European colonizers' mass killing of Native Americans caused change in climate: study

The Hill ^ | February 1, 2019 | Aris Folley

[EdnaMode]

European colonizers who arrived in the Americas caused death and disease to the point that it sparked what some have called the first major human-induced change in the Earth’s climate, a new study has found.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University College London (UCL), found that the arrival of European settlers killed nearly 56 million indigenous people over the course of roughly 100 years, causing large areas of farmland to go abandoned and reforested.

The study said the new swath of vegetated land, which CNN reported was roughly the size of France at the time, caused a massive decrease in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

Levels of carbon in the atmosphere had changed so much that it caused the planet to experience a global chill in 1610 that is now known as the Little Ice Age, researchers said.

"CO2 and climate had been relatively stable until this point," UCL geography professor Mark Maslin, one of the co-authors behind the study, told CNN on Friday. "So, this is the first major change we see in the Earth's greenhouse gases."

Maslin told CNN that he and the team of researchers conducted the study by examining archaeological evidence and historical data and analyzing Antarctic ice, which can trap atmospheric gas and reportedly reveal the quantity of carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere long ago. He said a combination of all of the above showed researchers how the reforestation that was brought on by the mass slaughter of indigenous people in the Americas led to the global chill.

"The ice cores showed that there was a larger dip in CO2 [than usual] in 1610, which was caused by the land and not the oceans," Alexander Koch, the lead author of the study, told CNN.

"For once, we've been able to balance all the boxes and realize that the only way the Little Ice Age was so intense is ... because of the genocide of millions of people," Maslin added.

[Dennis M.]

Should have known this was coming.

[MrEdd]

We have some of these nutburgers on Free Republic too.

Transmission of diseases back when diseases weren’t understood is an evil act, but only for those of European descent. Now, aboriginal people who caught diseases and spread them around were not engaging in an evil act.

And, if the diseases in question originated in Asia or Africa, well. .. its still those evil Europeans ganocidal plot.

[FlingWingFlyer]

Imagine the dent the Indigens made in the climate when they crossed the “Bering Land Bridge” into North AMERICA.

[Nifster]

Already posted earlier in the day

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

So what happened to the climate when the Asians sent the plague to Europe which killed three-quarters of the Europeans. Well?

[Concentrate]

Please pass the fentanyl!

[alpo]

56 million rotting dead injuns had to put back some CO2 and methane. Also, lightning caused fires would have burned until the rainy season because no one could put them out.
No mention of volcanic activity which would put more gas in the air than all of man’s activity.
And then there is that decomposing Norwegian Blue Parrot... (/sarc)

[Karl Spooner]

Another ironclad case where everything would be much better if the whites were simply exterminated.

[budj]

[xkaydet65]

You would be suprised (//sarc) to learn that many “educated” progs actually believe Europeans deliberately killed 58 million Indians. Of course Europeans certainly had technology where 100,000+ Europeans could kill 58 million in 100 yesrs (//sarc). Disease killed them. Not just small pox but measles, chicken pox, influenza. And while the Progs believe this was deliberate bio warfare, that is ridiculous. Tragic?? Yes, but so was the Black Death which came to Sicily from Asia. Were Asians responsible for this tragedy?

[TigersEye]

Ah, yes, too many forests. That’s what did it.

Whatever happened to the old liberal saw “before the white man cut all the trees down a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi river without ever touching the ground?”

Liberals are such lying scum they can’t keep track of their lies.

[robowombat]

Sensationalism aside, I think this is based on some extrapolation of the numbers of native peoples that succumbed to imported bacterial and viral infections. Some demographers put the loss of natives living in central Mexico during this period to be in the 75% range.

[crusty old prospector]

Look at all of the slaughters in the Old Testament.

[blueplum]

so the author is saying 1) reforestation caused global warming and 2) less people caused global warming (not to mention grossly overestimating the numbers of mesoamericans present at the time - current weather should give a clue on that).

I wonder how the author explains why, now that there are millions more trees in America than original settlers found, global warming isn’t more extreme from all that reforestation? And I wonder what global warming effect Mesoamerican habits of ritual human sacrifice each month to make the sun come up had? Or all the wars in the mid and far-east before the Dark Ages? But blame America.

Gotta love goofball authors. They remind us we’re the sane ones.

[the_daug]

Did the article offer archaeological so many people were killed. Epidemics don’t count.

[Freedom56v2]

Before the rise of Political Correctness, scientific thinking supported mini ice ages being caused by solar minimums... https://www.historicalclimatology.com/blog/what-was-the-maunder-minimum-new-perspectives-on-an-old-question The most famous grand solar minimum of all is undoubtedly the Maunder Minimum, which endured from approximately 1645 until 1720. It was named after Edward Maunder, a nineteenth-century astronomer who painstakingly reconstructed European sunspot observations. The Maunder Minimum has become synonymous with the Little Ice Age, a period of climatic cooling that, according to some definitions, endured from around 1300 to 1850, but reached its chilliest point in the seventeenth century. ​During the Maunder Minimum, temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere declined, relative to twentieth-century averages, by about one degree Celsius. That may not sound like much – especially in a year that is, globally, still more than one degree Celsius hotter than those same averages – but consider: seventeenth-century cooling was sufficient to contribute to a global crisis that destabilized one society after another. As growing seasons shortened, food shortages spread, economies unraveled, and rebellions and revolutions were quick to follow. Cooling was not always the primary cause for contemporary disasters, but it often played an important role in exacerbating them.

[Campion]

The Little Ice Age began in the 13th Century, a good 200 years before Columbus set sail.

[4Liberty]

The Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky School of Weather forecasting

[Paul R.]

Never mind that many of the colonists were themselves... farmers.

[TigersEye]

Exactly! This is one of the most ridiculous theories yet. And that’s saying something.