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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.
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.
- 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.
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?
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
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.
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.
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).
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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 ....
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.
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)...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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
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.
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.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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.
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).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
"His name was James Damore."
You can see such a dip in the first graphic associated with this paper:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html
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.
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.
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 ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
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).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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?
Right, so how is what I said the opposite of that? The forest has to grow in the first place.
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.
You left out the genocide he was directly responsible for, according to Las Casas and other commentators of the time.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
No sig today...
"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.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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!
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?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Two words: Maunder Minimum
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.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
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!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
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.
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.
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.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
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.
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
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.
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
Columbus is the first recorded traveller to America.
Lots of facts points to previous knowledge:
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...
Why can't