Some days you just have to shake your head and say to yourself that there’s irrational fixation on CO2 that has deep roots in the psyche when we see things like this. The 10:10 video was proof enough, but now we have “paleoblameatology” entering the picture to explain the Little Ice Age.
Meet Christopher Columbus, who had his day this week, but who has gone in the same week from being lauded explorer to destroyer of Europe’s climate by being a catalyst. From Stanford via Science News, of all places.
It boggles the mind.
Here’s the “logic”:
By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 80 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas. Many of them burned trees to make room for crops, leaving behind charcoal deposits that have been found in the soils of Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.
About 500 years ago, this charcoal accumulation plummeted as the people themselves disappeared. Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.
Trees returned, reforesting an area at least the size of California, Nevle estimated. This new growth could have soaked up between 2 billion and 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air.
Ice cores from Antarctica contain air bubbles that show a drop in carbon dioxide around this time. These bubbles suggest that levels of the greenhouse gas decreased by 6 to 10 parts per million between 1525 and the early 1600s.
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6 to 10 parts per million drop in CO2 triggered the LIA? Seriously? Wow that’s some powerful climate sensitivity. Even the IPCC doesn’t think CO2 is that powerful. Let’s see, since then we added how much? The drop in question is shown below in yellow highlight:
The graph above has this citation in Wikipedia: Law Dome ice cores show lower levels of CO2 mixing ratios during 1550-1800 AD, leading investigators Etheridge and Steele to conjecture “probably as a result of colder global climate”.[46] I suppose Nevle never considered that the oceans might absorb that CO2, perhaps in response to cooling induced by lower solar activity and increased aerosols due to volcanoes.
As for the 6-10 PPM drop induced by Columbus setting off the LIA, maybe such extreme climate sensitivity works in only one direction? /sarc
Mike Smith over at Meteorological Musings sums up this absurdity pretty well:
Mr. Nevle inadvertently makes the case to continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere. The effects of a Little Ice Age today would be catastrophic given the much larger population of the world. With the shorter growing seasons many millions would starve. The effects of another ice age, little or otherwise, would make global warming seem like a picnic.
h/t to Dr. Ryan Maue
So it was the trees that grew….and not burning them down….that did it.
Well…..at least we know now that dropping CO2 levels by 10ppm…is a lot worse than raising it a hundred /snark
I think it’s much more likely that the temp dropped, and the resulting drop in the biosphere and ocean CO2 uptake accounts for the drop in CO2.
Living at 51°N, I wholeheartedly support global warming.
I saw this on /. and thought it was ridiculous. It reads like someone is trying to discredit climate science by giving them blatant stupidity to support.
O.o I had actually not expected something this completely baseless. So now we have today’s man-made! warming, the 70s man-made! cooling, as I understand 2 or so man-made! cooling/warming episodes (I see a late 1800s date murkily in in my head) before that… and now we’re rewriting history with several ppm of man-made! ice age. Several.
Truly, this boggles the mind.
The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to pruning the plant back to the roots. The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education.
Hesse, Herman: “Magister Ludi”
I’m still waiting for an alarmist to tell me what they would say to the friends and family of someone who dies this winter because they cannot afford to heat their home.
Not one of them has had the guts to even respond.
The implication here is that the “precautionary” principle would suggest we pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere.
To put it in context, I was looking at what happened in the Maunder minimum:
1. The English Civil war which had quietened down, flared up and the end of monarchy as a political concept in Europe owes itself to the outcome.
2. 1690s there was serious famine (I’ve yet to link this to climate — I expect it is likely it will be linked)
3. The Darien scheme failed – even though the area was selected from those who had been before as being suitable. Again, I wonder whether this was climate related.
4. Because of 1,2 & 3 Scotland was virtually bankrupt and forced to enter Union with England on very unfavourable terms which have been a bone of contention ever since.
Some of the most traumatic events in UK history occurred during the Maunder minimum. If as I anticipate, they are climate related, and if as some suggest we are going into another Maunder minimum … hold onto your heads!**
**Charles I was beheaded. … a fate that could be awaiting Charles III …. given his love of greenhouse warming nonsense.
“They all laughed at Cristopher Columbus…”
What? “paleobamatology”?
Richard Nevle perhaps should learn some basic physical chemistry (along with his geochemistry). He could start with calculating the increased solubility of CO2 in seawater at lower temperatures. He may then have an answer to the dip in ice core values.
While he is doing that he could also look at the effect of diffusion of CO2 from ice bubbles below the fern that takes centuries, and which misleads the unwary suffering from confirmation bias.
What a crock!
I guess he never heard of the Maunder minimum. That was the time when folk thought that Galileo was suffering from vision problems, since he claimed there were spots on the sun. Beginning in 1650, said spots disappeared. And it got COLD. As in, the North Sea froze over. One could (if one had the stamina) skate from Denmark to Sweden. Can’t do that anymore.
Science News has gone the way of Scientific American.
They have left science, and taken up advocacy.
What a waste!
So, did CO2 lag temperature, or was it opposite?
According to Petit et. al. and Fischer et.al. (Science) it (CO2) lags temperature with, say, 800 to 1000 years…….so, if a human did it, it must have been early Vikings…..
Just when you think the Warmist comments can’t get any crazier…
40 million and 80 million people ?
the current population of the Americas is 913 million … are they really trying to tell us that tribal Americans had populations that equaled 5-10% of todays population 500 years ago ? not bloody likely … don’t forget, no horses before Christopher showed up …
This is their solution to the embarassment of the LIA that they have been trying to get rid of. This is how modern science seems to operate. Deny the existence of the LIA and the MWP, etc. Then when it can’t be ignored, come up with a human-CO2 cause for these inconvenient events. I heard on “Quirks and Quarks” a science radio thing on CBC an interview with Saul Perlmutter – Nobel P winner in physics in 2009(?) who discovered that the U is expanding at an accelerating rate. He and colleagues have invoked “Dark Energy” as the driver. Read the drivel of the first few paragraphs and tell me I’ve missed the point.
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=Saul%20Perlmutter&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
Give me a break! They invoked dark matter to shore up Newtonian/Einsteinian gravity theory and now they have to invoke “Dark Energy” to overcome the effect created by the massive Dark Matter, which would be slowing the expansion down – all this in close to empty space. Science from all disciplines has decided that the science is largely settled and just a few patches and tweaks are all we need as a substitute for falsification.
There seems to be no end of the silliness that “climate science” has become. It is worse than the counting bumps on people’s head thing years ago.
Cli-mythology
Gosh,
If you consider that besides Columbus, there was Vasco da Gama, Pedro ALvares Cabral, and Magalhães, just to name a few Portuguese that also opened new paths to the whole World, I would just say:
it was much worse than we thought!
Ecotretas
On the bright side, this is one of those rare things the moonbat brigade can’t pin on George W. Bush.
Further proof that every cloud has a silver lining!
Stanford University is considered as an excellent american university … I believe that I will reconsider my opinion !
The power of miniscule variations of the proportions of CO2 in our atmosphere knows no bounds. Clearly, the single most powerful substance on the planet. At least in the fertile imaginations of CAGW scaremongers! Obviously, it is only a matter of time before the entire history of life, the universe and everything can all be explained by variations in this molecule.
When we went into an glacial age 2 million years ago with no people to burn down tree how the heck did we get out?
Paleolobotomy. Honestly, you just can’t make this stuff up. It just seems so trite and vacuous. I had to read it several times to absorb the rarified substance of it all.
kwik says:
October 14, 2011 at 9:16 am
“According to Petit et. al. and Fischer et.al. (Science) it (CO2) lags temperature with, say, 800 to 1000 years…….so, if a human did it, it must have been early Vikings…..”
Do we know if the Vikings brought some diseases from Europe that killed indigenous population.? The Greenland settlements must have had some contacts looking for wood and other stuff.
One thing is true, the effects of another ice age, little or otherwise, would make global warming seem like a picnic.
IIRC , the LIA began in the fourteenth century – more than one hundred fifty years before Colombus set sail for the New World .