Timothy Birdnow

That is stupid beyond words. It never occurs to these dimwits that it is the exact other way around; the decline of Native American cultures stemmed from changes in the climate. The end of the Medieval Warming Period certainly coincided with the decline of the Mayans, the Incans, and the Mound Builders. It had nothing to do with declining populations in the Americas and certainly nothing to do with the coming of the Europeans. I despair of the stupidity of modern so-called "science".

Earth Systems Impact of the European Arrival and the Great Dying in the Americas After 1492

I would point out that the pre-Columbian American cultures had very limited agricultural capabilities, largely because they had only one staple crop (maize) and had no beasts of burden to aid in cultivation. As a result these civilizations had very limited carrying capacity, because they could be wiped out whenever there was a crop failure. In Europe there were multiple crops going and if one failed another could still feed the populace. And the Europeans had trade, with Asia, with Africa, etc. while the Americas didn't really trade with each-other. The Incans did not even know the Aztecs were there.

It made these cultures very vulnerable, most especially to changes in weather.

It had nothing to do with those evil white men.

From the "research":

We estimate that 55 million indigenous people died following the European conquest of the Americas beginning in 1492. This led to the abandonment and secondary succession of 56 million hectares of land. We calculate that this led to an additional 7.4 Pg. C being removed from the atmosphere and stored on the land surface in the 1500s. This was a change from the 1400s of 9.9 Pg C (5 ppmCO2). Including feedback processes this contributed between 47%and 67% of the 15e22 Pg C (7e10 ppm CO2) decline in

atmospheric CO2between 1520 CE and 1610 CE seen in Antarctic ice core re-cords. These changes show that the Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas is necessary for a parsimonious explanation of the anomalous decrease in atmospheric CO2at that time and the resulting decline in global surface air temperatures. These changes show that human actions had global impacts on the Earth system in the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. Our results also show that this aspect of the Columbian Exchange the globalization of diseases had global impacts on the Earth system, key evidence in the calls for the drop in atmospheric CO2at 1610 CE to mark the onset of the Anthropocene epoch (Lewis and Maslin,2015,201 8). We conclude that the Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land in the Americas that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO2and global sur-face air temperatures in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:21 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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