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
On second thought… Another reason for posting this (other than the exquisite humour content) could be to give it as wide an audience as possible. Should be mandatory reading for all…. With friends like Nevle the alarmists need no enemies…
I’ve always said that there’s too many exhaling liberals, never expected them to confirm it for me…
Gary Pearse is right–the climsci people would only grudgingly admit the Little Ice Age existed IF they could pin the blame on humans/CO2! Until they could, they just stood there with fingers in their ears yelling “La la la la la la la la la” anytime anybody even mentioned it.
To me their conclusions are preposterous. (Are we to believe humans have cause the last several dozen Ice Ages? And here I thought we’ve evolved in suficient numbers just since Columbus (they got lots of ‘splanin to do).)
So the white man caused the temperature to drop by several degrees, simply by moving to the Americas. Guess he has earned the right to warm it by several degrees before being asked to pay any recompense.
Hmm… no mention of all the forests in the UK and Europe that were chopped down to build all the sailing ships that sailed the Spanish Main.
/sarc
I’m not sure what more can be said on the sheer nonsense of this, but considering that the descent into the Little Ice Age (misnamed though it may be) began somewhere around 1250 AD, roughly 200 years BEFORE Columbus was even born, let alone began voyaging, I can’t believe anyone could take this seriously. I also can’t believe that anyone even remotely ecologically minded could suggest that slash-and-burn farming was somehow better than allowing forests to grow. And then there’s the whole absurdity of 6 to 10 ppm of CO2 being in the least bit significant.
Nice one, Mr. Hoffer!
Once again, an over-inflated estimate of the effect of CO2 on the climate. MODTRAN shows a raw LWIR energy flow of 289.163 W/m² seen looking down through clear tropical air at an altitude of 99 km with a CO2 concentration of 280 PPM. Increasing the CO2 concentration to 396 PPM seems to only reduce the raw energy outflow to 287.561 W/m², a 0.55% reduction.
Amazing the power of Columbus, to remove sunspots for a period of 75 years. Or was it the trees regrowing that removed them?
OK, so let me get this straight:
Columbus arrives and is the “catalyst” for an accidental massive genocide of the local population. ( I’ve heard variants on that theory before, but the “evidence” is I’ve seen is basically ” we know (based on anecdotes and bad descriptions) this happened to tribe X over here, now extrapolate across the americas”. ( I’m not doubting that Europeans had a terrible and gruesome influence, I’m arguing about how much actually happened, and how it happened.)
So massive vegetal growth happens that sequesters carbon because agriculture vanishes. ok, I guess if theory A is true that might happen in some places. (Though, one wonders about the effect of uncontrolled forest/grass fires and how they might affect things.) Is this a valid hypothesis on a continental scale? ( Beats me, and with very serious & detail work on pollen counts (to determine what plant were growing) in stratified mud and ground profiles to show things, it’s beats other people too. I’ve seen studies like that in New England and it’s very cool :you can trace, pre european periods , massive cutting of local forests, local agriculture, forest regrowth succession… but it’s local and requires certain circumstances)
Temperature crashes. (Due to above carbon squestration.) ok, fine. Again, LOTS of other things are happening all around the world and solar system, might this have an effect and can we quantify this at all?
But then I wonder: Suddenly europeans flood the continent, cut forests down in quantities and speed not seen ever before, build ships, cities and all sorts of other activities that will sequester that wood for decades to centuries, start a LOT of intensive agriculture on a scale never seen on this continent , in the certain regions STOP agriculture and then allow huge forests to regrow ( all of New England AND other parts of N.A.) which sequesters carbon and then burn massive amounts of carbon fuel, un-squestering megatonnes of coal and oil…
Is it just me or would untangling those effects, even if you could estimate them correctly, be akin to correctly sorting leaves in a forest by color, age and species, while digging them up from under the snow in winter and wearing a blindfold and mittens?
Aren’t these people ashamed of themselves?
By my calculation the drop of 6-10 ppm CO2 cause a cooling of 2 degrees C. That is quite a powerful effect. The desire in some quarters is to reduce the CO2 level from its present 390 to 280. That is at least 11 times the downward change wrought by Columbus and his diseased ilk. If we are successful, we can expect a temperature drop of 22 degrees, right? Isn’t that how it works? Linear and all that, just like on the upside?
Fred2;
Aren’t these people ashamed of themselves?>>>
No.
Wasn’t it the warmist that embraced and got the warm fuzzies all over Genghis Kahn or Atilla the Hun a while back for doing the same, and now they are being hypocritical of Columbus.
…continued from above.
Financial markets are expected to stabilize Monday and Spain’s currency to recover after a bizarre new twist in what has become known as the “LIA Lawsuit”. The Editor-In-Chief of “Science News”, one Tom Siegfried http://www.sciencenews.org/view/page/id/72079/title/Science_News_Staff_Bios#siegfried , resigned today in protest of the publication of Dr Nevle’s article blaming Christopher Columbus for the LIA.
In his letter of resignation, Siegfried affirmed that the article was factual, properly reviewed, and conatined no major or minor errors at all. “But the author didn’t consult with climate modelers.” said Siegfried, “and I feel I have no choice but to resign for allowing this travesty to be published. According to the computer models, there never was an LIA, and so Columbus couldn’t have caused it.”
“The EEU case against Spain is a shambles,” said litigation expert Ban D. Wagon. “With Siegfried’s resignation, it is clear that the LIA never existed. Spain now has the entire UN IPCC backing it and all the EEU countries and their First Nations supporters have to go on is a single discredited report that should never have been published.” Ban D Wagon went on to note, “there are some naive thinkers out there who believe the facts will prevail. But this is the World Court and the United Nations. Facts are irrelevant here. The only evidence is computer models which are superior to facts in so many ways.”
A spokesperson for the EEU law firm Wee Screwum and Howe declined to take questions, but did issue this brief statement:
“The retraction of this article and the resignation of Siegfried have no bearing on our case. We’ve been developing our own computer models and will be presenting them in court. We’ve noted that the amount of money involved here is in the trillions, and have been approached by a number of well known climate modelers who are now on board as paid consultants. We are confident that they will produce the results we need to prove our case, and we are paying them very well to do so.”
A call to the offices of Kevin “travesty Trenberth”, centre of the now nearly forgotten but similar resignation scandal of Wolfgang Wagner of “Remote Sensing” fame was answered by an assistant who wasn’t certain of Trenberth’s whereabouts.
“He took off all of a sudden,” she said. “He said something about getting a better job, somewhere in Europe I think. He was on the phone to Michael or someone and said he needed the tree ring data showing the LIA started in 1492 and got really ticked off, screaming something about not deleting it for real…and then he left”.
This case promises still more twists and turns, and this reporter will be paying close attention to making them all up.
RE: Robertvdl says:
October 14, 2011 at 9:52 am
“….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 interesting theory I read points out that Indian populations met with English fishermen and French trappers for over a hundred years without catching any European plagues. (As you mention, there is a possibility they had contact with Vikings earlier, as well.) It was, according to this theory, only when Indians were introduced to pork that the terrible pandemics occured. The theory suggested the first Spaniards drove herds of pigs with them as they searched for cities of gold and fountains of youth, and the like, and those explorers describe grand “kingdoms” in areas where later explorers found, only decades later, merely a few scattered tribes.
Maybe it was some version of the Swine ‘Flu.
See Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” for an interesting take on the question. Based on his analysis, I would say the answer to your question is “no”. The Viking’s settlements had population densities very much the same as the Native Americans. As a result, they did not have the population density necessary to breed the numerous fatal and near-fatal disease strains that the metropolitan areas of the early 1500’s managed to do.
And for JeffC, Diamond estimates that 80-90% of the native population fell victim to small pox, etc as a result of interaction with Europeans. And the interaction wasn’t necessarily upfront and personal; most populations had already been devastated by the time they saw their first “white eyes”. The diseases travelled much faster that the settlers did.
AGW claimed the right to rewrite history for the MWA– claiming their right to rewrite history for soil carbon and nitrogen is down right greedy! I
I sure would like to see the calculations demonstrating more carbon is fixed in a forest than is stored in a tall grass prairie with a 1 to 3 year fire return cycle and tens of millions of 1000lb plus herbivores defecating, urinating and trampling. (What we have now is a poor excuse for a true tall grass prairie and its soils C/N reservoirs are not compatible) These prairies were “cultivated” by the use of fire by Native Americans to prevent afforestation. The soils of Illinois were described by the first Europeans as “coal black.” Soil nitrogen was so high it formed nitrogen salt crusts. Corn stalks in the late 19th century in the midwest often had visible crystals of potassium nitrate and the reason why farmers of this time slept with one eye open- a single spark would make corn go up like a fuse late in the season. You can’t get these high N levels without high C levels. In fact corn was grown for 40 years in the midwest with no fertilizer and it was not until the 1920s that N levels were sufficiently reduced to grow wheat. There were perhaps hundreds of millions of burrowing animals ex.prairie dogs tilling more soil and deeper than perhaps anything we do today. What ants did is humbling. The massive changes made by Native American burning changed waterlogging which slowed soil organic decomposition and altered evapotranspiration. Fire changed pH as did the change of vegetation from trees to grasses. Over a hundred million acres of prairie is thought to have burned every year prior to the 19th century. Im with Pielke Sr and Ed Krug– land alteration can have dramatic local effects. I’m also willing to bet that most of the US prior to the 19th century would fail to meet current EPA air quality standards for soot, particulates, NOx,NOy, soot, ground level ozone etc. Those warm hazy days of early autumn (Indian summer) were the result of smoke!
D.J. Hawkins,
Diamond’s claim that smallpox killed 90% of Native Americans doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The death rate from smallpox in un-innoculated patients is about 13%, based on historical records, and no group has ever had a natural immunity. Variola major can have a mortality rate as high was 30%, and from Athens during the Peloponesian wars up through the 1950’s smallpox never had a 90% fatality rate among patients, much less whole societies.
Diamond implies that Europeans were somehow used to the disease, but they suffered continual epidemics until the cowpox vaccinations were widely adopted. The only way for any European to acquire an immunity to smallpox is to catch smallpox, which carries the same fatality rate as for anyone else in the world, and often more because European doctors would use bizarre treatments like mercury and antimony.
In 1721 Boston had a major epidemic brought in on a ship from the West Indies, probably carried by African slaves (smallpox was endemic in Africa). 50% of the city caught the disease, so obviously it was virgin soil, the same as any Native American group. Nobody had been innoculated the patients suffered the usual 13% mortality rate. So for the entire city, the mortality rate was only 6.5%. That’s typical for a smallpox outbreak in a new area.
So if the same disease is striking both the Western hemisphere and the Old World, with the same mortality rates, how can it wipe out the population of one hemisphere while the other thrives? Even in the 1700’s smallpox killed about 400,000 Europeans a year, yet their population expanded.
Other problems with Diamond’s claim are that the same conditions occured in Australia and other areas where smallpox arrived with the Europeans, yet smallpox never became endemic among Aboriginals. It also didn’t wipe out the Pacific Islanders or anyone else we encountered when we were keeping accurate records, and the lack of accurate record keeping is the only reason Diamond could even make such claims.
It’s a bit rough blaming Columbus. I blame Adam and Eve – they started all this.
What this article makes clear is the category to which the religion of CAGW belongs – it is animism. People groups in past millenia and also currently who have no knowledge of understanding of science, adopted belief structures in which all natural events had to be caused by sentient person-like entities, or gods / spirits. Thus probably for most of human history “climate science” has involved understanding which offended god or spirit is responsible for adverse weather leading to crop failure or poor hunting / fishing etc. Norse religion and mythology added a new twist to this, the concept of Ragnarok and the overthrow of the gods by men, based on contempt for the gods and belief in the greater strength of man. Norse mythology underlies the western mindset at a subconscious level – Hitler tried briefly to adopt Norse religion in Germany.
The superstitious animistic belief system exhibited in this paper and by mainstream climate science is characterised by humans taking the place of gods, such that people with this mindset are simply incapable of considering any agency for climate change other than human agency, linked to the Loki-like mischievous CO2 who betrays the gods bringing about their defeat to man.
Very interesting from an anthropological point of view to see the stone age culture and mindset of fundamentslist animism, and inability to comprehend any physical agency apart from a deified humanity, now firmly and permanently established as the culture of climate science.
Perhaps this is what Ravett was trying to describe with his concept of “post-normal” science. Except he should have called it “pre-normal”.
Welcome back to the palaeolithic!
The area of the New World is approximately 42.2 million square kilometers or 16.3 million square miles. The typical population densities cited for various cultures worldwide varies by greatly by orders of magnitude. This is especially true when progressing from Paleolithic cultures to Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age , and Modern cultures. Nonetheless, hunter-gatherer and Neolithic farming cultures share similar constraints upon sustainable population densities when compared to their Old World counterparts. Your professor’s conclusions about the Pre-Columbian Amerindian population being no greater than about 500,000 to 1,500,000 people implies a population density in the New World no greater than 0.012 to 0.036 people per square kilometer. Such a number is less than the population densities described for the Plains Amerindian tribes inhabiting the North American Great Plains cold regions a their nadir. Such implied population densities are often lower than the population densities cited for many Early Paleolithic cultures when Modern Humans were in their earliest beginnings in the Old World. In other words, such implied population densities are so absurdly low, they make no reasonable sense.
The population densities of MesoAmerica’s city states alone make such low New World population estimates entirely unreasonable. The valley of today’s Mexico City are described as increasing from a Paleolithic populaiton of about 5,000 people to a 1590CE population of more than 300,000 to more than 1,000,000 people alone.
The Mississippian Culture’s numerous city states and towns in North America had urban populations equal to the European cities and towns such as Paris, London, and their rural communities in the same time period. The Cahokia Mounds community is described as having a population of 12,000 to 40,000 people. Combined with other smaller communities in present day Illinois, the population density of the Mississippian Culture in Illinois would have been no less than 3 people per square kilomter on average, and it was very likely to have been twice or more. Indeed, hunter gatherer cultures in Europe and North Africa are often described as having population densities of at least 1 or 2 people per square kilometer to as many as 20 or 35 people per square kilometer.
The Woodland Culture spanned an area of Eastern North America of well more than 3 million square kilometers. If it can be assumed for the sake of illustration that an average population density of 1 person per square kilometer was reasonable for this culture, it alone would have harbored a population of around 3 million people. Even if we assume the population density was only one half that rate, there still would have been a population of 1.5 million people, in addition to the Meso-American populations numbering one or more million people. This still leaves us the entire population of South America to be reckoned with,k including the large populations in the Inca empire, its precedent civilizations, and the emerging information about the larger than previously reported Amazonian culture/s.
Assuming a New World average population density of one person per square kilometer, the New World population would have been on the order of 42 million people. Assuming a population density of 0.3 people would still give us a New World population of 14 million people. Ignoring the fact of extensive agriculture in the New World Amerindian cultures and civilizations, even hunter-gatherer cultures could sometimes attain population densities of 10 people per square kilometer, which would result in a New World population of 420 million people, that we know exceeds observed population levels by huge degrees. Consequently, it is easy to surmise the actual demographic pattern was a number of limited regions in which Neolithic farming cultures sustained relatively higher population densities well beyond 1 or 10 people per square kilometer, while pedestrian hunter-gatherer cultures achieved population densities of 1 or much less than one person per kilometer over wide regions of the New World. The over all average population density for the New World in Pre-Columbian time periods remain elusive, but the evidence suggests quite strongly any numbers less than 10 million people is so extraordinarily low by comparison to the Old World as to require equally extraordinary explanations for such a radical departure from previous experience with Old World Neolithic and prior hunter-gatherer cultures.
It appears your professor was no better at using common sense than some of the professors asserting Pre-Columbian Amerindian polulations of 100 million or more people.
D. Patterson says:
October 16, 2011 at 8:51 am
“The Mississippian Culture’s numerous city states and towns in North America had urban populations equal to the European cities and towns such as Paris, London, and their rural communities in the same time period. The Cahokia Mounds community is described as having a population of 12,000 to 40,000 people. Combined with other smaller communities in present day Illinois, the population density of the Mississippian Culture in Illinois would have been no less than 3 people per square kilomter on average, and it was very likely to have been twice or more. Indeed, hunter gatherer cultures in Europe and North Africa are often described as having population densities of at least 1 or 2 people per square kilometer to as many as 20 or 35 people per square kilometer.”
I am normally loathe to quote Wikipedia as a source for anything, but I’ll offer this section of their Illinois page on a purely FWIW basis
“Native Americans lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. The Koster Site has been excavated and demonstrated 7,000 years of continuous habitation. Cahokia, the largest regional chiefdom and urban center of the Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, was located near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. They built more than 100 mounds and a woodhenge in a planned design expressing the culture’s cosmology. The civilization vanished in the 15th century for unknown reasons, but historians and archeologists have speculated that the people depleted the area of resources. Many indigenous tribes engaged in constant warfare. According to Suzanne Austin Alchon, “At one site in the central Illinois River valley, one-third of all adults died as a result of violent injuries.”[19]
The next major power in the region was the Illinois Confederation or Illini, a political alliance among several tribes. There were about 25,000 Illinois Indians in 1700, but systematic attacks and warfare by the Iroquois reduced their numbers by 90%.[20] Gradually, members of the Potawatomi, Miami, Sauk, and other tribes came in from the east and north.[21] In the American Revolution, the Illinois and Potawatomi supported the American colonists’ cause.”
It would appear that there is at least one school of thought that suggests “The Mississippian Culture” was gone before any Europeans had a chance to get at them and despite all the hippie stereotypes regarding NAs, they were entirely capable of obliterating each other on their own recognizance. Given the broad variety of numbers bandied about in regard to Pre-Columbian populations it looks to me that anybody’s SWAG is just about as reliable as any other, which is of course not at all.
D. Patterson, your argument calculating likely numbers works exactly the same when you subsititue “Orcs” and “Middle Earth”, which is the problem with it. By the same methods, it is equally true that North America had the same number of Indians in 1492 as it did before the first Indian crossed the land bridge from Asia, because the land’s carrying capacity was the same. So there were obviously tens of millions of Indians here before the first one even arrived.
For example, Kentucky has an area of 140,000 square kilometers , somewhat larger than England, and had a native population of, well, zero. Early on, back in the days of Daniel Boone, the tribes in Ohio united to form an invasion force to take it back their hunting grounds, and that force numbered less than 200 when it crossed the Ohio River unopposed. Had they succeeded, and established residence, they would’ve had a population density of 0.0015 persons per square kilometer. And this is in the Eastern US, where the land can support very high population densities.
It can be hard for a Eurocentric Westerner to grasp the staggeringly low density of people that were here, but image trying to invade England with 200 soldiers. For another comparison, the US Army fought Sitting Bull for over a decade. When he brought all the tribes together, from an area larger than France, he had a couple thousand people. After wiping out Custer (268 US cavalry dead, for an area about the size of France), the US Army pursed him across an area almost the size of Western Europe, yet his band numbered only about 200, including women and children.
In all the Indian wars out West, which spanned a hundred years, the US military only suffered about 2,000 casualties. That’s 20 a year, or less than 2 per year per state the size of European countries, and that’s reflective of the population density centuries after any claims of virgin soil epidemics could be remotely plausible. In Europe, Napoleon would throw away 2,000 soldiers as a feint on the left to hide a bigger feint on the right to hide the forces rushing into the center to hold until the main force got there in a battle on a random October day.
Just because a room is empty doesn’t mean that somebody must’ve murdered however many are listed as its maximum occupancy rating.
Um… It must also be Bush’s fault. You know, like everything else. This poor man must have amazing superpowers to disrupt creation backwards and forwards in time.
I mean, come on, guys, you know that’s the next move in paleoblameatology.
So the trees were burned, causing the Medieval Warm Period, then the people died and the trees regrew, causing the LIA?
How did the climate ever change without us?