Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age

[L. Coyote]

Plant trees!

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Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335168/title/Columbus_blamed_for_Little_Ice_Age


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 ...............

[FarCenter]

1. Interesting! If we drop the current population to 700 million it would also help cool the planet

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Nature may do that for us if we're not careful

(although probably not to as few as 700,000,000)

[FarCenter]

3. If AIDS had been airborne, it would have done the job

You need a disease that is highly communicable preferably through the air, has a long incubation period during which it can be communicated before the victim becomes symptomatic, and has a very high mortality rate.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. I was thinking more in terms of food shortages, plagues from overcrowding...

...the wars that will result from serious resource depletion, and so on.

Doesn't just have to be one magic pathogen.

[malthaussen]

4. Ingenious

But if true, one might think that the population decrease incident to the Great Plague and subsequent reforestation in Europe would have had a similar effect. Interestingly, there IS a dip in world temperature circa 1350-1400 as well. The secular trend, however, is downward from around 1000 to a low around 1600, and then a very rapid increase.

-- Mal

[shraby]

6. I believe the volcano Krakatoa that erupted in that time period

was responsible for the mini ice age due to the amount of ash put into the atmosphere.

[FarCenter]

7. Krakatoa is relatively recent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_volcanic_eruptions

Santorini and the two Icelandic events are more likely candidates.

[shraby]

10. There was also a mini ice age at that time in history.

[piratefish08]

8. When is the best time to plant a tree?

100 years ago.

When is the second best time?

Today.

[Xithras]

9. Reforestation couldn't possibly be the cause of the Little Ice Age. The calendar doesn't fit.

The climactic changes that led to the Little Ice Age didn't happen overnight. While glacial expansion didn't happen until 1550 or so, the climactic instability can be traced all the way back to the Great Famine of 1315, which is generally regarded as the point when Europe's climate switched from "warm" to "wild". According to radiocarbon dating, none of the Norse settlements in Greenland lasted past the 1450's...an extermination primarily attributed to crop failures caused by climate change.

Columbus famously sailed in 1492. Extensive inland exploration of North America (e.g., exploration that ventured more than a few dozen miles from the coasts, which spread disease among vast parts of the native population) didn't start until DeSoto in 1539 and Coronado in 1540. Prior to that, deaths due to conquest or viruses were primarily limited to areas of Central America that were geographically too small to impact the global climate (Tenochtitlan was wiped out by smallpox in 1520), or were limited to a fairly narrow band along the coasts.

Glacial expansion during the Little Ice Age is estimated to have started around 1550. While it's possible that reforestation may have lengthened or deepened the cold period later on, the dates simply don't work for it to have been the CAUSE of the little ice age.

[Edim]

11. This is silly IMO

Little Ice Age was caused by a prolonged period of lower solar activity. There were several distinguished minimums after the Medieval Warm Period - Wolf, Spörer, Maunder, Dalton minimum. Maunder was the deepest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

[Mimosa]

12. Yay! Thanks for the facts, Edim.

Welcome to D.U. :D