A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an archaeological finding reported in American Archaeology associated with climate change, but I was waiting for the article to make it to the Web. It still hasn’t made it there, but now Archaeology has a report on the same finding, so here it is:
One surprising effect of European colonization of the Americas was a cooling of the Earth’s climate, researchers at University College London have determined. The team, led by geographer Alexander Koch, estimates the indigenous population of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century to have been around 60 million. Over the next century, this population declined by some 90 percent, largely due to epidemics introduced by Europeans. As a result, around 215,000 square miles of cultivated land, roughly the area of France, was left fallow and reverted to forest. This sucked up enough carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere—to lead to cooling.
How humanity tends to behave results in the emission of climate change gases, so reducing the numbers causes a reduction in those gases.
