Here is just one more indication that despite what some would like you to believe, the MWP was not a regional “non event”.
From a University of Arizona press release,
Giant Sequoias Yield Longest Fire History from Tree Rings
California’s western Sierra Nevada had more frequent fires between 800 and 1300 than at any time in the past 3,000 years, according to a new study led by Thomas W. Swetnam, director of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world’s oldest trees shows that California’s western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to a new study led by University of Arizona researchers.
Scientists reconstructed the 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on ancient giant sequoia trees, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.
“It’s the longest tree-ring fire history in the world, and it’s from this amazing place with these amazing trees.” said lead author Thomas W. Swetnam of the UA. “This is an epic collection of tree rings.”
The new research extends Swetnam’s previous tree-ring fire history for giant sequoias another 1,000 years into the past. In addition, he and his colleagues used tree-ring records from other species of trees to reconstruct the region’s past climate.
The scientists found the years from 800 to 1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, had the most frequent fires in the 3,000 years studied. Other research has found that the period from 800 to 1300 was warm and dry.
“What’s not so well known about the Medieval Warm Period is how warm it was in the western U.S.,” Swetnam said. “This is one line of evidence that it was very fiery on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada – and there’s a very strong relationship between drought and fire.”
Droughts are typically both warm and dry, he added.
Knowing how giant sequoia trees responded to a 500-year warm spell in the past is important because scientists predict that climate change will probably subject the trees to such a warm, dry environment again, said Swetnam, a UA professor of dendrochronology and director of UA’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
During the Medieval Warm Period extensive fires burned through parts of the Giant Forest at intervals of about 3 to 10 years, he said. Any individual tree was probably in a fire about every 10 to 15 years.
The team also compared charcoal deposits in boggy meadows within the groves to the tree-ring fire history. The chronology of charcoal deposits closely matches the tree-ring chronology of fire scars.
The health of the giant sequoia forests seems to require those frequent, low-intensity fires, Swetnam said. He added that as the climate warms, carefully reintroducing low-intensity fires at frequencies similar to those of the Medieval Warm Period may be crucial for the survival of those magnificent forests, such as those in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Since 1860, human activity has greatly reduced the extent of fires. He and his colleagues commend the National Park Service for its recent work reintroducing fire into the giant sequoia groves.
The team’s report, “Multi-Millennial Fire History of the Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park, California, USA,” was published in the electronic journal Fire Ecology in February. A complete list of authors and funding sources is at the bottom of this story.
To study tree rings, researchers generally take a pencil-sized core from a tree. The oldest rings are those closest to the center of the tree. However, ancient giant sequoias can have trunks that are 30 feet in diameter – far too big to be sampled using even the longest coring tools, which are only three feet long.
To gather samples from the Giant Forest trees, the researchers were allowed to collect cross-sections of downed logs and standing dead trees, he said. It turned out to be a gargantuan undertaking that required many people and many field seasons.
“We were sampling with the largest chain saws we could find – a chain-saw bar of seven feet,” he said. “We were hauling these slabs of wood two meters on a side as far as two kilometers to the road. We were using wheeled litters – the emergency rescue equipment for people – and put a couple hundred pounds on them.”
To develop a separate chronology for past fires, co-authors R. Scott Anderson and Douglas J. Hallett looked for charcoal in sediment cores taken from meadows within the sequoia groves.
“We can compare the charcoal and tree-ring fire records. It confirms that the charcoal is a good indicator of past fires,” Swetnam said.
Such charcoal-based fire histories can extend much further into the past than most tree-ring-based fire histories, he said. The charcoal history of fire in the giant sequoia groves extends back more than 8,000 years.
Increasingly, researchers all over the world are using charcoal to reconstruct fire histories, Swetnam said. Many scientists are analyzing the global record of charcoal to study relationships between climate, fire and the resulting addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Swetnam’s co-authors are Christopher H. Baisan and Ramzi Touchan of the University of Arizona; Anthony C. Caprio of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in Three Rivers, Calif.; Peter M. Brown of the Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research and Colorado State University in Fort Collins; R. Scott Anderson of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff; and Douglas J. Hallett of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
The National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest and Calaveras Big Trees State Park provided funding.
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
Mike D,
Thanks for your input. I expect your research runs into all sorts of political guff. I myself find people’s misconceptions about New England’s population “before the Pilgrims” a bit tiresome at times.
My family name has been kicking about New England for roughly 380 years, absorbing links to three separate families which arrived on the Mayflower 390 years ago, plus some Abernaki blood from Maine and French Huguenot blood from Quebec, which goes back over 400 years. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to get lectured by some whippersnapper who joined Audubon a couple of months ago, and who feels compelled to inform me what monsters all my ancestors were.
New England was densely settled by “natives” in the south. Dutch captains reported summer campfires “as thick as stars,” as they sailed along the Connecticut coast north of New Amsterdam. Estimates of the population generally range around 50,000 for the southern agricultural area, but I’ve seen higher guesses. Then a pandemic passed through between 1610 and 1620, and as many as 95% of the people died. It must have been a total nightmare. When Squanto returned from England, his home village was simply gone. He headed south, but then heard white people were settling into the place where his home village was, and headed back north and met the Pilgrims. (There is no way the Pilgrims and Puritans could have moved into New England in such huge numbers, if the land hadn’t been pre-cleared by various Algonquin clans, and then cleared of Algonquin by a horrible plague.)
I have an Audubon booklet which describes New England as a pristine wilderness inhabited by a smattering of ecologically enlightened natives, and then along came my ancestors to screw everything up. It’s not even close to the truth, but it serves a certain Agenda.
Even though the pandemic wiped out most of the history and lore of New England, interesting tales were passed along to my ancestors which describe all sorts of war-mongers and peace-makers. (For example, the “king” of the Massachusetts tribe went to meet a delegation of Micmacs, but the Micmacs were fed up with the fellow, and brought along a stick they had purchased from the French. They pointed the stick at the “king,” fire came out of the stick, and the king dropped dead.)
At times I get the feeling modern academics don’t even want to know about New England’s rich past. My son came home from school a few years back and told me New England’s horrible pandemic was caused by “whites” who intentionally sold blankets infected with smallpox to natives. Thus the teacher plucked an ugly war-time act from Ohio in the mid 1700’s and inserted it into history 150 years earlier. Why? I suppose it served some sort of “Agenda.”
In the same way, this entire Global Warming falsification-of-science seems to serve an “Agenda.” It is especially irksome, because the people involved put on airs, and pretend they are more scientific than anyone else.
I think there is something about having an “Agenda” which is destructive to science, truth and honesty. At some point in New England’s history my ancestors decided to drop the English, French and Abernaki Agendas, and decided marrying and making babies was more fun than feuding, and 200 years of war gave way to 200 years of peace.
Now I fear that peace may be ending, due to certain Agendas. I’ve met birdwatchers with binoculars who’d murder for a mockingbird.
So the two graphs shown have nothing much to do with this data – they are about global and European temperatures respectively – and the word “anomaly” is mis-spelled and the graphs carry no formal provenance. That doesn’t help your case.
If the fires were man-made then the climate is almost irrelevant – other than the ground was probably not soaking wet at the time of the fires. Not sure how this gives evidence for a warm period in NA, much though I would like to believe in one.
If the fires were man-made then it would be interesting to know why people were clearing the brush under the trees – it is plain that the trees themselves were not the target, as they survived – although they suffered collateral damage.
“The invasion of Europeans upon the North and South American Continents resulted in genocide”
No it didn’t. Most of the natives were killed accidentally by the introduction of smallpox. Conversely, contact with natives of the Americas caused new STDs to transfer to Europe causing widespread and death, particularly syphilis.
No, tht was a mostly glaciated continent with marginal areas in forest. Today’s Europe has some 10,180,000 square kilometers of territory. At the time of the neanderthals this area was extremely reduced to less than half its presently available area. So , assuming 40% of today’s area and the same population density of 0.015 people per square kilometer as the 19th-20th Century Eskimos, the possible equivalent neanderthal population works out to 60,180 neanderthals. That number falls neatly between the 10,000 to 100,000 neanderthals the author suggested.
First of all, you’ve got the date wrong. You are falling for the old fallacy that the Amerindian population peaked at the moment of Columbian contact with the New World in 1492. Such is not the case. The Mayan empire was among the most populous of the Amerindian civilizations and the entire rest of the world in its time period. Mayan population densities are reported to have reached 1,295 to 1,813 people per square kilometer in the countryside and 4,662 to 6,734 people per square mile in the cities. MesoAmerica is littered with their ruined cities, rainfall collection basins, and canals. However, this great civilization and its population suddenly crumbled and its population reduced some 90% to 95% by 950AD, not 1492AD.
A host of likely factors have been suggested as the causes of the Mayan collapse, and diseases endemic to the New World such as hemorrhagic fever are among them. Suffice it to observe that the Old World Amerindian populations were subject to catastrophic collapses due to disease, famine, natural disasters, political upheaval, warfare, and more in the same way as the Old World cultures. The homogenity of the genetic makeup of the New World populatons, however, made those populatons at greater risk of diseases coming from the Old World and the New World. Ultimately, it proved to be an inevitable catastrophe. It was only a question of when and how and not if it would occur, because contact between the disease pools of the Old World and New World would have to occur in one direction or the other sooner or not so much later.
Secondly, not all of the Amerindian cultues practiced burials. Many of the cultures exposed the dead or cremated the dead. In some circumstances, slaves and other captives were ritually slaughtered and cannibalized. In those cases, you’ll have no reason to discover burials. In the other cases, there is a rich history of burials. The great Mississipian culture of North America left behind a vast landscape of burials in North America, many others have been ignored as farmers plowed the grave sties under their farm fields, and more remain to be discovered. See the maps and illustrations of the Mississipian burial mounds:
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/memorial/68/mndmap1.gif
Hundreds of points are discovered in Illinois alone every year. You also need to note these people were not just hnter-gatherer cultures. They built cities as large as and larger than many European cities in the same age. They accomplished these projects without the major beasts of burden available in the Old World. Their ability to procreate was also hampered by comparison to the Old World, where mothers finished nursing their babies earlier by feeding them from substitute milk sources such as cows and cow milk. The Amerindian mothers lacking such resources did not bear children as often while breast-feeding their children for many more months. Despite such handicaps, they worked metals such as copper, manufactured pottery and jewelry, navigated the rivers in trading networks, and maanged their forests by regularly burning off the understory shrubbery. To see this in person, visit the Cahokia Mounds, the Mesoamerican cities, and the cities of the Incas. The physical evidence of these millions of people are as massive as the stoneworks of their cities and the massive artistry of their mounds and moats. Then remember the New World has more than 42 million square kilometers of territory, and even at the bragain basement population density rates, the Old World would still have had tens of millions of people whenever those populations were not already reduced some 90% and more by catastrophes such as the New World and Old World diseases.
Mike D:
“Denevan’s own analysis and synthesis of the work of Borah, Henry Dobyns, Wilbur R. Jacobs and others leads him to estimate that the population of the New World in 1492 was at least 57,000,000 people. That count exceeds the estimated population of much of contemporaneous Europe.”
Which is of course why they all relocated to tiny reservations instead of ejecting the newcomers who kept making demands. Throw enough bows and hatchets at a problem and the muskets and rifles aren’t going to matter (ask Custer.) If the new world population was higher than europe, then it totally dwarfed the european immigrant population.
I’m more inclined to say that this guy’s analysis and estimate is wrong. That’s the problem with models… you can get them to say anything you want to by adding some unjustified assumptions… things like “disease killed off 80% of the native population” to account for the dissappearances. (note: just an example of an assumption, not actually qupting their article.)
Mike D.: “Come on folks. Leif, tell ‘em. You can’t take an anthropogenically caused phenomenon and detect micro climate change in it. That’s goofy. I’m not saying there was no MWP. All I’m saying is fire scars in a human-mediated cultural landscape are not climate proxies!!!!!!!!!”
And you don’t also discount trees in the rest of the world where humans have been chopping them down, pasture-ising them and generally changing the environment in which the trees grow during the same period?
I remember my history teacher telling me that the Romans in Britain cut down 80% of all the woodland. That’s long before modern methods, but clearly by the end of the Roman period a lot of previously wooded areas were being cultivated.
In Scotland, the forests have been removed and sheep have dramatically changed the environment, creating open spaces where none existed before. Reindeer herding in the Siberian tundra, will also tend to affect the forest, so that e.g. younger saplings are killed allowing mature trees to grow, whereas when grazers are not protected by humans, the balance in the ecology is different as the herds are graze only where they are safer from attack.
D. Patterson:
“The New World area is about 42,549,000 square kilometers. Some anthropologists estimate the pre-civilization paleolithic cultures had a population density of at least around some 0.1 persons per square kilometer. Such a population density would result in a population of at least some 4 million people in the New World living in pre-civilization hunter-gatherer groups. ”
Faulty logic there… just because a culture has a given population density in an area that they exist (which, as you say, is esitmated anyway), doesn’t mean that they existed everywhere that it was possible to exist so that you can extrapolate to total population.
As I understand it, the bulk of the population was nomadic, which meant that they shifted sites. If every location in North America was claimed by a tribe, there’d be nowhere to go to find new game, etc. I doubt the .1 person/km estimate was based on land use over many years, but rather land in use at any given time.
This actual fire evidence certainly confirms what a multitude of researchers have been reporting: that the MWP was global with “unprecedented” temperatures and climate effects. Here is a page I found that lists a bunch of MWP/Little Ice Age studies, and then another page that is just historical proxy temperature charts, —-
http://www.c3headlines.com/climate-history/
http://www.c3headlines.com/temperature-charts-historical-proxies.html
North America was burned for about 9,000 years, from about 8,000 years ago when agriculture began. In some areas the result was grassy plains, but east of the Mississippi the result was the savanna which resembles modern park land (now maintained with mowers) but the trees used to be much bigger. What Europe was like B.C. is less apparent; the modern Appalachian forest shows what a thick tangle can result when the lesser growth is allowed to run amok for a hundred years.
New research finds that prescribed burns release 18 to 25% less carbon than wildfires. Although it is not apparent just how much of this study depends upon simulation rather than measurement.
A thought provoking article, but I share other concerns about the suitability of the infographics at the start – a bit more context or better examples would be useful.
I know I’d fancy spending some time taking those samples.
What’s the source of the bottom “historical” graph?
Tree rings-not good for hockey stick graphs, but good for MWP grphs?
Here in North Carolina, there are a lot of pine trees. Tall skinny southern yellow pine trees. The kind that look a hurricane can easily blow down. There are so many pine trees that we have many towns named after them. Southern Pines, Pinehurst, Whispering Pines, Pine Knoll Shores, Pine Level, Pine Bluff, Pinetops, and Pineville are examples. These particular pine trees need fires for the seeds to germinate. To help grow new trees, controlled burns are sometimes started. Some forests need fires, it is part of their history. The only reason why fires and droughts are used to scare people is because people don’t like disasters and are ignorant. Many years ago when I was at Yellowstone park, it had just had a really big fire. The park service said it was needed and good. This was before the global warming scare was at the level it is now.
So, is Michael Mann of Penn State to climatology same as Jan Hendrik Schön to physics?
Perhaps my annoyance plus enjoyment of all the information in this post-and-comments begins with Anthony’s lead-in: “Here is just one more indication that despite what some would like you to believe, the MWP was not a regional ‘non event’.” Are you goading us or Michael Mann?
From there the tug-of-war begins: 1. fires were human-caused — no they could not have been; 2. humans (homo sapiens sapiens) managed their evironment from the beginning — no they were too “primitive”; 4. Human populations prior to the amazing European-types (and perhaps Chinese-Egyptian can be included here) were limited hunter-gatherers — no, they were quite ingenious and built remarkable civilizations. . European genocide decimated native populations — take another look at the meaning of genocide and see that it mostly does not apply here.
There is much more of this push-pull. I guess we are educating each other, but in a frustrating variety of fields. My thoughts:
1. The seeds of Giant Sequoias need fire to germinate. The trees are almost impervious to fires. Since they want to have little ones, fire must be important o their evolutionary history.
2. Does it matter whether humans or lightning started those fires? Seems to me it must be both.
3. Always, everywhere, in the research I read, humans have used fire to manage their environment. They (we) are no dummies. Visit the beautiful Oregan Gardens in Salem and see the beautiful oak trees that were able to grow when Native Americans managed (for their purposes) the areas and then see the useless scraggly mess when European types came in and had different uses for the land. (Also see Dan C 21:47:37)
4. Warmth — El Ninos — often mean great precipitation for California and fantastic growth of all kinds of delicious (to a fire) “tinder”; cold — La Ninas — tend to bring drought and hungry fires. And “we” have had something like a thousand-year drought before.
Shouldn’t we be paying more attention to these realities than giving any more screen time to the AGW fools — other than to bring about their defeat. Return my tax dollars! And let’s build some mighty desalination plants. One is set to begin construction in San Diego — 150 million gallons/day. Is this enough for very many people? Would it help in a drought of the entire Southwest. Remember the Anasazi. Given the results from research, I very much do not want to live during the downsizing or steep decline of a society/civilization.
1. I never said Cortez was some kind of saviour. I said that’s when horses showed up in NA. Cortez’ invasion was brutal but large numbers of horses escaped into the wild and were absequently domesticated by the native population.
2. 1492 was right at the end of a nasty cold period that was almost 100 years long already (see graph above) and was followed by the truly severe LIA. This would have had major implications regarding food source for managed crops and game alike.
3. Examples of pockets of people having agricultural practices can’t be extrapolated across the whole of two continents. They were not wide spread.
4. The Mayans no doubt had a much higher population density but their civilization collapsed and vanished hundreds of years before Columbus. Further, consider the numbers. They supposedly reached RURAL population densities as high as 1700 per square mile. Really. Let’s think about that. Let’s say they had big families and lived 10 to a household. That’s 170 houses per square mile. That’s 3.8 acres per household. The house, foot paths, roads all have to take some space, let’s call it 3.5 acres per household to generate enough produce to feed themselves (all 10 of them), plus have enough left over to sell to feed the nearby city supposedly at 10 or 20 times the population density. There are certain areas of the new world that could have in theory supported such massive agricultural output, but they were tiny in comparison to the area as a whole.
5. Much of central N America is plains. The main food source there was buffalo which have HUGE grazing ranges and (think about this) the plains had didly squat for vegetables, leafy greens etc. The tribes that lived there not only had to have hunting ranges that were gigantic, they ALSO had to wander off to other areas for non meat food sources in their diet.
6. In much of North America there are natural camp grounds which were used either as stopping points on the long trek between summer and winter locations, or as giant meeting spots where the local tribes would convene councils days long to discuss trade, borders and so on. These areas frequently could accomodate only a few thousand people whose territory was gigantic by comparison.
7. If those who want to propose a native population of 50 million or more want to make their case, I am willing to listen. What happened to the natives of North America due to the influx of Europeans was a terrible thing. But when I read a history of what the population might have been, I stop reading when I see the words “genocide”, “holocaust” and so on. These are terms that denote deliberate and systematic attempts to wipe out another people. They are incendiary by nature, yet the articles supporting large native populations at time of Columbus are ladened with them which ascribes to them a political purpose.
Robert (22:44:44) :
……In the same time the period from 800 until 1300-1400 is know in Europe as the age of the cathedrals, the colonies on Greenland and such. It was a time when Europe started to stand up after the Dark Ages wich came after the fall of the Roman Empire that once covered a large part of Europe, Africa and the middle east. Why is that around 1350 the average lifespan of a European was only 17 years while a century before that it was still 39 years?
——————-
Simple answer: 1350 was the year the Black Death struck Europe, its effects compounded by food shortages due to the sudden decline in temperatures that ended the Medieval Warm Period in Europe.
Why would natives set fires in a mature forest?
For food. If you’re ever lucky enough to be in a really sizable fully mature forest, of redwood or Douglas fir or whatever in the Pacific northwest, check the ground. It’s all dead needles. In season there are mushrooms. That’s about it. No shrubs, no flowers, no grasses, no nothing to attract game. Dense mature forests are surprisingly sterile. Not enough light gets through the forest top to support lower growth.
So you set a fire to burn off the top cover. The trees can handle it; they’ll be back at full greenery in only a few years.
But in the meantime, the cycle starts with berries and grasses, mostly delivered by air mail (birds). Then comes the game. Happy times for aboriginals.
Still, lightening is thought to have caused most forest fires. Friction is rare, but it happens: two dry branches rubbing together as their respective trees move in a stiff wind. I fought just such a fire at Franklin River on Vancouver Island. It may have been a Boy Scout Special, but it was just as tough as any other forest fire.
We, humans, have the tendency of worrying about everything instead of observing our closest reality.
We are living already in a solar minimum with all the interesting issues it involves. Just look at this:
BTW it didn´t happend in the medieval optimum or in the Maunder Minimum, it´s happening now in the “Jose Minimum” :
Chilean Earthquake Moved Entire City 10 Feet West, Shifted Other Parts of South America
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100308132043.htm
This is against the expected “subduction” direction predicted by “models” of the Nazca plate under SA
Caleb (03:19:17) and D. Patterson (03:47:28) have effectively countered Mr. Hoffer’s generalizations. I would just like to recommend a terrific book on the subject:
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Knopf, 2005 ISBN 1-4000-3205-9).
Mr. Mann (no relation to Michael, I assume!) presents some of the latest research into the nature of the American Indian societies (both North, South, and Central) immediately before the onslaught of the Europeans. He argues convincingly that their numbers were far higher than previously thought; that, contrary to the Rousseauian picture of the isolated ‘noble savage’ roaming the virgin forests with bow and arrow, the Indians practiced a great deal of intensive land and forest management, both in the temperate forests of North America, and in the tropical ones of Central America and Amazonia; and that, the genetic homogeneity of the Indians made them almost universally vulnerable to European diseases, particularly those that originated with the livestock that the Europeans brought with them (and to which the Europeans had relative immunity). Mann retells the story of Cortez’s visit to the vast native towns along the Mississippi, accompanied by hundreds of pigs, and a subsequent survey a few years later, which discovered the towns abandoned and the population all dead.
Not to mention, of course, that Cortez encountered not a few bands of hunter-gatherers, but huge urban complexes surrounded by cultivated fields.
Mike D: it might be helpful if you could explain a little more what the California Indians were trying to accomplish by firing the redwood forests. And what about the periods before and after the MWP?
/Mr Lynn
Mike D. (20:38:08) :
Thanks for the links. What readers here might not pick up on is that the arguments in these articles cut in various directions. While Europeans through the introduction of smallpox and other plagues may more convincingly be accused of genocide if the populations of the Americas were large, the practices of the native peoples can also be demonstrated to have NOT been “in harmony with the environment” as understood by sentimental environmentalists. When the first settlers arrived in Virginia, they found (according to their own descriptions) large areas of park-like landscape (not dense forests) almost devoid of human populations. This made it extraordinarily easy for them to farm this land. The land had been cleared by the Native Americans, through burning to create agricultural land. It is argued by historical geographers and ethno-ecologists that this landscape can only be accounted for by human activity: the lack of people was due to the plagues unwittingly unleashed on the Native American population following the arrival of the Europeans, which it is speculated killed 90% of the native population. Contrary to several comments seen here, some agriculture was indeed practiced by Native Americans.
However, I also have to agree with several comments here that it is unlikely that the local tribes would have attempted to fire the huge ancient sequoia groves: the fire scars probably do document natural fire occurrences.
@Mike D
‘All I’m saying is fire scars in a human-mediated cultural landscape are not climate proxies!!!!!!!!!’
Oh-oh-wow. You’re actually mostly saying a lot, but proving naught.
Guess working isn’t proof.
If you know anything about native americans from the southern tip Argentina to the northern tip of Canada, (both which are farther in either direction then Chile and Alaska,) there’s two things that are striking very few city civilization like ancient Egypt or ancient India, and very few farmers up until the white men descended upon their poor ar—.
They most often didn’t go around clearing forests the way that are done today in some countries, that would’ve been suicide. Nor did they run around setting fire to trees for the fun of it, and certainly not just in one, now, national park.
I’m thinking, that if the north american natives had a use for ginormous trees on any scale of worth, that they brought down with the help of fire, it would probably have showed up on the archeological radar by now.
Although I wont concede to any 50 million, that would’ve constituted about 1 person per square kilometer. And a lot of the folks in present day USA were nomadic. But I’d say that around MWP that there were far more than one million from north to south, the numbers wouldn’t add up otherwise. 50 million people would actually leave a pretty little dent in nature, from settlements to the amount of game available.
Some people have commented on it already – my concerns are associated with the lower “Historical” graph above.
There is just NO way the temperature of medieval Europe was 7C warmer than the 20th century. Believe me, my Irish ancestors would have been drinking wine to beat the band, rather than sticking to raw whiskey, if they could have grown grapes. There were enough monastic orders in Ireland to introduce grapes if they could. Believe it or not, wine is made in Ireland and Britain today, but only in certain microclimates along the southern coasts.
I agree there was a MWP, and I would not be surprised if it extended throughout the northern hemisphere, and maybe beyond. No one really disputes the MWP basics and that its ending was accompanied by population decline like the Norse Greenland colony, but also the decline of the English colony in Ireland, wars and famines across Europe.
While I applaud this paper, and would like to learn more, this is just not enough to “disprove” contemporary global warming. A graph of dubious value is not nearly sufficient. You need to turn your tree-ring data into proxy temperature measurements and calibrate with measurements from other sources. Given the interest in climatology, grant money should be available for such an effort.
OT:The Chilean earthquake was forecasted by:
J.C. Ruegga,∗, A. Rudloff b, C. Vignyb, R. Madariagab, J.B. de Chabaliera, J. Camposc,
E. Kauselc, S. Barrientosc, D. Dimitrovd
We would then conclude that the southern part of the Concepción–Constitución gap has accumulated a slip deficit that is large enough to produce a very large earthquake of about Mw= 8.0–8.5.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28560952/Ruegg-et-al-2009-1-1
1DandyTroll (07:34:13) :
If you know anything about native americans from the southern tip Argentina to the northern tip of Canada, (both which are farther in either direction then Chile and Alaska,) there’s two things that are striking very few city civilization like ancient Egypt or ancient India,…
THIS IS NOT TRUE AT ALL!, before the pyramids in Egypt were built, there were pyramids in the city of CARAL, Peru, 5000 years ago, a few kilomters north of Lima, the peruvian capital.
See the links below:
http://www.caralperu.gob.pe/civilizacion/intro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral
And, if you read Walter Fairservis’ “The origins of oriental civilization” you will find there that the first wrinting in China was the Quipu (Kee-poo), knot writing tought by the emperor FU-HI. Quipus have been found at Caral.