Is it April 1st in London?
The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world.
This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story.
The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.
That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
It’s a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the “Little Ice Age”…
The implications of this are pretty staggering. Firstly, we’re only talking of the regrowth of an area the size of France. What if carbon reduction programs overdo things, then, biffo — ice-age, here we come? It was only a reduction of 7 – 10ppm. And think of the paradox, if we reforest the world, it will become so cold we’re looking at snowball Earth, which will kill all the forests.
If a mere 10ppm loss of CO2 caused a mini ice age, it’s a wonder we’ve survived the 120ppm rise since then. All that extra CO2 seems to only have warmed us back to where we were in the Medieval Warm Period. There is a kind of wormhole here in the maths where negative CO2 units are far more powerful than positive ones.
POST NOTE: Commenter Francis Lacan follows this through on “colonizing Africa”.
These people are truly bonkers: Listen to the co-author talk about the implications.
Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is [a lesson for modern climate policy]. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions.
“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaches and using tree-planting to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” he told BBC News.
What matters here, is it the actual temperature “outcome” or the level of a trace gas?
“And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the Great Dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few ppm. This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”
The lesson is always “more”: more reductions, more money, more rules.
What’s more scary — the amount of the Earth we’d have to reforest to get a perfect climate; the amount of people who have to die; or the lax, one sided training of BBC reporter Johnathon Amos?
What about the 50 million killed in the Black Death?
If human population controls the climate what did Earth do for the first 4.5 billion years?
If the Earth were to freeze or to fry,
Alarmists would always deny,
That the sun played a role,
Which beyond their control,
Would all their false dogma belie.
–Ruairi
h/t to George (Aprils fools day indeed@!) and Bill H. Thank you both.