Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.