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Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age
ScienceNews ^ | 10-22-11 | Devin Powell

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 ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Front Page News; Government
KEYWORDS: 1492; ageofsail; ancientnavigation; carboncretins; catastrophism; change; christophercolumbus; climate; climatechange; co2; columbus; columbusday; cooling; deforestation; energy; forests; globalcooling; globalwarming; globalwarminghoax; godsgravesglyphs; gorebullwarming; greens; junkscience; littleiceage; navigation; psuedoscience; reforestation
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To: SamuraiScot; PJ-Comix; Charles Henrickson
Historian Charles Mann

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! :-)

101 posted on 10/14/2011 5:29:12 PM PDT by COBOL2Java (Obama is the least qualified guy in whatever room he walks into.)
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To: SunkenCiv

The best part of anyone’s collective memory is it didn’t require multiple tax dollars...


102 posted on 10/14/2011 5:39:12 PM PDT by bigheadfred (But alas)
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To: bigheadfred

LOL! 14’? Instead of using a ladder, just chop it down, collect the ears, and saw the stalks into cord wood.


103 posted on 10/14/2011 5:45:19 PM PDT by ApplegateRanch ("Public service" does NOT mean servicing the people, like a bull among heifers.)
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To: bigheadfred

I’d appreciate it if you don’t mention it to my PO.


104 posted on 10/14/2011 6:02:01 PM PDT by Silentgypsy (If this creature is not stopped it could make its way to Novosibirsk!)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

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.


105 posted on 10/14/2011 6:10:32 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: Rebelbase; ApplegateRanch; bigheadfred

:’)


106 posted on 10/14/2011 6:11:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: afraidfortherepublic
Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age

Well of course, he is an evil white man isn't he?

107 posted on 10/14/2011 6:16:02 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
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To: ApplegateRanch

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.


108 posted on 10/14/2011 6:25:30 PM PDT by bigheadfred (But alas)
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To: andy58-in-nh

” 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?


109 posted on 10/14/2011 7:13:41 PM PDT by dsc (Any attempt to move a government to the left is a crime against humanity.)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

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...


110 posted on 10/14/2011 7:28:50 PM PDT by Cacique (quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))
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To: Altura Ct.; Silentgypsy; ApplegateRanch; TheOldLady; Daffynition; afraidfortherepublic
evil white man

That's an occi-moron iff'n I ever did see one.

111 posted on 10/14/2011 8:11:28 PM PDT by bigheadfred (But alas)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

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.


112 posted on 10/14/2011 8:44:06 PM PDT by worst-case scenario (Striving to reach the light)
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To: SunkenCiv

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.


113 posted on 10/14/2011 8:52:27 PM PDT by worst-case scenario (Striving to reach the light)
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To: Godzilla

Godzilla should win the post of the week trophy for that one.


114 posted on 10/14/2011 10:18:48 PM PDT by rdl6989 (January 20, 2013 The end of an error.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Not a problem. I hope you feel better soon. I love your pings.


115 posted on 10/15/2011 6:39:23 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
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To: dsc
Did I seem to be in disagreement with that?

No. I was just being unnecessarily contentious.

116 posted on 10/15/2011 10:24:58 AM PDT by andy58-in-nh (America does not need to be organized: it needs to be liberated.)
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To: andy58-in-nh

“No. I was just being unnecessarily contentious.”

It’s only fair. I deserve it.


117 posted on 10/16/2011 7:46:17 PM PDT by dsc (Any attempt to move a government to the left is a crime against humanity.)
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To: dsc
Actually, if you haven't already read it, I would highly recommend The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest.

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.

118 posted on 10/17/2011 5:44:44 AM PDT by andy58-in-nh (America does not need to be organized: it needs to be liberated.)
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To: andy58-in-nh

“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.


119 posted on 10/17/2011 12:15:08 PM PDT by dsc (Any attempt to move a government to the left is a crime against humanity.)
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