Ok that headline is not exactly what was said, but it is the flavor of the absurdity. The quote itself from the Carnegie Institution, distributed via AAAS’s Eurekalert news service, is actually even more absurd.
Here’s the quote:
Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline.
Given what happened on Eurekalert yesterday, I wonder about the veracity of this claim.
When Genghis Khan was alive (1162–1227), in this Wiki article it says he killed 40 million:
It has been estimated that his campaigns killed as many as 40 million people based on census data of the times.
Seems like a negative carbon footprint to me.
Here’s the graph of world population from the U.N. A true hockey stick:
It seems pretty much of a stretch to me to equate Genghis Khan’s 40 million low carbon footprint peasant deaths to todays automobile numbers:
| year | cars produced
in the world |
| 2009 (projection) | 51,971,328 |
| 2008 | 52,940,559 |
| 2007 | 54,920,317 |
| 2006 | 49,886,549 |
| 2005 | 46,862,978 |
| 2004 | 44,554,268 |
| 2003 | 41,968,666 |
| 2002 | 41,358,394 |
| 2001 | 39,825,888 |
| 2000 | 41,215,653 |
| 1999 | 39,759,847 |
That website goes on to say:
It is estimated that over 600,000,000 passenger cars travel the streets and roads of the world today.
600 million cars globally today -vs- 40 million people killed by Genghis Khan.
There’ been a lot of lecturing to us about the evils of the automobile. This website http://carsandpeople.sdsu.edu/ from San Diego State University Dr. Victor M. Ponce goes so far to calculate car to human equivalency:
In summary, in terms of energy consumption, one (1) car is equivalent to approximately 18 persons.
So…if one car = 18 people, then Genghis Khan killing 40 million people….
40 million Genghis Khan people divided by Ponce’s 18 people/car figure = 2,222,222 Genghis Khan equivalency cars.
600,000,000 cars globally today / 2,222,222 Genghis Khan equivalency cars = a difference factor of 270 by cars gasoline demand alone.
That’s hardly close to the equivalency of saying Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. And, we haven’t figured in trucks and motorcycles, and farm equipment, and a whole bunch of other gasoline consuming vehicles. Now maybe I’ve missed something in the reasoning behind the claim, but it sure seems way off to me. Beside the magnitude issue, there’s one of sign. It also doesn’t square with the fact that 40 million people removed by Genghis Kahn is a reduction in (negative) carbon footprint while 600 million automobiles are an increase (positive) carbon footprint.
Eh, but close enough for climate science publication news releases in Eurekalert. 😉
And here is the Eurekalert web source for this Carnegie Institution Press release, reprinted in full below. The author put her email address and tel# in that press release, so apparently she wants to be contacted. Who am I to quibble?
Addendum: Perhaps she is not looking at people so much, but only at forests. But how would you know accurately how much forest had been burned/impacted then to include in a model today? Historical records are mostly anecdotal. Even so I still think it’s a bit more sensational than need be.
Here’s the Black Death Blip:
===========================================================
Contact: Julia Pongratz
pongratz@carnegie.stanford.edu
650-919-4358
War, plague no match for deforestation in driving CO2 buildup
Stanford, CA— Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget. Dwarfing both of these events, however, has been the historical trend towards increasing deforestation, which over centuries has released vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as crop and pasture lands expanded to feed growing human populations. Even Genghis Kahn couldn’t stop it for long.
“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” says Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, lead author of a new study on the impact of historical events on global climate published in the January 20, 2011, online issue of The Holocene. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.”
Clearing forests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the trees and other vegetation are burned or when they decay. The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from deforestation is recognizable in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica before the fossil-fuel era.
But human history has had its ups and downs. During high-mortality events, such as wars and plagues, large areas of croplands and pastures have been abandoned and forests have re-grown, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Pongratz decided to see how much effect these events could have had on the overall trend of rising carbon dioxide levels. Working with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and with global ecologist Ken Caldeira at Carnegie, she compiled a detailed reconstruction of global land cover over the time period from 800 AD to present and used a global climate-carbon cycle model to track the impact of land use changes on global climate. Pongratz was particularly interested in four major events in which large regions were depopulated: the Mongol invasions in Asia (1200-1380), the Black Death in Europe (1347-1400), the conquest of the Americas (1519-1700), and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty in China (1600-1650).
“We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn’t enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil,” says Pongratz. “But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion and the conquest of the Americas there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.”
The global impact of forest re-growth in even the long-lasting events was diminished by the continued clearing of forests elsewhere in the world. But in the case of the Mongol invasions, which had the biggest impact of the four events studied, re-growth on depopulated lands stockpiled nearly 700 million tons of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. This is equivalent to the world’s total annual demand for gasoline today.
Pongratz points out the relevance of the study to current climate issues. “Today about a quarter of the net primary production on the Earth’s land surface is used by humans in some way, mostly through agriculture,” she says. “So there is a large potential for our land-use choices to alter the global carbon cycle. In the past we have had a substantial impact on global climate and the carbon cycle, but it was all unintentional. Based on the knowledge we have gained from the past, we are now in a position to make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle. We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained.”
The Carnegie Institution for Science (carnegiescience.edu) is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.
The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.
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This certainly fits well with the 10:10 crowd, “Genghis Khan, champion of environmentalism”. i.e. Kill people = Save the planet
Next thing you know, they will be blaming the LIA on him…………………..
oh wait, nevermind, first they would have to admit that there was a LIA
This happy [snip] is what passes for political argument today. You’re worse than Genghis! Well, you’re worse than Adolf!
[snip]
These people have absolutley been sucking on too many automobile exhaust pipes. Maybe there’s a point, just before the unconscious state, at which they can still do math but have no grasp of the subject being measured.
Gentlemen, I wouldn’t touch her with yours and make of that, which you will. The woman is stupid beyond redemption..
Genghis Khan: an early proponent of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
Sez the Khan: “Of course it was voluntary. Those SOBs were just asking for it.”
“The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget. ”
In other words, the Plague (which killed what, a third of the population?) and the deaths of 10 of millions were positive events. It takes a lot education to say something that stupid.
Or put the cart before the horse. Agriculture expanded when the warmer weather permitted it, and contracted when it didn’t. Or did it become warm enough in Greenland to grow crops only because the Vikings colonized it and grew crops? And how exactly did their carbon footprint cause the LIA, which saw them abandon the colony?
“We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained”
These findings were brought to you courtesy of an activist, not a scientist, see the previous posting on facts losing their truth.
As I recall, the Black Death came in cycles – not just one manifestation. But, that aside, IIRC, it also killed approximately the same numbers as the Khan family in a shorter time period. Which would have caused a larger blip in the carbon cycle than the same amount of decaying “matter” spread over a 4X longer time period.
Dunno who she is, but I don’t think much of her thought process.
Whom the gods want to destroy they first make mad. I think it’s a chronic problem in the carbon footprint calculating business.
Talk about dubious sources, the 40 million deaths is most likely cited from good old Wikipedia that uses a book called “Empire of Debt” by Bill Bonner, basically a mass newsletter marketer with no academic cred that I can find, and Addison Wiggin, his business partner, who has BA in English and French, and a MA in Philosophy. They in turn cite “1300 Chinese Census” which shows a decrease of 40 million from the last “estimate” after the completed invasion. Of course it is kind of hard to have a thorough census A. in 1300 B. After Mongul hoardes have displaced a good portion of your population and totally disrupted your government C. in a territory as large as China.
I find it highly unlikely that a force of probably maximum of 250,000 foot soldiers (and small fraction of horsemen) with bows and spears could kill twice as many people as well over 5 million 20th Century Germans with bombers, panzers, artillery and MGs did in the USSR. Or nearly 4 million genocidal IJA soldiers did in a much more heavily populated China from 37-45.
Seems their history research is as light and dubious as their scientific research.
Are the authors of this paper saying that the pre-industrial levels of CO2 were too high? If so, what level are they saying is acceptable? And even if we accept that the pre-industrial level remained at 280 ppmv, there is clear evidence of both warm and cool periods over the past 2,000 years, so there must have been other more powerful influences on climate than CO2.
Technically, it seems to me like farming has a larger negative impact on CO2 than a forest would.
Sure, it takes a lot of CO2 to grow a forest… but once the trees reach a certain size, they really don’t get any bigger – and at that point, they balance out with the CO2 released by termites and decay of old wood and forest debris.
If we really needed to reduce CO2, I’ve always thought the best approach would be to chop down trees, build buildings out of wood, then plant new trees, to repeat the cycle. I think in general, using lots of paper products (and specifically NOT recycling)… or farming a lot would also be good.
Somehow, I have a bad feeling that we (taxpayers) paid for this.
Descartes: “I think, therefore, I am”
Universe: “So?”
The question is: Who is nowadays “Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes” ….my suspicion is they are insinuating that WE (the skeptics) are! 🙂
Genghis also decreed religious freedom and supported domestic and international trade. He exempted the poor and the clergy from taxation.[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire#Genghis_Khan
he was our first greenpeace member
Excuse me, but I doubt there was any “Census” taken at that time in history. Furthermore, Genghis typically gave his targets the option of paying tribute, etc. or being part of the roadkill which was common in those days. When the Big G decided to eliminate opposition they killed everything within the circle they formed, even insects. Total obliteration.
In any case, he was not the only wannabe world conqueror to make a name for himself. This kind of BS is pure fantasy. Methinks far too many “climate scientists” have been watching old “Conan the Barbarian” type movies.
But he eliminated 40m people. How long did that set word population back? he eliminated 1/7th of the worlds population. If there was only some kind of calculus to determine the difference in area under the curve…
This sort of goofy “research” (speculation) does the climate alarmist agenda no good at all. Makes them a laughingstock.
Seems a bit of a chance she was the Director/Producer of Al Gores movie.
My memory is not that good on movies. google the name
The article compares more than a century of forest re-growth to a single year of gasoline use. The sign is not an issue–just the magnitude of the total effect. The article is not ridiculous.
Of course, such studies require proxies, and the accuracy of them is always in doubt.
And anything to do with carbon dioxide and human causation is full of so much emotion and desire to prove something as to cast great doubt upon ANYthing.
REPLY: If the article said nothing about war and human disease, then I’d have only to quibble with the forest issue. Yes proxies, anecdotal history. It’s all estimates. And what’s the point of worrying about Genghis Kahn today? -A
typo: is as it always has been
REPLY:Helpful to know where? Body, a comment from you, another commenter?
Ah Genghis Kahn, now there’s a man who was smart enough to bring cavalry to a knife fight.
/sorry.
“The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget. ”
This is a completely ridiculous comment and lack even a remote understanding of the kind of devastation the Black Death inflicted on Europe. The Black death of the 1340’s and its return in the decades following killed 50% of the population of Europe. Not only did the Black Death ravage Europe, but everwhere between Europe and China. The Black death started in China and moved its way gradually westward ravaging everywhere it went.
If we look at Europe alone a 50% population decline would be on the order of 40 to 100 million deaths alone. Furthermore, these deaths were permanent! The population of Europe did not recover for centuries after the Black Death. Before the Black Death came along Europe had been experience higher population growth and a nice warm climate that helped to support said population growth. With the arrival of the Black Death vast tracks of land were abandoned by their dead owers and left to become reforested.
The impact of the Black Death was brutal, devastating and had a lasting impact on European society, to suggest otherwise is wilful ignorance.
Climatological bullshit factor of 270. According to my observations, its average value is around 10. Good work.