The mind is like a parachute. It works only when it is open.—Frank Zappa

Dear Friends + Interlocutors,

Here’s an interesting item if you are a history buff and/or a global warming enthusiast. (See below) I came across it recently, yet it is dated 2011. I had been reading about Pizarro and the amazing Inca empire which spanned from modern-day Chile almost to Columbia.

Due to pandemics, caused by their contact with the Spaniards, the Incas stopped clearing land, stopped burning trees to clear the land for farming. The Inca population was drastically degraded by pandemics and the Spanish conquest.

So the trees grew back. What happened then? According to this scientist, it kicked off the “Little Ice Age” in Europe. The added trees cooled the planet. Figure it out. Read the article. I’m not sure I buy it, but I guess it’s possible.

Note, however, that another scientist thinks other factors (my emphasis) were at work:

Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College. 

Still, let’s give trees a chance to lower the temperature and mitigate against “global warming”. I don’t hear much about planting trees from the masterminds in Washington and Davos. More about windmills and batteries, etc.  

Why not a massive campaign to plant trees…along the U.S. interstate highways for example? Anywhere and everywhere…if the the issue is such an “existential threat”.

On the other hand, I also recently came across an article—Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce—from 2009 written by the legendary “progressive” Alexander Cockburn. Although a “left-wing” activist, writer and editor (of CounterPunch) he did not buy into the “liberal” hysteria over “global warming”. 

Could the masterminds be wrong? They could be. I don’t trust them at all with respect to other matters because they have been dead wrong. Cockburn makes a pretty good case. Read the article. 

At the end he states, 

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention - geo-engineering - could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it's a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it's a terrible tragedy.

This has bothered me for some time. Why not concentrate on pollution we know for certain is man-made and deleterious to the planet? Like plastics…in the ocean. We need plastics, but we should cut back as much as possible and really get serious about recycling, it seems to me.

Patrick

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/columbus-arrival-linked-carbon-dioxide-drop

Columbus’ arrival linked to carbon dioxide drop

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

Devin PowellOctober 13, 2011 at 10:43 am

MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a depletion of a key greenhouse gas may have helped augment Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages, Nevle’s team has argued.

By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 100 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 metric 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.

Reforestation fits with another clue hidden in Antarctic ice, says Nevle. As the population declined in the Americas, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got heavier. Increasingly, molecules of the gas tended to be made of carbon-13, a naturally occurring isotope with an extra neutron. That could be because tree leaves prefer to take in gas made of carbon-12, leaving the heavier version in the air.

“There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake,” says Jed Kaplan, an earth systems scientist at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

Kaplan points out that there’s a lot of uncertainty in isotope measurements, so this evidence isn’t conclusive. But he agrees that the New World pandemics were a major event that can’t be ignored — a tragedy that highlighted mankind’s ability to influence the climate long before the industrial revolution.   

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