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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.
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.
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.