Montezuma'a Revenge

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Tranquillus in Exile

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The “Little Ice Age” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was triggered by the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas by European settlers, new research shows.

Scientists have long wondered what caused the drop in temperatures so severe it sometimes caused the River Thames to freeze over.

Now, new analysis by University College London (UCL) argues that so many people were slaughtered or died of disease that the amount of agricultural land dramatically reduced, in turn sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Known as the “Great Dying”, the upheavals following the first contact with Europeans in 1492 is thought to have slashed the population of 60 million living across the Americas down to five or six million within just 100 years.

Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, the study found that much of the land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, becoming swallowed up by forest and grassland. It estimates that an area of 56 million hectares, roughly the size of modern-day France, would have been rewilded in this way.

. . .

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, said: “It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science...cased-thames-freeze-caused-americas-genocide/
 
An interesting theory. Wish I could have read the whole article; it's behind a pay wall and their registration thing is not working.
 
Okay, got it to work. Seems really implausible to me. Volcanoes have always been given the credit/blame; they didn't really present any evidence to change that. I wonder if the genocide<--->cold period isn't connected the other way instead. Crop failures were reported across Europe during that time; couldn't the same thing have happened in the Americas and contributed to the massive loss of life during those years?
 
LOL. Indians not hunting with forest fires to drive animals to slaughter did not cause the Little Ice Age. The argument is too bizarre to even take seriously. Fewer people=more carbon is just silly.
 
10DayUserName said:
LOL. Indians not hunting with forest fires to drive animals to slaughter did not cause the Little Ice Age. The argument is too bizarre to even take seriously. Fewer people=more carbon is just silly.
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It doesn't make any sense to me either. From the article:

"Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, the study found that much of the land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, becoming swallowed up by forest and grassland.

"It estimates that an area of 56 million hectares, roughly the size of modern-day France, would have been rewilded in this way.

The scale of the change is believed to have drawn an amount of CO² from the atmosphere equivalent to two years’ fossil fuel emissions at the present rate."

If farm land crops are being replaced by "forest and grassland," isn't that just an exchange of one type of plant life for another? Besides, the indigenous ppl did not farm the way we do now, with vast open areas growing a few varieties of food in them. They planted very small plots surrounded by local flora.

"The Maya people of Mesoamerica have much to teach us about farming, experts say. Researchers have found that they preserve an astonishing amount of biodiversity in their forest gardens, in harmony with the surrounding forest. “The active gardens found around Maya forest villagers’ houses shows that it’s the most diverse domestic system in the world,” integrated into the forest ecosystem, writes Anabel Ford, who is head of the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “These forest gardeners are heroes, yet their skill and sophistication have too long been set aside and devalued.” "

Source: https://e360.yale.edu/features/native-knowledge-what-ecologists-are-learning-from-indigenous-people
 
Major assumptions underlying this hypothesis:

Population estimates of indigenous peoples of North America in the 16th century are poorly constrained, and presumably barely more than educated guesses. That introduces a vast amount of uncertainty into the study's conclusion.

I didn't understand how they quantified the distinction between re-forested land and cultivated land as carbon sinks. Corn and squash plants are carbons sinks in the same way fundamentally as shrubs and conifer trees.

A lot of native americans did not engage in large scale agriculture and land clearing. The tribes of the pacific coast region, the arctic and sub-arctic tribes, and the plains Indians for example. Was that considered in the study?

Correlation does not imply causation. And that is one thing journalists tends to neglect to point out. I just skimmed this, but I did not see a discussion of alternative hypotheses and how they were ruled out.

Basically, this is an interesting hypothesis, but undoubtedly it would required much more testing, corroboration, and validation.
 
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Tranquillus in Exile said:
The “Little Ice Age” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was triggered by the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas by European settlers, new research shows.

Scientists have long wondered what caused the drop in temperatures so severe it sometimes caused the River Thames to freeze over.

Now, new analysis by University College London (UCL) argues that so many people were slaughtered or died of disease that the amount of agricultural land dramatically reduced, in turn sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Known as the “Great Dying”, the upheavals following the first contact with Europeans in 1492 is thought to have slashed the population of 60 million living across the Americas down to five or six million within just 100 years.

Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, the study found that much of the land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, becoming swallowed up by forest and grassland. It estimates that an area of 56 million hectares, roughly the size of modern-day France, would have been rewilded in this way.

. . .

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, said: “It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science...cased-thames-freeze-caused-americas-genocide/
Click to expand...

Pure speculation. It is a known fact that sunspot activity, along with four volcanos erupting in the same year were responsible the little ice age. Human activity had nothing to do with it.
 
Tranquillus in Exile said:
The “Little Ice Age” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was triggered by the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas by European settlers, new research shows.

Scientists have long wondered what caused the drop in temperatures so severe it sometimes caused the River Thames to freeze over.

Now, new analysis by University College London (UCL) argues that so many people were slaughtered or died of disease that the amount of agricultural land dramatically reduced, in turn sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Known as the “Great Dying”, the upheavals following the first contact with Europeans in 1492 is thought to have slashed the population of 60 million living across the Americas down to five or six million within just 100 years.

Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, the study found that much of the land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, becoming swallowed up by forest and grassland. It estimates that an area of 56 million hectares, roughly the size of modern-day France, would have been rewilded in this way.

. . .

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, said: “It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science...cased-thames-freeze-caused-americas-genocide/
Click to expand...
A similiar hypothesis was made after the Mongol conquests as the Mongols destroyed so much agricultural land with scorched earth tactics that it actually impacted climate.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
A similiar hypothesis was made after the Mongol conquests as the Mongols destroyed so much agricultural land with scorched earth tactics that it actually impacted climate.
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That seems more plausible than swapping one form of plant life for another, but still a long stretch.
 
ThatOwlWoman said:
That seems more plausible than swapping one form of plant life for another, but still a long stretch.
Click to expand...
That's because the Mongols depopulated a vast swatch of territory and forest grew where they had destroyed farmland and pastures. They completely destroyed the irrigation systems of what are now Iran and Iraq and that alone came close to depopulating the whole region.
 
i thought montezumas revenge was getting massive diarhea after eating all the lower standard food in mexico and drinking their dirty ass water.
 
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