for precisely what the "Conservatives" actually are.

Thanks for your contribution to our public demonstration.

Alternative explanation

[hackertourist]

Sceptics of Columbus' plan were on record as saying 'Sure you'll be able to sail around the world, when hell freezes over'. He proved them wrong (sort of), and hey presto! Ice age. Coincidence? I think not!

Re:Alternative explanation

[Antisyzygy]

Yes, the heat of hell warms this planet. Currently we are undergoing a "warming period" due to the increased industrial output of hell.

Re:Alternative explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

That only explains cooling in New Jersey.

Re:Alternative explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

no, he did not sail around the world - he only went half way across

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[ShakaUVM]

Most? Well, a bit less than half. But I agree that nuclear is our best option for reducing CO2 emissions.

Trying to force Americans to give up cars is quite simply a non-starter.

Ooooohhhhhhh shit LOL

[GameboyRMH]

A story that colonization by European white men may have cause climate change?

Whether or not this turns out to be correct, it's gonna whip the denialists into a frenzy!

HUH? Stupid or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the lack of trees caused a decrease in CO2. Hmmm, and that caused 'global cooling'? Sounds 180 degrees from today's doomsday fanatics. lol

But then it wasn't the loss of trees but the rebirth of trees that actually caused the loss of CO2. Even more rubbish. To say that a small growing tree consumes more CO2 than a fully grown tree is something that the loony left-winged pot smoking Democrats want to hear. lol

How about the admitting that mankind still doesn't know enough about the universe, the earth's core, the sun, and even where to find Jack let alone to discuss it.

I call Bu**Sh*t...

[Anonymous Coward]

More non-sense from the "man is evil" crowd. If they want to make a positive impact, why don't they all off themselves for the good of the planet, and let the rest of us live in peace without their constant "the sky if burning" non-sense every time the sun comes up...

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Doc Ruby]

No environmental scientist missed any criteria. A random Slashdot poster missed something for a minute.

The scientist didn't cry "the sky is falling" - you did, in your straw man. They never do, even when the evidence is pretty strong. Because fallacious attackers like you threaten their legitimate careers to defend the polluters paying to script the "Conservative" mass media attacks you parrot.

Previous climate change, along with continental drift, continental forest fires, and the other big changes you invoked - all happened over thousands and millions of years. The current climate change you deniers no longer bother to deny is actually in progress is happening over just a few decades and centuries. Which is totally unprecedented.

No matter how much you "Conservative" climate change deniers "accidentally" not figure in criteria like that before crying "it's god's will", you're still just stupid liars.

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Conservatives think that they can shit directly where they eat and suffer no consequences. Even dogs aren't that stupid.

Michael Mann disagrees

[Layzej]

Michael Mann agrees with you that other processes better explain the little ice age. FTA:

Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

[Cornwallis]

Kinda validates the Pirates > Global Warming connection...

Re:Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

[Antisyzygy]

Ahh, but Conquistador = Gold Plunderer, Plundering = Pirate, so Conquistador = Pirate

Re:bull pucky

[wes33]

I think this must be the most obtuse
comment I've ever seen on slashdot
(which is saying a lot).

Smallpox not always a plus for Europeans?

[T.E.D.]

The ironic part about this is that the Little Ice Age is actually blamed for killing off the earliest European settlement in the Western Hemisphere.

The Norse had a settlement in Greenland for almost half a millenium (from 986 AD to sometime in the 1400s), and during their better times were in contact with mainland North America ("Vinland"). As the weather turned colder, things became tougher for the Norse livestock agriculture, and better for the Inuit hunting culture. The last records we have show incresing hardships, including increasing attacks from Inuit ("skraeling") bands.

The influx of Eurasian diseases in the Americans has typically been portrayed as a tremendous disaster for native American populations and a great boon to Europeans. I would be rather ironic if this were in fact a case where it instead helped the natives wipe out European settlement.

Re:Smallpox not always a plus for Europeans?

[dwillden]

Which also begs the question, if European diseases did spread across the continent so very very quickly in 1492, why did such diseases not spread quickly across North America starting back in 1000 AD? Were the Norse super humanly healthy with no disease among them?

I don't claim any expertise in these topics, I'm probably missing some key detail, but this thought did occur to me while reading TFA and the comments here. The Vikings had colonies on Greenland and on the NA continent, how were there no mass epidemics sweeping out from their colonies similar to the ones in the 1400's and 1500's?

Re:Smallpox not always a plus for Europeans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which also begs the question, if European diseases did spread across the continent so very very quickly in 1492, why did such diseases not spread quickly across North America starting back in 1000 AD? Were the Norse super humanly healthy with no disease among them?

I don't claim any expertise in these topics, I'm probably missing some key detail, but this thought did occur to me while reading TFA and the comments here. The Vikings had colonies on Greenland and on the NA continent, how were there no mass epidemics sweeping out from their colonies similar to the ones in the 1400's and 1500's?

This has been thought of (can't find the reference). It IS a handwaving argument, but it goes like this: Norse colonies were small, high in lattitude. There were relatively fewer Native Americans at that time and place to infect. The populations of Inuit were small and relatively isolated compared to the burgeoning and well connected NA populations further south. Even if they Norse did bring over the same diseases (and they may not have, very simple hygenic practices would have gone a long way to prevent this), they may have only affected a few smaller populations. Same with domestic animals (another vector of disease).

There is relatively little archeolgic evidence for the Norse colonies compared to the later English / Southern European settlements so there may be other things going on that we don't know.

Re:Smallpox not always a plus for Europeans?

[T.E.D.]

Well, another point would be that the natives they had contact with were mostly Inuit. Their culture initially developed in Alaska and spread across the entirety of North America. In their Alaskan homeland they already had contact with Eurasia, and thus already had as much exposure to Eurasian diseases as they were likely to get from the Norse.

Really though I think the best argument here is population density. In order for disease to really make population inroads, it has to hit a settled (generally agricultural) community. Those are the places where people are living so close together that a virus can be assured of finding a new host (or 20) before its done killing its existing one. The Inca and Aztecs certianly qualified, as did a debatable amount of natives in the NE USA and Mississippi valley. The various small bands of Inuit whale hunters really don't.

Re:Smallpox not always a plus for Europeans?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

if European diseases did spread across the continent so very very quickly in 1492, why did such diseases not spread quickly across North America starting back in 1000 AD? Were the Norse super humanly healthy with no disease among them?

Kinda sorta, yeah. IIRC, the western Norse of that period had relatively little contact with the Mediterranean world, and the Mediterranean, being the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia, had always been where people were most likely to come in contact with exotic (to them) diseases. Their eastern cousins were already pushing into Byzantine territory, but Ericson's sailors were predominantly Icelanders; they were as distinct from the Varangians as late-18th-c. Anglophone Americans were from the English. It would be a century or more before the Scandinavian world as a whole had much exposure to the Mediterranean-style back-and-forth movement of people, and rodents, and insects, and the pathogens they brought with them.

Re:Smallpox not always a plus for Europeans?

[findoutmoretoday]

<quote>the western Norse of that period had relatively little contact with the Mediterranean world</quote>

So whole America was contaminated by the touch of a finger,  but various Viking groups spreading from Constantinople to North America avoided interacting over a number of centuries?

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[ArcherB]

Previous climate change, along with continental drift, continental forest fires, and the other big changes you invoked - all happened over thousands and millions of years. The current climate change you deniers no longer bother to deny is actually in progress is happening over just a few decades and centuries. Which is totally unprecedented.

OK then. What caused the "little ice age" to begin with? Didn't it start within a few decades or centuries? If we are to assume that Europeans deforested the Americas causing an end to the little ice age, then how did it ever start since Europeans had been deforesting Europe for centuries? Shouldn't it have been warmer in 1600's than it was in the 1400's, which should have been warmer than the 1200's and then the 800's and so on? How on earth did a little ice age form in the 1800's? Also, what ended the "big ice age" about 10,000 before Columbus was ever born?

See, this is the problem with the whole AGW argument. Man spots a trend like, the climate is warming or it's raining, and then wonder what HE did to cause it. Maybe, just maybe whatever change happened with no help from man at all. Maybe that dance really didn't cause it to rain and it was going to rain whether you danced or not.

Correlation does NOT equal Causation.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[tbannist]

Well according to the article after Europe discovered the Americas, a series of epidemics swept the Americas and may have killed close to 90% of the Native Americans. This allowed trees to grow again on land that was cleared for farmland, thus taking up some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the researchers behind this paper think that's what caused a drop in the level of CO2 that shows up at about the same time in the ice core records. That reduction in CO2 would have had a small cooling effect, although as Mann points out in the article, there were probably other events at the same time that had a larger role in the LIA.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[tbannist]

Much of the problem will eventually resolve itself. There's a limited supply of oil, and gas prices are likely going to rise faster than inflation until they reach the point where synthetic gasoline becomes price-competitive. At point, the economic situation will likely be that you'd have to be rich, an idiot, or both to drive a gasoline powered car.

The fight now is just over whether we want to spend a smaller amount now or a larger amount later to deal with the problem. Thanks to the economic collapse it'll probably be more later.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[msauve]

"The current climate change you deniers no longer bother to deny is actually in progress is happening over just a few decades and centuries. "

Yep. 200 centuries ago, the spot where I'm sitting was covered by a 1000 foot sheet of ice. Then WMCGW (Wooly Mammoth Caused Global Warming) started, and it's been getting warmer ever since.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Article's theory: An area the size of california was reforested over 200 years causing the little ice age

Your theory: removal of X amount of forest over 200 years should have resulted in Y amount of warming which we didn't see. We actually saw a temperature change of Z.

You need to figure out what X , Y and Z are before making that a legitimate argument. The article has real numbers and real research behind it, your speculation does not rise to the level of a rebuttal.

Author ignorant about Pre-Columbian America

[DallasMay]

The belief that the pre-columbian indians were small in numbers and lived in sparsely populated and isolated tribes is a myth. They were very numerous, had complex economies, and lived in very large cities throughout the Americas. When the first wave of Europeans came to America, half of the worlds population lived in the Americas. Much evidence suggests that deseases that were brought in by the first wave killed over 90% of the Indian population before the second wave ever arrived. By that time, over 40 years later, Forests that largely didn't exist 40 years before had taken over farm lands and entire cities. The only peoples that survived were the small isolated tribes. Thus the myth that we have. So the authors history is completely backwards.

Re:bull pucky

[Attila Dimedici]

More likely, the solar cycles.

Hogwash

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: “There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake,”

This seems to suggest that nothing other than "human land use" could account for variations in carbon dioxide levels. This is a social agenda (anthropogenic global cooling/warming) in search of (bad) science to support it.

Nope, you'll find "MWP" on the graph

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you'll find "MWP" on the graph so it still exists. What DOESN'T exist is the idea that the MWP was warmer than the recent decades.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[bhcompy]

Two words: Maunder Minimum

Re:bull pucky

[d3ac0n]

More to the point, the idea that somehow the Medieval Cooling Period was caused by the discovery of the New World is yet another example of the kind of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" pseudo-science that passes itself off as climate science.

Most of it is now driven by either politics (IE: People with a socialist/communist/fascist agenda that want to use climate science as a convenient crisis under which they can obtain power. See: Harry "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Reid.) or by scientists attempting to obtain/increase their funding, much of which is obtained via the former group of power-mongers.

It's part of the "perfect circle" of deceit and corruption that is at the heart of the modern left and modern climate science. Most Americans have caught on to the game by now, which is why 70% (and rising) no longer believe a word from the climate scientists' mouths. People hear the words "Climate Change" or "Global Warming" (or whatever the term du jour is) and they just roll their eyes and stop listening.

The really sad part is that it has inculcated in large parts of the American populace a distrust of scientists in general, particularly if they are in any way connected with the climate science field.

Frankly, the climate science field has been nothing but a disaster for science as a whole. It needs a hard reset, with all current scientists retiring, and all existing data deleted. We need to start over on this and do it right. Now, whether that is actually possible, I don't know. Probably not. But I don't see any other way of making it trustworthy again.

Not in TOPSY TURVY land!

[Anonymous Coward]

More politically correct BS.

Except in the USA, of course.

In the USA, it's politically correct to believe that global warming is a hoax - but if it isn't, it's not caused by people - and anyway, it would be good for us if it was real. That's the line chanted by tens of thousands of mindless media-programmed drones incapable of independent rational thought.

Similarly, in the USA it's politically correct to believe (or at least pretend) that you can fix a broken economy by increasing spending and cutting taxes, that wars don't have to be paid for by taxation, and that collective bargaining is bad for competition, and that reducing regulation of marketplaces prevents monopolies and encourages economic growth.

Inside the beltway, you can't hear the middle class screaming over the noise of the Wall Street dollars talking.

Re:Not in TOPSY TURVY land!

[Toonol]

In the USA, it's politically correct to believe that global warming is a hoax - but if it isn't, it's not caused by people

Oh, please, that's nuts. You think that corporations spend millions of dollars advertising how green they are because they're struggling against political correctness? You think that schools spend hours our of every week teaching kids about climate change and green lifestyles because the teachers are struggling against political correctness? You're making a losing argument, an obviously losing argument.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[ArcherB]

As usual, the "Conservative" agenda is to lie by attacking their opponent falsely for precisely what the "Conservatives" actually are.

You mean "racists"? Yeah! Herman Cain is the worst! Don't even get me started on that Bobby Jindal. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be the first to tell you how us "Conservatives" won't tolerate them damn foreigners!

Oh wait! You probably actually believe it. See, it's funny because you accuse conservatives of lying, all while believing and even perpetuating lies AGAINST conservatives.

The "politically correct" thinking on climate change is the denial. The polluters pay for politics to fight the science that might make them pay for the pollution.

Yeah, that worked out so well for Rick Perry. Fact is, if you so much as say, "Maybe we don't know all there is to know about climate change" you are instantly labeled "anti-science", even though the statement is 100% accurate. It's like you are questioning evolution. Matter of fact, it is EXACTLY like asking questions about evolution. Are you seeing a pattern here? Question Obama, you are a racist. Question man made climate change and you are anti-science. Question Social Security and you are anti-grandma. Question abortion and you are anti-woman. Wasn't the entire liberal platform based on "Questioning Authority" and keeping an open mind? Sorry, but "politically correct" simply means "the liberal position".

It's funny how liberals like to call those that question climate models "flat-earthers", but if people were not allowed to question what some accept as fact, we'd all still be "flat-earthers".

Thanks for your contribution to our public demonstration.

No, thank you!

Inconclusive evidende

[Anonymous Coward]

The evidence myth tells us there is a smoking gun in science reseach, there is not. The method either shows a significant chance of an insignificant one. If the evidence is inconclusive it is insignificant, and there is no evidence..So the conclusion is bogus.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[khallow]

The fight now is just over whether we want to spend a smaller amount now or a larger amount later to deal with the problem.

Don't forget time value of money. I have yet to see evidence that the problem is less now, more later. If it's more now, less later, then that entails completely different behavior.

The new bandwagon: climate "science"

[concealment]

Every age has some bandwagon we can all hitch ourselves to and make headlines. I guess this decade it's climate science. The "science" here is dubious; I think he's really stretching.

What I think bothers me more is the imprecise use of language in the article.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there

And then later

Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.

So what's wrong with this? Well, see here

Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated ) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimate

Re:bull pucky

[Antisyzygy]

They way to phrase that makes it sound like they killed off millions single handed. Its more of a "foreign pathogen" problem.

Columbus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Columbus...History's greatest monster!!!!

Good example of AGW 'scientific' thinking

[dtjohnson]

The idea that the global climate could be changed by a relative handful of europeans clearing a tiny portion of the forested landscape with handsaws and horses is ridiculous. The Oort minimum began approximately 1,000 years ago, followed by the Wolf minimum (740 years ago), the Sporer minimum (600 years ago), and then the Maunder minimum approximately 400 years ago. Columbus set sail in 1492 so those europeans would have had to have been working like beavers (pardon the expression) to have cut down enough trees by ca 1600 to drive the climate to yet another minimum. We may be at the beginning of yet another climate minimum right now, likely driven by reduced solar output. AGW proponents are turning into spin doctors with these kinds of 'theories' (such as TFA) to explain the utter failure of their climatic theories to account for the real global climate change that is in the fossil record over the last 100,000 years.

Re:Good example of AGW 'scientific' thinking

[MuValas]

Not only did you not read the article, you haven't even read any of the posts about the article clarifying things.

It goes like this:
1. European Explorers get to America
2. Disease wipes out tens of millions of natives
3. Forests that the natives were cultivating grow back
4. Carbon sucked out of the atmosphere in massive reforestation.

Re:Good example of AGW 'scientific' thinking

[dtjohnson]

Sorry, but the idea that the native populations of central america were deforesting the north and south american continents to any significant degree with their relatively-small populations and stone axes and no horses is even more ridiculous, if that were possible. Also, the europeans arriving in North and South American in the 16th century did not find deforestation but rather large primeval forests in most areas.

Re:Good example of AGW 'scientific' thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

As noted in the article and the comments (basically, everywhere but the messed-up summary), the issue is REforestation, not DEforestation - reforestation caused by the death of millions of Native Americans by disease post-Columbus, and thus a decline in people cutting down trees. Arguing against a straw man doesn't add to your intellectual image here.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is much more likely to be right than a combination of internet wackos and economically interested public figures. That's why we have science - to figure things out.

Re:Good example of AGW 'scientific' thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

"The idea that the global climate could be changed by a relative handful of europeans clearing a tiny portion of the forested landscape with handsaws and horses is ridiculous."

You're right, *that* idea is pretty stupid. But it has little or nothing to do with the actual thesis.

Unless you intended you attack the very concept of biased, blinkered thinking by providing a picture-perfect example of your own, in which case: bravo, sir.

Re:Good example of AGW 'scientific' thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

So you've not only failed to read the article, or the summary, you've now failed to read a helpful 4-bullet-point summary provided especially for you to aid your comprehension?

This is not about deforestation, it is about reforestation.

Other, newly-introduced misconceptions:
1)The population of the Americas prior to Columbus was actually larger than previously thought, according to recent research (still research in progress, of course)
2)It is relatively easy for even small groups of people to deforest or otherwise control large areas, by using fire. Thus "slash and burn agriculture".
3)Related to point #1, primeval forests would be those undisturbed by significant human activity. You've managed to smuggle your conclusion into your premise (perhaps unintentionally). Again, recent research suggests significant management activities by the indigenous population (eg google "terra preta").

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Doc Ruby]

No, I'm very popular. Among people who aren't intolerably stupid. Because I don't call people with working brains stupid. Only stupid people hate seeing stupid people called stupid.

Or bite their tongue among the stupid because they want to be popular among them.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[DinDaddy]

Indeed you didn't read the article. Its premise is that RE-forestation (new growth) caused by existing native populations being wiped out by imported disease caused the untended cleared areas used by theose native populations for agriculture and other things to be filled in with NEW forest, which caused CO2 to drop, decreasing temperatures.

Opposite scenario. Otherwise, your objection would be valid.

Maunder minumum

[dr_leviathan]

Coincidentally with the coldest part of the mini ice age was the "Maunder minimum" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum which was a period of very low sunspot activity. It is speculated that the two may have a common cause: variable solar radiance.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Doc Ruby]

I never said anything about racism. Though it's easy to see what's racist about the fetishes for Cain on the one hand (by only 25% of Republicans) and Jindal (who, in Louisiana, is "not Black or Mexican", which is all that counts there - where I lived for several years).

What the post to which I replied said was not "maybe we don't know all there is to know about climate change". That's a statement with which I, and practically all climatologists, to say nothing of just reasonable people, agree. It's you "Conservatives" who say "we don't want to know any more". Like this week, as Rick Perry's Texas government censored the official climate change report because it published data showing Galveston Bay's sealevel is already rising and damaging Texas.

Your "racism" straw man is yet more proof of the savage illogic of the "Conservative" mind. Forcing yourselves into the government and political decisionmaking to interfere with actually running the country whenever possible. Creating the anarchy vacuum into which corporate power shoves itself.

Thanks for strutting. Now let's have another demonstration.

Stupid "scientist"

[p51d007]

People like this are educating your children!

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Whorhay]

I don't know that all that much CO2 would remain stored underground if the above ground part of the trees were removed. Unless the soil is more clay than dirt decomposition is going to happen and the gases will work their way to the surface or be used up by other plants as nutrients.

The last I heard we thought that the oil deposits were created by organisms, plant and animal, dieing in the ocean. Their remains settled to the seabed at enough depth that cold and hypoxia hampered bacterial decomposition. The layer of dead stuff slowly builds up over centures or millenia and is eventually covered over by other sedimentary layers. Geologic processes eventually turn this layer into Oil Shale. The Oil Shale might at some point be subject to enough pressure and just the right amount of heat to cause it to exude oil, which pools into pockets and becomes readily harvestable via drilling.

So if

[Dunbal]

Columbus and the European colonization of the Americas triggered the "mini ice age", then why did it stop? It's not like the forests have grown back. Bullshit-meter pegged at maximum.

Re:So if

[Belial6]

The stories premise is that Europeans were the vector for massive death in the Americas due to disease. Thus immediately following the arrival of Europeans, the population of the Americas dropped dramatically, and that is when the forests grew back causing the mini ice age. Over time, the European population grew to a number that the land could be re-deforested.

Re:So if

[Myopic]

Because we cut down all the trees again.

Come on, man, keep up with the conversation. This isn't brain surgery.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[tbannist]

There's also opportunity costs to consider as well, of course, money spent fighting climate change could be spent on other projects instead. The issue is always going to be about putting the money to the best overall use.

I think, iif done correctly we could mitigate the effects of climate change with relatively little cost. A small but increasing tax on previously-sequestered* CO2 emissions would likely have a large effect on curbing emissions without excessive cost. Businesses would naturally reduce emissions to reduce the cost, where possible.

There are numerous estimates of what the costs of climate change will be, but those estimates rarely break down to the level of determine who's going to pay what costs, but the vast majority agree that it's cheaper to prevent/slow down climate change than to pay the costs to adapt to the changing climate.

* I put previously-sequestered here for the mouth breathers who get hysterical over the imaginary possibility of a tax on mouth-breathing, of course, they probably won't read this.

This is nonsense.

[BMOC]

"Science News reports on a story which blames a centuries long cooling of Europe on the discovery of the new world. Scientists contend that the native depopulation and deforestation had a chilling effect on world-wide climate. 'Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.' The story notes that the pandemics in the Americas were possibly an example of human climate manipulation predating the Industrial Revolution, though isotope measurements used during research have much uncertainty, so 'that evidence isn't conclusive.'"

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. So, Trees that filled an area and used to pull tons of CO2 from the air were cut down, meaning that now there is *more* CO2 in the air. But contrary to what we've all had hammered into our brains for 15+ years now this deforestation doesn't cause warming by removing CO2 eaters, no no, it in fact causes the little ice age. What's worse, is deforestation caused pandemics. No gentlemen, it wasn't the filthy sailors from the depths of the boats finding native girls to get cuddly with and passing on their horrific viruses, no it was deforestation and climate manipulation that caused them. Abject nonsense, I'm surprised more people on /. are not calling this for what it is, complete bunk.

Re:This is nonsense.

[tbannist]

Well the reason more people on /. are not calling this complete bunk is because we have some minimal level of reading comprehension. In the context above "deforestation" is obviously an unfortunate typo. The diseases carried by those sailors are exactly what caused the depopulation of Central and South America which allowed the forests to grow back (reforestation). The estimated death toll of around 90% of the population or between 36-72 million allowed a lot of forest growth until they were replaced through immigration and natural population growth. The argument is that the diseases were virulent enough to actually have an impact on the climate. At least, that's what the article says. Of course you'd know that if you read more and didn't jump to conclusions.

As a bit of a history buff I am skeptical

[einhverfr]

Here's why:

1) the Little Ice Age began around the 11th century. Unless Columbus's ships were also time machines......
2) There is no reason to see these patterns of warming and cooling as global phenomena.

What's going on here is that climate scientists are seeing a hammer of green house gas concentrations and noticing that everything looks like a nail. This is reason enough to maintain a little skepticism regarding even artificial global warming views today (though on the balance I think AGW is probably real, anyone who looks at what the evidence actually is will notice we don't have a long or comprehensive enough record to say anything for certain).

Every now and again I see theories purporting to prove that some event or another caused cooling due to reduced greenhouse gas concentrations Often you want to ask them if they think the medieval warming period (when Europe was even warmer than today, and so was much of North America) was a global phenomenon. There is no reason to think it is. End of story. So it is unlikely we are really dealing with *global* warming or cooling in these eras, but rather major climate shifts.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Curunir_wolf]

The "politically correct" thinking on climate change is the denial.

That's patently false. Political correctness is, by definition A form of censorship practiced by faggots and leftist subversive fucks so they don't have to hear any points of view that they don't agree with.. So, obviously, any wing-nut denialist is violating the politically correct code when they express their denialism in public.

Of course, there isn't any science in AGW any more, it's all political. AGW is incontrovertible.

Re:bull pucky

[Chuck Messenger]

I think you have that backwards: it's not that climate deniers have come to distrust science because science has it wrong on global warming; it's that the deniers distrust science, period. Distrusting science, you're "free" to believe whatever you want to.

Unsurprisingly, such people end up believing just those things which it is in their interest to believe.

we have a very charismatic cerebral president

[circletimessquare]

who is having the national agenda ripped away from him by genuinely stupid and propagandized fools

why?

because you need fire in the belly to lead the mob that is the general public, in any country, in any era. cold rational discourse doesn't cut it. cold rationality should of course dictate your agenda. but achieving that agenda is all about passionately summoning your allies and passionately dispelling your enemies, not dispassionately reasoning with people, especially people who can't ever be reasoned with

and i'm sorry, but knuckledraggers pointing out one minor flaw in your argument will happen no matter how careful you are. the point is to not take their criticism seriously and soberly, the point is to call them out for being the clueless antiscience idiots they are

you don't respond to a dumb thug wearing brass knuckles menacing you with a more erudite scientific argument. you kneecap him. i am being figurative, of course, i am talking about rhetorical debate, not real world violence

Re:we have a very charismatic cerebral president

[Antisyzygy]

I would liken your analogy to this : Carry a loaded weapon, tell the thug he will be shot if he attempts to harm you. This loaded weapon is knowledge. You can be passionate about your arguments, but making shit up is never ok in science. No-one is saying to dispassionately argue with people, just to not falsify reports, or to come up with bogus theories just to publish a paper. It harms you more in the end. I am as pissed off as the next guy about the current state of affairs, however I will not sell out my principals, those of science, just to mislead someone who is already an idiot.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Dunbal]

Yeah: "By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people". Real numbers there. Call me when you have the error down to say, 5%. Otherwise it's bullshit, just like your bullshit and GP's bullshit.

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

My dog eats his own shit, with apparently no consequences. Ha! Top that!

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Dunbal]

Burning it will most definitely release carbon into the environment that wasn't free before.

Why, where did the tree get the carbon from in the first place? Magic? You are merely returning to the atmosphere what was previously in the atmosphere. Granted you are releasing it suddenly instead of over a period of 20 or 80 years (or however old the tree was), but you care not "creating" CO2.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Dunbal]

Yeah, the sun provides enough energy to change the world's temperature by well over 10 degrees every 24 hours during the day/night cycle, is suspected of being able to trigger large earthquakes through alterations in the geomagnetic field, yet is absolutely incapable of being the cause behind long term trends in the weather for some people.

Re:bull pucky

[Will.Woodhull]

Good points. There is something that needs clarification:

The civilizations of the Amazon basin did not use slash and burn agriculture. They were built on top of terra preta agriculture, which is a system that works in rain forest conditions, that was unknown to Europe until the last decade or so. It involves sequestering large amounts of carbon in the soil in the form of biologically active charcoal, or biochar. The civilizations grew over hundreds of years, but were destroyed by disease in just a few decades. The terra preta soils would have reverted to jungle very quickly since these are very rich soils.

The terra preta system involved methods of handling sewage that were very different from European practices and may well have facilitated the rapid spread of European diseases. So far as I know, no one has done any research in this area, other than identifying that human waste was somehow incorporated into terra preta in significant quantities.

QED

[argStyopa]

Let me see if I understand the logic:

Indians deforested continent.
Columbus comes.
Indians die.
Forests grow back.
Temperature plummets.
Little Ice Age appears.

The only logical conclusion is that we're supposed to start slaughtering indigenous peoples again?

I mean, sure, if science says we have to.

Re:QED

[Belial6]

Of course, WE are the indigenous people now.

Re:QED

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you would kill anyone who uses wood. For paper, which is on my desk. Or particle board, which my desk is made of. Or, . . . let's abandon this plan.

Re:QED

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, although we're all the indigenous people now (i.e. for those of is in the Americas anyway).

I'm a big believer in Science and all that but... you first?

Re:QED

[argStyopa]

I'm not "Native" American - despite being a 4th generation born-here resident - according to the US Government and their 'free tuition' policy. I'm safe.

Et tu, autocthones?

Re:bull pucky

[Will.Woodhull]

So if we all just click our heels together three times and say "There are NOT 7 billion people on this planet", all the anthropogenic problems will go away?

Thanks, Dorothy! That is an approach to the great evils of our time that the scientists have not come up with!

Now to get back to trying to understand how humanity created this mess, in the hope that somehow we might find a clue about how to mitigate at least part of it.

Re:bull pucky

[Dunbal]

Touché. The New World and imperialism in general saw a huge boom in ship-building and construction. At one point there was a very real shortage of hard wood in Europe, and the Brits were pissed because they were resorting to using American Oak for their ships, a material they considered to be inferior.

Re:bull pucky

[Dunbal]

Remember this is the paper that uses numbers:

By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas.

Only an error of 40 million people - or 100%.

This new growth could have soaked up between 2 billion and 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

Whoa. Only off by 850% there. I'm guessing it _could_ even be around 30 billion tons. Or maybe 200,000 tons. Nice to be working under such tight constraints. Sorry but I can't approve your grant request, we have real science to do.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Toonol]

What you're really doing is betting that the Earth has some as-yet-unknown magic trick to make it all vanish.

Well, since CO2 has been much higher in the Earth's past, we know there are potential mechanisms in place that can fix it. We just don't know exactly what, since climate is a chaotic system and our models all suck.

Re:bull pucky

[Alomex]

And your point is?

If you show me a person height pile of sand I can best estimate the size within a factor of 2 or so. Does that mean the pile of sand isn't there?

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[cusco]

You don't get it. Most of the Americas wasn't old growth forest. By the time the Pilgrims arrived (which is where the history knowledge of most North Americans begins) the Spanish barbarians had already been in the New World for most of two centuries and the Great Dying was mostly over. Around 70 percent of everyone between Tierra del Fuego and Point Barrow had already died. It made the Black Plague look like a walk in the park, and utterly destroyed entire civilizations that only recently have been discovered. Did you know that much of the Amazon was actually fairly heavily populated? That large population centers of tens of thousands of people existed in the Midwest and Atlantic Seaboard? That the Inca were so decimated by the diseases of the filthy Spaniards (influenza, smallpox and TB) that the population of Peru didn't fully recover until 1970? That disease killed far more people in Mexico before the Spanish even arrived than Cortez did? That the reason people believed that they were representatives of vengeful gods was because of the diseases inherent in the filthy lifestyle of Europeans, not their technology? Didn't think so.

I thought...

[sparhawktn]

I thought the global warming/cooling mass extermination of the dinosaur/old growth trees/dodos were caused by the fact that King Henry the 8th farted when Anne Boleyn was beheaded. Or was it when Marie Antoinette was thought to have said "let them eat cake". No maybe it was Galileo who sneezed on one of his writings and when he wiped off a very large booger he cause everyone to think the Earth was NOT the center of the universe. Or maybe it was Da Vinci telling a slightly off color job about a Nigerian banker wanting to complete a simple finical transaction that caused the Mona Lisa only slightly smile at his joke. No wait I forgot about Chinese invented fireworks and the smoke they produced caused a butterfly in in Egypt to flap it's wings just right to bury the Sphinx. Or was it the Mongol hordes with all those horse and the methane they produced that caused Marco Polo to bring back the spaghetti to Italy to say the precious food? So it can't be Columbus' fault. The poor guy just got lost and thought it was on the other side of the world simple enough for anyone to do.

Re:bull pucky

[Toonol]

I once read a paper that argued that global warming would cause poison oak to proliferate, making woods less pleasant for mankind.

Re:bull pucky

[Toonol]

That's right. In reality, if the Indians had traveled to Europe and then returned home, they'd probably have had many of the same problems. The decimated populations were a sad result of contact, not of one group exploiting another.

Now, I won't argue that the Europeans didn't exploit native Americans... but that wasn't what decimated their population. And the use of 'decimation' is funny. It literally means 'killing one man in ten', but in this context, it left one man in ten alive.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[gtall]

I wasn't aware the native Americans were big on farming, and I do not believe they were. They were mainly hunter-gatherers. If anything, the native Americans would have opened up more land to be deforested for farming thus decreasing the carbon sink, increasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thus warming Europe.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[gtall]

Yes, well the point is rather how much can we dump into the atmosphere without cooking ourselves and the wildlife. Lately, we seem to be discovering new oil and gas deposits and technology is getting better at recovering it. And there's no guarantee that governors in the past on overheating will still be there in the future given how man has changed the planet.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Let me repost the important part of the theory:

Article's theory: An area the size of california was reforested over 200 years causing the little ice age.

The climate change they are attributing to the amount of reforestation, not the change in population that caused the reforestation. So, I'm assuming that they have the amount of land reforested more accurate than the number of people. Again, the important part of the theory is the amount of reforestation, not the number of people. It is not scientific to make up numbers and wildly guess the out come of your numbers to oppose a more scientific idea.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see the liberal value of tolerance is one of your strong points. It's a good thing you've been appointed the arbiter of working brains.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[gtall]

The story also fails to consider that the new Americans were big on farming and would have been clearing land for farming. I too think the authors had their PC blinkers on.

gives science a bad name

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of crap that gives science a bad name--the ability to run regressions in Excel does not make a scientist...

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[tbannist]

You're thinking too U.S. centric, the primary populations centers of pre-contact America were in the south. The North American hunter-gatherers were more resistant to the European plagues because of their greater isolation from one another, however, in South and Central America there were actual cities which were destroyed by the combination of war and disease brought by the Europeans (particularly the Spanish).

Of course, the reforestation that took place after the cities were abandoned was eventually reversed when Europeans began to settle the Americas. Some cities, of course, never recovered (like Machu Pichu) and others that are occasionally discovered in the rain forests of Brazil.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[cusco]

Actually the European deforestation restarted at the end of the Dark Ages, around the year 1000 or so, when population began to recover from the fall of Rome. There is a tiny blip in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 content associated with the plagues the raged as the Roman Empire collapsed and later with the Mongol hordes depopulating eastern Europe, but not enough to be definitive because not enough area was affected.

Look at a globe. See Europe? That little tail hanging off the rump of Asia? Now look at North and South America. The formerly forested area of Europe could fit quite handily in one corner of the Amazon, which was home to at least two major civilizations which we only recently discovered (since the diseases so common in the vile European lifestyle wiped them out before the Spanish and Portuguese arrived in those areas).

This was also brought up in a recent book

[Floritard]

titled 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann. There were an awful lot of other consequences of the Columbian Exchange. It's a fascinating read.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[tbannist]

Quite true. One problem is that people can continually argue against paying anything more than we have too right now, which will just lead to a continually increasing cost to climate change until we run out carbon sequestering resources.

To some people that's actually preferable because ideologically they see a difference between something they have to pay and something they chose to pay. Strangely, libertarians seem to want people to be able to choose to pay for things but seem to want societies which are unable to choose to pay.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Joce640k]

Of course...all the coal and oil was once CO2 in the air.

I can also find sea fossils thousands of feet up in the mountains. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to go back to that point in history.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Wolvenhaven]

I had a nuclear engineer describe it to me this way. Nuclear power stations for the grid's base load, step it up a few extra levels and use the extra power to crack hydrogen. Use that hydrogen to run turbines for the grid's variable load and produce enough of an excess to be able to sell it to fuel cars. It will require a lot of nuclear reactors, but completely replaces our dependence on fuels which may run out at some point and if the ecomentalists ever get over their fear of nuclear power, will solve what they see as the poisoning of the atmosphere. Except for the fissionable materials, the entire process is renewable and leaves no pollution, and if those fastbreed(I think) reactors which can run on spent fuel rods work as designed, we wouldn't have much of a containment issue either.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[BergZ]

The Green House Effect caused by greenhouse gasses is known to increase the global average surface temperature by ~32C... and yet is absolutely incapable of being influenced by human emissions of the same green house gasses according to some people.

pfff

[Anonymous Coward]

I call cow farts on this.

That's not what happened - read the article

[DG]

Per the article, that's not what happened.

Pre-Columbus, the Native population of the Americas was many, many times larger than most people imagine - on the order of 80 million people. This population actively cleared land via slash-and-burn agriculture and generally comported themselves the way humans do (contrary to the popular imagination of Avatar-esque tiny populations living in perfect harmony with nature)

When Columbus made contact, he passed on smallpox and diptheria, and the subsequent wave of epidemics wiped out 90% of the Native population. Along with this, most of the previously cleared land was reforested, and the theory is that the reforestation pulled out enough atmospheric CO2 to cause a temperature drop due to lack of greenhouse effect.

Note that the tiny Native populations encountered by later European explorers were the remnents of the mass pandemic extinctions that played out "offstage" from European observation.

DG

Re:That's not what happened - read the article

[dtjohnson]

Reforestation requires that there first be deforestation by someone. I thought that was obvious but, judging by the comments, apparently it isn't. Who did this deforestation? The pre-columbian population (which experts put at about 50 million throughout North and South America) was simply not large enough to have accomplished significant deforestation through 'slash and burn' methods to affect the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Slash and burn requires that someone actually cut the trees down to dry out (i.e. the slash) and then burn them during a period of dry weather. Cutting down even one tree with a stone axe is a very large amount of work. The only reason for doing this would have been...agriculture...i.e. planting on the burned-over area after the burning. Again, planting and harvesting by hand is also a very large amount of work. A total population of 50 million people in North and South America, even if they were ALL engaged in agriculture (which they were obviously not), would have been able, at most, to have sustained agriculture on perhaps 500 million acres out of a total land area of 10,500 million acres or 4 percent. (This is a 'slashdot hypothetical'...europeans arriving in the 16th century did not find that.) If there are 30 tons of primeval carbon per acre (EPA number), that would correspond to a release of 15,000,000,000 tons of carbon or approximately 50 million barrels of oil which is the approximate amount of oil that is produced worldwide in ONE DAY. TFA is an excellent example of the fuzzy thinking inherent in AGW 'science.'

Re:That's not what happened - read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

A bunch of wrongness again.
1)Killing a tree with primitive tools is actually pretty easy- cut the tissues around the outside of the tree (aka 'girdling') and it dies. It might fall or might be burnt in place. Slash and burn agriculturalists tend to work as efficiently as possible from a caloric perspective- but they've got time.
2)Native groups may have burned for agriculture, but also to modify their environment for other purposes (eg to flush game). And, if they were frequently using fire for environmental modification, it's not difficult to imagine that those fires (or even ordinary home/work fires) might get out of control on a regular basis and burn more than anticipated.
2b)Slash and burn agriculture involves burning a field, farming it for a few years, and then moving on. Forests continue to accumulate biomass for over 100 years after initial succession. So the area of impact under discussion isn't necessarily what a single farmer is farming at a point in time.
3)15B tons of carbon released is not 15B tons of CO2. High school chemistry should've explained this to you; let's see if you can figure out for yourself what the actual number should be. hint: it's in the "O" part.
4)1 ton of CO2 is very roughly equal to 2.5 barrels of oil (0.43 metric tons CO2/barrel, from the EPA). So disregarding your chemistry mistake, 15B tons of CO2 would equal 6B barrels of oil, not 50M. Correcting for the chemistry error, it's more like 20B barrels. Ive seen tC/ha numbers more like 225 (ie about 3 times what you've cited per acre), which would take us to 60B barrels. Correcting for the misperception about impact area could easily multiple that again by 2-5 or more (or not, there are too many variables here to even make a reliable rough guess. But let's posit the 'worst case' for your argument as a test).
End result, something like 150-200B barrels of oil equivalent. Something like 400B tCO2- over ten years of CO2 at current rates (ie enough to lower ppm worldwide about 20).

Funny thing is, I actually doubt that the original theory is correct- or, Id want to see much more evidence supporting it. It's pretty far out there in terms of speculation. Nevertheless, interesting if only bc it stimulates one to look at the problem differently.
But you, for some odd, odd reason think that this is somehow directly related to the theories of GCC. I don't know why, other than you seem to have some issue with the science there. Insofar as you understand it.

Finally, I would think after you've demonstrated over and over again that you do not understand basic science or math and are prone to errors of logic, you ought to not be so certain of your conclusions. Many people who are much brighter than you exhibit a great deal more tentativeness in leaping to conclusions, and IMO this usually serves them well.

Re:That's not what happened - read the article

[dtjohnson]

You are correct that I have a math error. The 15,000,000,000 tons of carbon (5.5 x 10^10 tons co2 equivalent) would be approximately 102 billion barrels of oil or about 5 years of current world production which is still insignificant wrt the global atmospheric co2 concentration. The earth's atmosphere has a mass of 5.7 x 10^15 tons so the carbon released from the hypothetical deforestation caused by the 50 million pre-columbian inhabitants would contribute to a hypothetical increase in the atmospheric co2 concentration of 10 ppm if we assume that all of the carbon is released as co2 and there is zero uptake in the deforested areas. This is approximately the same increase in co2 that we have seen between 2005 and the present. This amount of decrease or increase has an insignificant effect on the climate and certainly did not cause the Maunder minimum. To get to even this amount, we've made ridiculous assumptions about 50 million inhabitants armed with stone axes all carrying out slash and burn agriculture leaving 250 million acres continuously defoliated. The entire premise of TFA is...ridiculous...and is an excellent example of the fuzzy thinking inherent in AGW 'science.'

Vikings and Global Warming

[zooblethorpe]

No matter when you date the start of the Little Ice Age, the cooling started at least as early as 1300 (when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe) and probably around 1250 (when the North Atlantic glaciers started to expand).

So, the vikings are to blame?

Of course, silly! The Vikings were, after all, basically pirates, and as anyone knows, global temperatures increase as the number of pirates declines. So it stands to reason that the opposite would hold true as well -- more pirates, colder temperatures -- and we do indeed see this trend, with global temperatures declining as the Vikings got up to speed. It's simple math, really.

So yes, the Vikings are to blame for the Little Ice Age. Quite appropriate that a group that believed in Ragnarok and Fenrir eating the sun and bringing eternal winter would then do just about that -- bring constant warfare and colder winters. Clearly, His Noodly Appendage at work, giving us historical proof of why we should wear pirate regalia.

Cheers,

Right....

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a fucking break.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Dunbal]

Except, this has all happened before... where are the trilobites?

Re:bull pucky

[Dunbal]

No, but it means that when you try to tell me how many trucks and how much fuel I will need to move said sand and how much it will cost, you will be completely wrong.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting idea. Can you explain the mechanism by which the mammoth caused the warming?

Otherwise, you're purposefully ignoring real science and trolling.

Look further south -- They had written history.

[zooblethorpe]

...the fact is the Native Americans didn't really maintain much of a historical record, just some folk tales handed down by oral tradition.

That's a common misconception, which is a real indictment of the inadequacy of US history curricula. There was writing in the Americas before the Europeans came, and there was history, written down in local scripts. The Spaniards systematically destroyed most of what they could find; if memory serves, the Jesuits were the most fanatical destroyers, while the Dominicans instead tried to preserve such records. We (the general English-speaking "we") are only beginning to figure out what Native American history was from their own perspective, thanks in part to finally mostly deciphering the Mayan script. There may be other writing systems further north that we haven't yet discovered, possibly hidden under some Midwest suburban Walmart parking lot, but despite the presence of large pre-Columbian sites like the numerous Caddoan mounds along the Mississippi, there hasn't been anywhere near the interest or archaeological digs going on the US as there has been further south where people built using stone.

Cheers,

Re:Look further south -- They had written history.

[Curunir_wolf]

I mentioned archeology vs. history originally, and all you've done is expound on that a little. I guess I could have qualified the phrase you quoted by saying "and a few cryptic scribblings from the larger civilizations", but it's still a huge stretch to call it a "misconception", and even given what was destroyed the North American peoples still had nothing even comparable to the written records that existed in Europe and the Middle East even 1000 years before Columbus, much less in that century.

Re:Look further south -- They had written history.

[cowboy76Spain]

Ignoring the people from other countries who speaks English:

If Russians invaders killed most of the people currently living in the USA(*), and the survivors had to deal with Russian occupation authorities, you would surprised how quickly all of the books in Library of Congress become "cryptic scribblings".

*: Remember than until recently only a minority of people knew to read and write.

Re:Look further south -- They had written history.

[Curunir_wolf]

False equivalency. Other than the fact that English and Russian share common language roots, your description of "only a minority of people knew [sic] to read and write" is meaningless without some context for "recently" as well as the particular population you're referring to.

In any case, we're talking about Mayan writing (the only examples the GP brought up). It appears from the studies that even those are likely even less informative from a historical perspective than even the surviving Egyptian hieroglyphs, and look to be concerned primarily with inventories of commodities and slaves, used only by the top-level rulers of the civilization. Far from anything you could gain something like stories or chronicles or anything else that the study of history concerns itself with.

Re:Look further south -- They had written history.

[Curunir_wolf]

That's a common misconception, which is a real indictment of the inadequacy of US history curricula.

Of all the skewed history, political correct history, revisionist history, lies by omission, and downright deception in the public school's US history curricula, it's actually nothing but a minor footnote.

Re:Look further south -- They had written history.

[zooblethorpe]

Of all the skewed history, political correct history, revisionist history, lies by omission, and downright deception in the public school's US history curricula, it's actually nothing but a minor footnote.

Fair enough. There is much that could be improved, certainly.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Doc Ruby]

The global climate change we have now is more total, a bigger change, and more rapid than even the "Little Ice Age".

Your problem with the AGW argument is much more accurate a description of the way nonscientists like you search for anecdotal cherries to pick to dismiss the problem. "Maybe, just maybe" is a worthless complaint from a random, unqualified person in the face of "as probably as we get" from thousands of climatologists who compose the scientific consensus.

The climate is changing due to several causes, some of them cyclical. One cause that we can do something about is human emissions. If we do what we've been doing, the climate will change rapidly enough that it will be a disaster for humans. If we do something about our emissions, we'll probably suffer less damage.

The reasonable way to act is to accept the science I just summarized, which is even less controversial than the proportionate causes. We are faced with a future that we will influence, either constructively or destructively. We have to take responsibility for our actions now and going forward. Not look for excuses to argue about spin.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Doc Ruby]

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the (nearly, but sadly not) comical presentation from the science of "duh".

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[riverat1]

In places in the new world the natives actively suppressed the growing of forests. For instance in the Willamette Valley of Oregon they lit fires every fall to keep the trees from reforesting the valley floor. This helped some of their food sources out. Also, the serious logging in the new world didn't really get going until the mid-1800's, about the time the LIA was winding down.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[riverat1]

In the past when CO2 was much higher than it is now the Sun was also considerably cooler than it is now. 3 billion years ago Sol was only about 75% as bright as it is now.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I understand your frustration with your inability to counter scientific arguments that you intuitively disagree with. Its not expected that a layman could offer up a scientifically valid counter argument imminently (or after any period of time really) after the publication of an article they disagree with. The rational thing would be to suggest that researchers look into the suggested period of time and deforestation to see if agrees or disagrees with this research, rather than arbitrary declare that the research would support your position.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please tell me what "politically correct" means?

I thought it meant using terms like "little people" instead of "midgits." Based on how the term is tossed around, it seems to mean being critical of white people.

Re:bull pucky

[Anonymous Coward]

you will be completely wrong.

I will be off by a factor of 2 at the worst, not completely wrong. there is a difference there.

Absurd

[eegad]

The idea of blaming Columbus for this is absurd. Clearly the blame lies with the Spanish government who sent Columbus exploring to begin with and therefore Spain should pay for all the world's global warming expenses. I'll submit this to a UN subcommittee for review immediately.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[budgenator]

What they are hypothesizing is that the Indians (American like Icamiabas, Aztec and Inca not Hindistani) had a large society and population in precolumbian times, that engaged in extensive slash and burn and slash and char agriculture and very fertile soils now called tera preta. This style of agriculture released considerable CO2, and cleared large stretches of forest. When Conquistadors like de Orellana explored the area, disease then wiped out 85% of the indian population, caused the society to collapse and the jungle reclaimed the abandoned farm land which cause a world-wide drop in CO2 levels due to rapid new growth trees and triggered the little ice age.

The poster never said "created". You made that up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you're being dishonest. Maybe you're being lazy. Either way, it's really lame.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[riverat1]

It wasn't just North America but all of the Americas that got depopulated. And Europe is much less than half the size of North America and less than a quarter of the size of all of the Americas so you could expect the effect to be bigger from changes in the Americas.

Re:bull pucky

[HeckRuler]

See: Harry "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Reid.)

I'm sorry. I was almost with you until this point. You were arguing against this paper, and against the politicizing of science, and I was with you. I understood. And then this. And it didn't get better.

YOU are politicizing science. You invoked your political bias against "the modern left". You're making up numbers and assuming social trends simply because that conforms to your preconceived worldview. Listen, if you think that global warming is false, you're delusional and can't conclude that 2+2=4 to save you're life. If you don't think humans aren't to blame, you're probably wrong. If you don't think there will be severe repercussions from all of this, well, you could be right. We'll see. It really depends on how fast this all goes down.

And you can argue about those last two things. Indeed it's a good thing to argue about. But the MOMENT you throw politics into the fray, one way or the other, then you're word is shit, and I wouldn't believe any figures you pull out of thin air.

You're right that politics ruin good science. You should work on that.

Re:bull pucky

[Anguirel]

Population is 33% error (60 + or - 20).
Carbon Sequestration would be ~79%, I guess (9.5 + or - 7.5).

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[vadim_t]

But by that standard it's all carbon neutral, as oil is just carbon that came from dead dinosaurs millions of years ago, which came from the vegetation at the time, which came from the air from back then.

But that way of looking at things isn't very useful. What matters is the effect actions have on the atmosphere that exists right now.

Also, forests persist a lot longer than 80 years. Individual trees aren't important. Forests may sequester carbon for thousands of years easily.

So what you're implying is

[drainbramage]

Avatar had a plot?

I'll call bullshit on this one

[Anonymous Coward]

I always remembered the "Little Ice Age" starting in either the 1300 or 1400s. About 60 seconds and Wikipedia proved my memory right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

It may have peaked between 1500 and 1700 but it started hundreds of years earlier. It's thought that possibly the industrial revolution ended it with the massive increase in CO2 from coal fires but it started long before that. The little ice age caused the vikings to abandon Greenland and that was before Columbus let alone the colonizing of North America. It's a little like saying CDs made people abandon 8 Track tapes.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Coren22]

But China is working hard to change the US position on that list. :)

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[budgenator]

South America Actually, specifically the Amazon basin.

Why no cooling from 20th Cent. reforestation?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the supposed reforestation after Columbus had such a great affect, then why didn't we see the same effect from the reforestations in the 20th Century. Run around the woods of New England and you'll see miles and miles of stone fences that once surrounded fields. Likewise, in read the reports of traveling through Sweden in the early 1900's and seeing no trees where now there are large forests. The reforestation from industrialization was massive in it's reach. Even in Washington where the forests were cut for logging in the late 1800's and early 1900's the trees have grown back. If this theory was correct we ought to be in a real ice age by now.

Re:bull pucky

[riverat1]

Well, poison oak is one of the types of plants that benefit most from increased CO2.

you know what also harms arguments?

[circletimessquare]

bad analogies

well there's your bias

[circletimessquare]

Michael Mann directed "The Last of the Mohicans." His sympathies are obviously with Native Americans.

Re:well there's your bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you can make a movie about native American zombies. That would be great.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[HornWumpus]

There is a big fancy word for swamps that are laying down future hydrocarbons.

They are rare these days, the only example in the USA is the Okefenokee IIRC.

Forests don't sequester carbon. Roots are eaten by termites.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[HornWumpus]

Politically correct means you self censor to avoid asking questions or making statements that make liberals uncomfortable. They have found a 'right' to not have their world view publicly questioned.

It was coined on American liberal arts campuses during a misguided period of speech codes (that hasn't ended yet).

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[HornWumpus]

Did you know it has recently become popular to romanticize the native populations and lives? Of course you did, and are doing your part.

You do this by vastly inflating the number of people that were supposed to be here pre-Columbus.

No other stone age people have ever been able to support such large populations per acre. Even granting bronze age to them (only a very few native cultures smelted bronze) you still don't get more then a few of million N and S America combined.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Well, one thing in favor of the spanish is that despite the diseases that they brought to the New World they recognized as human beings the natives very soon and they married without much trouble with them, making mestizo a huge chunk of the modern Latin American population, and established laws to protect communal lands that lasted up to the independence of the spanish colonies. The europeans that settled in what is now the east coast of USA obliterated systematically with ruthless efficiency the natives.

Sadly, after independence, the new governments and the mestizo behaved far worst than the Spanish Crown against the indians. I despise Subcomandante Marcos, but after hearing how many white and mestizo mexicans degrade indians, saying that the life of an indian was of less value than a chicken, I'm surprised that they didn't take arms with such force before.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[cusco]

Don't take my word for it, go back and read about the explorations of people like DeSoto and Cabeza de Vaca, who traveled through advanced communities of tens of thousands of people in the American southeast. Walk through the Andes, where people cultivated every scrap of land from sea level to the snow line, terracing valleys from bottom to top, bringing irrigation from scores of kilometers away, because there were so many of them. Read about the recent archeological discoveries in the Amazon and Orinoco jungles. Mexico (the city) was declared by the Dominicans to be far larger than Paris or Rome before its destruction. Sorry to tell you this, but they weren't all hunters and gatherers like in the John Wayne movies, at least not until their civilizations collapsed after the Great Dying.

Far more varied than mere inventories.

[zooblethorpe]

In any case, we're talking about Mayan writing (the only examples the GP brought up).

Did you read the first link I provided? Here it is again -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems -- which mentions at least four or five possible different scripts used by at least as many different cultures. Granted, the Mayan script appears to be the furthest developed and most widely used, but there were others.

It appears from the studies that even those are likely even less informative from a historical perspective than even the surviving Egyptian hieroglyphs, and look to be concerned primarily with inventories of commodities and slaves, used only by the top-level rulers of the civilization. Far from anything you could gain something like stories or chronicles or anything else that the study of history concerns itself with.

What studies have you been reading? This describes the Mayan codices in general, with a mention of how the Spaniards systematically burned almost all they could find. This describes the Dresden Codex, whence we learned a lot about how extremely precise the Mayan astronomers were, and part of where we get the current 2012 hoopla about the end of the Long Count calendar. This describes a book of Mayan poetry and dances, purportedly dating back to the pre-Columbian 1400's.

These are just what I found quickly on Wikipedia, but even this slim sampling tells of far more Mayan literature than something "concerned primarily with inventories of commodities and slaves, used only by the top-level rulers of the civilization".

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[Pseudonym Authority]

We just don't know exactly what,

How about: Huge forests, full of carbon in the form of sugars, are slowly buried thousands of feet beneath the surface over millions of years. There they wait and become hydrocarbon chains and are sucked out of the ground and burned to release the energy that was stored in the trees. The process of combustion is conservative and all of the original particles in the tree are converted back into CO2 and H2O. The CO2 that was present in the atmosphere was captured by the forests and stored below ground.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[flyneye]

Personally I've been playing with wind/solar power as the state I live in has abundance of both.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[flyneye]

Yeah I bet it warmed something fierce when the volcano in New Mexico blew so loud and long.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[riverat1]

Agriculture is a requirement to support a civilization such as the Inca's, Mayan's and Aztec's had. When the diseases that Columbus and others brought swept through the natives, wiping out up to 90% of the pre-Columbian population those farming areas were left to go fallow and back to forest. A map on this page outlines the areas where farming was predominant over hunter-gatherer population.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[flyneye]

The sky is falling is analogous to the environmental crisis du jour.
My statements are reflective of a profession that must continually justify its existence in order to gain funding and sustain employment.
I have no doubts as to human nature and corruption and therefore smell a waft of bullshit whenever the benevolent scientist/gods of politically underdeveloped grant us a glimpse into their crystal ball.
I'm thankfully neither a liberal nor conservative. I'm a realist. I don't think the environment is getting better, but I can see a Darwinian weeding out coming anyway, so I suppose it doesn't matter anyhow.

Natural cycles v. Human induced cycles

[Anonymous Coward]

When I watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", one thing stuck out to me more than anything else. Sudden drops in carbon dioxide levels in glacial ice showed a further steady drop, followed by an ice age. I'm no expert, or even well educated person, on the matter of climate changes, but I do know the Earth has natural systems that interact and create balances. Ice ages and warming periods are the extremes to cycles that are used by the planet to to naturally create balance. There have been many of both extremes and medians. Does anyone else think it is not out of the realm of possibility that the current and proposed sudden reductions of carbon dioxide by humans could cause an ice age? Personally I think it is possible, but I also think humans have a very narrow view of time and data, which makes us overreactive in many ways. I live in North Dakota and, from what I've seen the last 3 years, I sometimes wonder if that area won't soon have colder weather year-round. Then it warms up and I wonder if the whole state won't soon be a giant lake, which would also lower temperatures. It is now getting to the point where flooded areas still have standing water that freezes and floods more areas when it floods again in the spring. I'm no expert, but I think it's only a matter of time before nature's cycle moves back toward the other extreme.

Yeah right

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

That measured the comparative effect of 1 gas in completely absurd quantities, and has little relevance to the behavior of earth's athmosphere. It's about as valid a claim as saying "A human with 0.000005% oxygen survives yet if we inflate him with 0.5% oxygen he dies, therefore oxygen is poisonous".

The system measured is so ridiculously simpler than the system it attempts to predict the measurement is beyond meaningless.

(add of course the fact that this experiment only works because the lamp mostly emits high UV heat radiation, whereas the sun emits mostly visible light and a tiny little spec of UV. High UV is absorbed long before it would interact with CO2 (which is incidentally an absolute requirement for human life : we cannot survive high UV exposure for long) With actual sunlight this experiment would probably have failed to register any difference)

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[khallow]

I think, iif done correctly we could mitigate the effects of climate change with relatively little cost. A small but increasing tax on previously-sequestered* CO2 emissions would likely have a large effect on curbing emissions without excessive cost. Businesses would naturally reduce emissions to reduce the cost, where possible.

Why would it? Seems to me a small change in carbon taxes results in a small change in behavior. Most people seem to think a large change in behavior is required. That would require IMHO a large incentive.

There are numerous estimates of what the costs of climate change will be, but those estimates rarely break down to the level of determine who's going to pay what costs, but the vast majority agree that it's cheaper to prevent/slow down climate change than to pay the costs to adapt to the changing climate.

And most of that "vast majority" both don't have a clue nor consider the time value of money. For an analogous situation, consider recycling.

There's only a few things that are truly worth recycling for the value of their materials, such as aluminum cans or jewelry (and more generally most metals). Everything else has to be justified on the basis that it saves some vague resource such as landfill space. Somehow landfill space is more important than wasting the time of the people of the municipality or whatever that is imposing the recycling program.

My view is that if most places did proper due diligence and had to compensate people for the loss of their time (to comply with any recycling mandates), then they would either bury their waste or ship it to someone who would.

But these programs move on because of the same lazy analysis that you did above. People "think" that other peoples' time (and money) isn't worth much, while landfill space and the environment are. So wasteful projects are implemented, hypothetically to save the environment or other public good, while simultaneous harming society in general.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

That's of course true, but don't forget we started out with roughly equal landmass to today, but zero oxygen in the athmosphere ...

Last time plants multiplied until CO2 supply became the limit, which happened eons ago and it is unclear how long it took. But it can't have been more than a million years. Plants and other photosynthetic life can easily colonize 90% of the planet surface, even in the presence of humans. We don't actually know just how spread plants are in the oceans, nor what the maxima are, so that makes it hard to say what will happen. We do see changes : for the first time in over 2 millenia the sahara has shrunk (since 1980-1990 actually). It's only a percent or two, but keep in mind that the sahara is far larger than the US, so that's quite an area.

Add to that that plants' metabolic rates are mostly dependant on CO2 (in "normal" climates), and studies show that these can be made to double by providing a co2 rich environment (this is one of the reasons for greenhouses. Plants grow much faster in co2 enriched air, and greenhouses can be used to trap co2. Want to grow tropical plants in Canada ? That's the way to do it). In our current climate, plants waste sunlight energy to avoid running completely out of co2 (which would be disastrous as their cells' internal energy cycle is dependant on it. Below a minimum level of co2, plants die, just like we die without o2) (this seems to me similar to what our own cells do to avoid running out of o2)

Add to that that plants respond correctly to the tragedy of the commons (if a shared resource is threatening to run out, the correct response, economically speaking, is to consume more of it, not less). If given the chance, plants will rapidly use up all available co2. Rapidly, is a term that should be measured in geological timescales, of course, so we're not talking weeks, but centuries.

It is unclear how much plant O2 production can be accelerated. But it's going to be at least 30-50%, and maybe a lot more than that. It's also certain that if it can increase, it will.

Re:Bla Bla Bla

[HornWumpus]

We don't know why but they apparently abandoned their cities with fair regularity, helping the 'Indians were living in Eden' storytellers inflate the numbers.

No technology to support their numbers led to viscous boom-bust cycles. Many destruction cycles separated by centuries.

Read the comments.

[poofmeisterp]

The comments in TFA say everything that needs to be said.