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.
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