Posted on 10/13/2011 2:17:57 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate
MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.
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, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.
“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” says Nevle, who described the consequences of this change October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.
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. This depletion of a key greenhouse gas, in turn, may have kicked off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
For the record, Charles C. Mann is not an historian. He's a B.A. who writes stuff, generally at great length. A heavy-breathing, politically correct scribe who takes a lot of liberties with the truth, in my observation.
Hey, PJ! Charles! Could be NadinBrezinski's brother! :-)
The best part of anyone’s collective memory is it didn’t require multiple tax dollars...
LOL! 14’? Instead of using a ladder, just chop it down, collect the ears, and saw the stalks into cord wood.
I’d appreciate it if you don’t mention it to my PO.
Or, maybe I’m just a nimrod. Sorry, I missed your ping. Probably slept through it, I’ve been fighting off a cold or something lately, and have been falling asleep early and often.
:’)
Well of course, he is an evil white man isn't he?
Ah yeah. NO. My dad is Mr. Agriculture. (professionally). Driving down the road and he says “Name that plant.” “NO, GD, IN THE LATIN!!!”. ;-)
We (he) does. Remember that squirrel stew last month? Every year there seems to be a different challenge with his garden. Don’t know that he could claim to be a “prize-winning” gardener since the only competition he ever enters in is against Mother Nature. But judging by the amount of things-quantity-PURE VOLUME, of everything I have to preserve, he is winning.
” I was only making a point about the insanity of assuming that human beings can have any substantial control over CO2 amounts in the atmosphere, 97% of which is naturally-occurring (e.g. - evaporative water vapor) and which only constitutes 0.38% of the Earth’s atmosphere to begin with.”
Did I seem to be in disagreement with that?
How about it being caused by the Sun missing it’s sunspot cycle? Nah, we couldn’t use it as an excuse to control our lives...
That's an occi-moron iff'n I ever did see one.
suppose it could therefore be argued that climate change caused by the entrapment of greenhouse gases is actually simply restoring the order to what the Earth should has always been - a growing band of uninhabitable land alone the equator, with increasingly violent storms in the rest of the world.
That is, if one were going to posit the existence of man-affected climate change.
But since that can never be done, it is far smarter to simply say that this man’s work is pure bunkum. Man’s behavior cannot affect the Earth’s atmosphere. Not only that, but there is no evidence that 1.) there was a huge extermination of aboriginal peoples as a result of Europe’s colonization of the Americas; 2.) that the peoples were responsible for the clearing of millions of acres of the North and South American continents; 3.) that forests such as the Amazonian are actually only 400 years old or so.
He better have some amazing evidence to back up all that conjecture.
You don’t remember a blizzard before you were in your late teens or 20s?
Still, that one might have been the same one that shut down my East Coast university in 1978, for the first time since its founding. I got up that morning in my off-campus apartment and walked to class, figuring the University never closed. A guy X-country skied past me at chest level as I walked the sidewalk cut to the class building. It wasn’t until I realized that it had been *chained shut* that I realized that the Uni had, indeed actually been shut down for the first time in its almost 200-year history.
Godzilla should win the post of the week trophy for that one.
Not a problem. I hope you feel better soon. I love your pings.
No. I was just being unnecessarily contentious.
“No. I was just being unnecessarily contentious.”
It’s only fair. I deserve it.
The author is widely considered to be the foremost historian of Stalinist communism, the horror and cruelty of which he describes unsparingly. Conquest concludes that the death toll from the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture was at least 5 million in the Ukraine and as many as 14 million throughout the Soviet Union.
“The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest.”
Okay, I’ve put it on my list. (My reading list is starting to resemble a campaign promise more than anything else.) In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find the things I read earlier.
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