world climate
Climate change through genocide – the extermination of the Indians cooled the world
Francesco Pizarro destroyed the Inca Empire.
© Sir John Everett Millais/Commons
From the 16th to the 19th century the earth got cold. London scientists report that the Little Ice Age is linked to CO2 levels in the air. It sunk then, and that has to do with the genocide of Native Americans.
From the early 16th century through the 19th century, Earth was unusually cool. This time is also called the Little Ice Age. So far, natural causes have been assumed for both the Little Ice Age and the warm-weather period of the 12th century. Now it looks like this cooling is at least partly man-made.
Researchers from University College London claim the variation is related to the level of CO2 in the air. Just as increasing CO2 levels heat the atmosphere today, back then a decrease in carbon dioxide would have led to cooling.
Today, the CO2 is increasing because we burn fossil fuels on a large scale, back then the bound biomass increased massively. The nitrogen in the air migrated into plants.
And they came up with a terrible explanation for the reduction in CO2 in the atmosphere. Lichtenberg came up with the aphorism: “The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.” In fact, the Europeans wiped out most of the Native Americans within a short period of time. Through direct violence, through imported diseases, and because the Indians could not tolerate the slave labor that the new masters forced them to do,
A culture was destroyed
A team of scientists now says that European colonization caused a huge chunk of the agricultural land used by Native American cultures to simply disappear and be covered by fast-growing trees. “The great extinction of the Americas’ indigenous peoples resulted in the abandonment of so much land that the resulting uptake of terrestrial carbon has had a tangible impact on the atmosphere and global surface temperatures,” writes Alexander Koch in the study, published in Quaternary Science Reviews ” was published.
In order to arrive at this thesis, the scientists first tried to determine population figures. According to this, at the end of the 15th century, about 10 percent of the world population at that time lived in all of America, that is 60 million people. A hundred years later, five to six million remained. Co-author Professor Mark Maslin says the actual cooling was about twice as great as if caused by natural processes alone. “To get cooling on that scale, you need that genocidal-induced increase in CO2.”
Afforestation is not a solution
In addition to the memory of the genocide, the study also harbors another less than hopeful implication. If you convert the increase in biomass at that time, for which the area of France was converted into jungle, into today’s combustion rates of fossil fuels, it corresponds to the global CO emissions of little more than two years.
This means that reforestation projects are important for the local climate. They will not be able to stop climate change caused by CO2 emissions. So much space is not available to produce biomass on this scale.
Sources: Quaternary Science Reviews
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