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.'"
More politically correct BS.
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 truly the most idiotic thing I've ever read.
And I've read a Creationist textbook.
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.
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?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
... thereby completely undoing Columbus' environmental misdeeds!
This is an article in Science News - once a good publication, now just a political mouthpiece. Anyway, where do they get these "scientists"?
- 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.
- Second, there was no significant variation in CO2 at that time. The deviation they point to is ridiculously small on a historical scale - noise.
- 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.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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?
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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?
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.
More "progressive" BULLSHIT.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Well we have an easy solution to global warming then. Just depopulate America again.
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.
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.
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."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Right up there with the whole global temperature follows atmospheric CO2 level chart that Gore tried to sneak past everyone.
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.
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.
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....)
He did however whoop Captain Kirk's ass at a rap battle lately...
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
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 ...
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.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Leif Ericson made it to America some 500 years before Christopher Columbus.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
When the Europeans got to the new world they cut down more trees than ever! If there had been reforestation, where are those forests?
really..
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...
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
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!
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!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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...
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.
Kinda validates the Pirates > Global Warming connection...
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.
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.
I've given up on Slashdot's comment scores.
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 so it still exists. What DOESN'T exist is the idea that the MWP was warmer than the recent decades.
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.
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.
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
Columbus...History's greatest monster!!!!
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.
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.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
People like this are educating your children!
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
-Styopa
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.
This is the kind of crap that gives science a bad name--the ability to run regressions in Excel does not make a scientist...
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.
I call cow farts on this.
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
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,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Give me a fucking break.
...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,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
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.
Maybe you're being dishonest. Maybe you're being lazy. Either way, it's really lame.
Avatar had a plot?
No brain, no pain.
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.
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.
bad analogies
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Michael Mann directed "The Last of the Mohicans." His sympathies are obviously with Native Americans.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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".
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
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.
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)
The comments in TFA say everything that needs to be said.