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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[snip over the top ]
You might get closer by projecting the lost percentage of population forward to today (it looks like 40M was about 10% then), and assuming that no other factor would have limited the population to its current level had the 40M survived. 10% of the current world population is about 670M people, which is about 37M car equivalents, off ‘only’ by factor of 16. I guess you could factor in a drop in agricultural and electrical needs too. That might get the error down to a factor of 10.
As others have said, the ability of Genghis Khan to kill off 40M people, 10% of the world population at the time, also seem like a gross overestimate.
The greatest deforestation that as happened in recent past is the last glacier period. The ice killed 70-100 trillion trees in the northern hemisphere. No CO2 was taken up. No O2 was produced.
The loss of 25 million people from the Black Death during the LIA can hardly be counted as a “blip”.
The number of trees is a rough estimate.
German/US Climate Modeler (especially land use): http://dge.stanford.edu/DGE/jpongratz/cv_jpongratz_v2010-11-21.pdf
Ahhh – models.
Ghengis Khan’s legions burned cow and horse dung to heat their yurts. I hope this was taken into account in their calculations….
“… to suggest otherwise is wilful ignorance .” Pretty much describes the whole paper , IMHO .
You imply the existence of temporary death, which means that I must insist you give me details on this zombie apocalypse you’ve discovered.
a blip
well here in good old blighty we still have villages that were abandoned during the Black Deaths – so that would be a ‘blip’ of just over 600 years then.
The Black Deaths also caused a massive social upheaval; breaking down the remnants of the feudal system and empowering the workers for possibly the 1st time; Labour (unskilled; semi-skilled and skilled) was in short supply for the first time.
Farming in the UK (and Europe) didn’t recover for decades; nor did the population; nor did the standard of living.
Black Deaths – they came in waves..
But watch out : the warming/change/challenge/??? meme is dead; look at the new meme : human FARMING adversely (?) affected the climate long before industrialization; therefore human CO2 must be responsible for all 33 deg C of unnatural CO2 caused warming that the earth suffers from; so it will not be sufficient just to stop industry; these buffoons are ready to move to the next stupid attempt….
warm is good – cold is bad
Jason,
But he did it whilst riding horses, surely a more eco friendly means of transport than a Prius. It’s just that he had other issues:-)
“”””” “We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained” “””””
But perish the thought that we should ever make use of that knowledge.
Now old Genghis was a bit of a loser. It wasn’t untill Harry Truman demonstrated that he had a way to knock them down even faster than Genghis could set them up; that we really started to put our knowledge to good use.
I suspect that virtually all of the seven billion people now infesting this planet, are actually living a damn side better than Ghenghis and his fellow horse jockeys did, back in those days; and much of that improvement in man’s lot, can be laid at the foot of the automobile.
A famous Physicist who now seems to be quite unknown, once railed against NASA’s space program and its excesses. He commented that the rocket that launched men to the moon was just a worthless pile of scrap metal; and a total waste of valuable resources to build such a monstrosity. This was back in the days when Physicists of the unmentionable’s ilk, were trying to rip off the funds to build something they called the “Superconducting Super Collider”. Now how does that grab you for a really practical use for valuable resources. So who cares if there really is a Higgs Bozo ?
So the “Moon Project” that Kennedy launched was supposed to take ten years, and cost 40 billion dollars. Seems to me that it only took about 8 years, and came in several billions of dollars under budget.
And analysts have calculated, that the USA saved a lot more than that $40B in the next ten years; just by the reduced crop losses in the South Eastern United States; that resulted from improvements in longer range (1 week) weather forecasts; that resulted from the simple fact that the US program was a manned program, and it demanded around the clock, around the world global communications, and weather monitoring; because that was required to continuously monitor the well being of those astronauts. So NASA put up the necessary weather and communications satellites to close that loop.
As for the money they did spend on that pile of scrap metal. That funded the development of all manner of technologies; exotic materials, Electronics; you name it; even how to eat or go pee out in space, Neil Armstrong and his buddies simply went along on a free ride just for the hell of it.
Well yes we could have done it differently and spent the money to do the research in other ways. A nuclear war with the Russians would have done quite nicely to fund that sort of advanced technology research. So why did we waste it giving a joyride to a few hot rod jet pilots.
Even worse, Genghis Khan and the horde no doubt plundered the treasuries of all their carbon credits, tipping the world into a catastrophic death spiral that now, after this hottest year, is only becoming absolutely undeniable.
It has been said that court eunuch Gymgiss Khansen saw this future written in the ox entrails and tried to warn him. But no. And the rest is history.
From the ‘can you top that’ department: There has been strong evidence presented that the Toba Caldera Eruption +/- 70,000 years ago had reduced the world population down to as low as 1000. It is also useful to remember that this was not global warming, but a cold climate event that nearly wiped out the human race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanley_ambrose.php
This is part of the warmists response to the rationalists who point out that the past included natural variations. They’re trying to co-opt the natural variation and take it out of the conversation. It’s ALL man’s fault All the time going back to the very beginning. It seems like they are trying to say that the world and the world’s climate was perfet until man came on the scene and started building fires for warmth.
The central assumption is that CO2 is responsible for warming. Also remember that water is not classified as a greenhouse gas by the IPCC – only 100% as a “feedback” on CO2. Also, it isn’t clear that they have compensated for CO2 exchange with the oceans based on temperature (where the existence or not of things like the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the LIA, etc can make a large difference in modeling). The US has experienced tremendous reforestation in the past century or so, while the population has grown tremendously as well, so another assumption in this study (that reforestation is inversely proportional to population change) is falsified. Etc.
The 3 Kingdoms period in chinese history was probably bloodier then anything Genghis Khan did. Chinese historians usually start from AD184 which was the beginning of the end for the Han Dynasty.
From Wikipedia
“The Three Kingdoms period was one of the bloodiest in Chinese history. A population census during the late Eastern Han Dynasty reported a population of approximately 50 million, while a population census during the early Western Jin Dynasty (after Jin re-unified China) reported a population of approximately 16 million.[2] However, the Jin dynasty’s census was far less complete than the Han census, so these figures are in question.”
I have read the book written in about 1200AD on this period of Chinese history and it was pretty bloody. Allowing for the Jin census in 280AD missed say 5 million people – in this hundred year period there was a net loss of 30 million.
Could you imagine the world and Chinese population could have been? I think CO2 would be the least of our problems.
Actually there’s been a lot of reforestation in the past hundred years, although in North America a lot of the early 1900s timber was trees which were due to the preceding reforestation. Americans and Europeans were both burning a lot of land for various reasons. The Khan’s war was just another war…and the fact that his horses didn’t starve means they were able to remain on enough green land.
Europeans used to know they were getting close to the New World due to all the smoke blowing over the Atlantic, because the natives and colonists were burning what was in their way.
I think it is so noble of these population activists to start the ball rolling over population control by hanging themselves in a public arena. This will set a fine example to the rest of us prolific breeders by them putting their money where there mouth is (was)!
Being out by a factor of 270 is pretty close for the Climate Change “industry”. They’re getting better…
You’ve heard about Genghis Khan’s last words from his deathbed, said to his trusty 2IC when the 2IC asked if he he would do anything different if he had the chance for a do over?
“yeah, next time no more Mr Nice Guy”
Anthony, I think you have it backwards. The last biography I read of Ghengis Khan said that he has gotten a bad rap as a barbarian intent on destruction mainly because he wasn’t a western european therefore… The book said that he actually was a very good ruler, pushing good government administration, education, and science in the course of building the biggest empire perhaps ever known, then or after. He and his sons set up there capitol in Beijing and spread civilization. His administration would have encouraged agriculture. This would have resulted in a lot of deforestation as farming and ranching spread. Thus, he would have had a “negative” impact on climate. As if we can classify all changes as negative.
In any case if they are claiming that Ghengis had as big a “negative” impact on the environment as we have with all our CO2, it is noticable that the world didn’t come to an end, all species didn’t die out, and people weren’t driven near to extinction. Doesn’t this imply that CAGW will also not be “Catastropic”. Hence the need for panic driven actions is eliminated.
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Don’t kid yourselves . . . the bad guys are only buying time . . . their robots are not perfected yet . . . . Slaves were “a version” of robotics. . . .
How does that one go . . . What is a mindless slave? . . . . “Blindly” Obedient!
thecomputerguy says:
January 20, 2011 at 12:08 pm
“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.”
Damn right, Computerguy. CO2 fixation by crops such as corn and soybean is way faster than trees, but this tends to get back into the atmosphere again when we feed these to pigs and chickens (and then eat the pigs and chickens….).
However, the US is actually in a net re-forestation phase for most of the past 50-100 years as a massive amount of re-forestation has taken place in both New England and the Pacific coast regions. I really need to find the paper that calculates this, but globally, we aren’t doing all that badly either – with a lot of temperate forests growing and rate of tropical forest loss declining. I would like to see how oil palm plantations are accounted for in this as well as a lot of the “old-growth” forest cut down for these plantations were probably CO2-neutral, whereas a decent oil palm plantation sucks up CO2 about as fast as corn and not all of it is returned to the atmosphere as quickly.
We should start a campaign to use more wood for building – my wife’s family in Norway live in a house over 300 years old made with solid wood timbers. Can they claim carbon credits?
The case of all scientific endeavour that is politically motivated is the creation of plausibly denialable propaganda. This is no exception and shows that truth should never get in the way of a good story. Alas for these people the target audience is getting smaller as the stories become taller. Thus their audience is rapidily being reduced to those with an incurable malaise, called terminal stupidity.
Uhm the graph, but as far as I know the latest data says people have existed during some 400 000 years, which is about double than from a decade ago, so I humbly wonder what people existed 2-5 million years ago in the “Old Stone Age”?