22 thoughts on “Columbus caused the Little Ice Age, reports Scientific American”

  1. Please take the time to read the whole article. The first paragraph is just the opening punchline. If you don’t have time, here’s the summary: Sans the enlightened, all the humans have to go.

  2. I’m amazed and almost speechless. I was impressed with the bomb spike chart. That was one of the more outstanding pieces of chartsmanship I’ve seen in a while. Are you sure this wasn’t from Analog?

    How long before we see some bright folks citing this truly memorable piece of scholarship?

  3. “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” – RR

  4. Not enough bodies form the bubonic plague buried to give it it’s own era, obviously 🙂

  5. What farmland?? Just how much farmland did the indigenous North Americans have while living a hunter/gatherer life? CO2 went down so the temperature went down? Now, CO2 is up some, but the temp isn’t. What is this idiot smoking?

  6. So how do they explain the cooling that started ca.1400? Or the glaciation that started 100 years before that? Did the earth somehow know that Giovanni Colombo’s grandson would set sail in 1492 and started to cool the climate just in case he made it?

  7. Would it be too presumptious of me to strongly suspect that this article has just been published in the April 2015 issue of SA?

    APRIL FOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s a long-standing tradition with the magazine. The logic is sound but the rationale (data and information) is really off the wall and over the top.

  8. This author is a journalist, NUFF SAID. Another twit attached to the whine and cheese crowd of the beltway. A Columbia grad no less and unfortunately no more….gets his science from his leftest friends and I doubt he has ever cracked a physics book or taken a science course, earth science DOES NOT COUNT.

  9. This article has so many falsehoods, you don’t know where to start.
    Where did this 50 million dead indian figure come from? There were not enough Indians around to have that many deaths just from warfare and smallpox. They must have counted every indian death for two centuries.
    It took over 100 years for the US population to reach 50 million. And we always read about the white man’s overwhelming numbers.
    The original article probably said 5 million (still ridiculous) but the editor said 50 million sounded much better.

  10. Now that I’ve cleaned up the coffee I spat on the monitor while reading this, I offer up the following from a single paragraph.

    “By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations of the most prominent greenhouse gas and start a little ice age.”

    Exactly how many are “all those trees”? Botanists/forestry professionals – is it a given that trees will establish (or re-establish) in previous “farmland”, taking into account the level of agriculture that created the “farmland”?

    Also, “prominent”, from Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prominent), would be this:

    “standing out or projecting beyond a surface or line : protuberant
    “readily noticeable : conspicuous
    “widely and popularly known : leading

    Examining these definitions for a clue to the author’s intent provides an answer: CO2 is indeed the most “widely and popularly known” among those who don’t know any better.

    Also, if the author meant “prevalent” (dominant from Merriam W.) GHG, he’s still wrong – water vapor comes immediately to mind, as it should.

    Also, if a loss of “at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations” was enough to “start a little ice age”, doesn’t it stand to reason that gaining back that 7 ppm (and more) would reverse the cooling and produce very high levels of heating? Which we haven’t seen.

    Also, what effect did the loss of humanity due to the bubonic plague across Europe have on carbon emissions? Given the relatively high level of agriculture, deforestation, coal usage and everything else in play at that time, what was the impact of the loss of those (for the time) highly technical societies devastated by the Black Death?

    I’m out of “also’s”, patience and coffee.

  11. This is one of those articles that proves that climate scientists dont check their basic assumptions like real scientists. There have been several studies that show fairly clearly that there is now a larger tree cover in North America than during the colonial period. Fewer people cutting trees for wood, and most dramatically no more huge buffalo herds to destroy the trees in the western and mid western states. Also, there are no more huge herds of buffalo to ruminate and produce methane. Has this study even gone through peer review? If so, the peer reviewers are clearly part of the problem (but we already new that of course).

  12. So, a decrease in atmospheric CO2 of 7ppm caused the Little Ice Age. I wonder why the increase to the current, near 400pm, level hasn’t boiled the oceans.

  13. If this were valid then when the glaciers melted and allowed the forests of the northern hemisphere to go again we should have seen a huge drop in temperature. Did we?

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