Posted on 10/21/2011 11:02:39 AM PDT by MoJoWork_n
By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europes climate.
The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.
We have a massive reforestation event thats sequestering carbon coincident with the European arrival, said Nevle.
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. Such a depletion of a key greenhouse gas may have helped augment Europes so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages, Nevle's team has argued.
By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 100 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Yeah, except few Native Americans had agriculture and most were hunter-gatherers.
another guilt trip . . . and I just got back from one . . . what ever the libs speak, it’s taken as gospel truth . . .
So..when do reparations to Europe begin? /sarcasm
This guy reminds me of Professor Irwin Corey! Makes the same kinda sense.
Oh, that’s right. So the corn tortilla that came down to us from the Aztecs was originally made from tree bark.
Same thing they made their canoes from.
The building material for any number of souvenir items in the casino gift shops. Great to know they’re edible, after we’re done using them as ash trays, or bathroom potpourri holders.
No, you got the point of the article wrong.
It was *more* trees that sucked more CO2 out of the atmosphere, that the people advancing this theory say could be linked to the decreased CO2 in the ice in Antarctica, that suggests the drop in temperatures during the Little Ice Age may have had a human origin.
Columbus didn’t cut down NO trees.
You’re the one that suggested it should have been the other way around, whatever the origin of the increased CO2 levels.
It would have to have been ‘orders of magnitude’ less, though, wouldn’t it, since there was no mass extinction event as happened after the Permian era?
You’re the one that suggested it should have been the other way around, whatever the origin of the increased CO2 levels.
It would have had to have been ‘orders of magnitude’ less, though, wouldn’t it, since there was no mass extinction event as happened after the Permian era?
It is like in a discussion about the health benefits of drinking water you bring up the case of a guy who died from drinking gallons.
“Tying together many different lines of evidence......”
The flight patterns of birds, entrails of sheep, tossing pieces of bone. It all comes together in “CO2 (is bad) Theory”.
I don’t know.
Mayonnaise was invented in France. (Yuck.)
3-Bean Salad was first thrown together in the U.S. (Double Yuck.)
But so was the first pizza.
Go figure.
There are probably no hard and fast rules about that.
You mean the Cahokian cultural demise which included vast swaths of denuded, untended, abandoned agricultural land wasn’t a problem, but a bunch of colonists were?
Oh yes, those evil whites!
The coutries colonized by Great Britain should thank God
it was that country and not Spain or France or Portugal.
The Cahokian folks may have just run out of logs to burn.
But that was only a century or so before Columbus, so the trees that grew back after the collapse of that culture would have added to the ‘too much CO2’ problem, a little earlier on but more or less compounding the same ‘too many trees, not enough Native Americans’ issue.
My main point is that by "cleared" the author means 'burned to the ground' as in forest and brush fires. Not only was there no fire suppression at that time, but the natives actually cleared land by fire and also used fire to push herds of buffalo off cliffs or into rivers.
No, he wasn’t that powerful, but the gasoline powered chain saws that he used to completely deforest both hemisphers were.
What they’re saying there is that *right along with* the re-forestation and (possible) increased CO2 levels, there may also have been “....a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide.....” All of which would be completely unrelated to the disappearing Native Americans suspected root cause.
...Actually, I don’t know that a few parts per million of CO2 are necessarily such a horrible thing (6 to 10 parts per million, to be precise), but what seems to have gotten everyone so wound up — besides the drop in average temperature of a few degrees — is the suggestion that there were many, many, many people (anywhere between 40 and 100 million of them) whose relatively sudden disappearance may have affected the the climate of the whole planet.
I had to look the good doctor up. I had never heard of him.
“A discussion about the health benefits of drinking water...?”
Huh? I thought it was a discussion about what might have caused the temperature drop of the ‘Little Ice Age.’
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