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America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate’ [BBC News]
- Thread starter Gowans
- Start date
I mean, if you do that millions of people would also die of starvation.
I am sure people who think that's a great idea, will make the sacrifice and go first. For humanity's sake.
No offense, but maybe it's time to step away from the internet for a while.
There is historical precedent that mass death has lead to subsequent prosperity for the living. The Mongol Invasion is one. The Black Death lead to an economic explosion and was a major factor towards the renaissance.
is it genocide if you're doing it equally across all of humanity?
so what the report is saying
is that colonisation was beneficial to earths environment?
hmm
don't trust it
is that colonisation was beneficial to earths environment?
hmm
don't trust it
This doesn't make a rule. Specific historical and economic circumstances in a handful of countries are just that, particular events in history. The Black Death for instance only eased Malthusian constraints and gave peasants bargaining power (Ending feudalism) in a handful of countries in Western Europe, Eastern Europe only saw more violent enforcement of feudalism that lasted until the early 20th Century while the Iberian Peninsula's economy got fucked by the disruption of trade networks.
Similarly, the Americas were not more affluent after the invasion than they were before.
A lottery doesn't ameliorate the ethics behind mass murder. If the point of your question is whether it's technically genocide, well, that would be stupid pedantic bullshit not worth answering.
If I remember correctly European domesticated and farm animals made us immune to the diseases that killed 90% of the indigenous people.
Bringing those to the Americas was like a biological weapon of mass destruction.
Bringing those to the Americas was like a biological weapon of mass destruction.
so if the choice was behind the entire planet dying or half the human population you'd be fine with letting the planet die just because of the ethics behind killing half the human population
Like how people jump to mass death instead of trying to implement changes like renewable energies, redesigned infrastructure and other things to help. Nope everyone has to go!
It's about farmland being reclaimed, plantlife growing and absorbing more CO2, it's not about literally just having less bodies.
That's not a situatution or choice in the realm of reality anyone needs to make. If you want to discuss petty nonsense about Thandos then go find a comic book thread.
User Banned (1 Week): Advocating and promoting systemic killing, inflammatory rhetoric
If the planet and the population continues going as is it might well become a viable situation where there would be orchestrated cullings of either humans or animals.
Hell China had a version of it through their one child policy that was active for 30 odd years
That will not make it in time. IEA estimates that renewable energy will account for only 18% of the world's energy by 2040.
It would never be done 'equally'. That is the lie underlying such premises, whether you realise it or not. Even in raw abstract, wiping out half the population of one country is not the same as wiping out half of another. But in most probable execution, well...
Actually since you bring it up: China's has resulted in a well documented strain of sexism: Because many interpreted 'one child' as 'one son', as existing social biases made them preferable over having daughters, in turn reinforcing that notion further. Then you throw on the resulting 'deficit' of women from that bias when those generations come of age, and you perhaps should start to see why that is not, in fact, an enviable model.
With regards to this sort of thing? I would not trust those designing it to create a model that does not conveniently remove the 'undesirables' of society most of all. All for the sake of the planet, amirite?
So why didn't the 75-200 million deaths in Europe during the Black Plague have the same effect? Surely the same situation of lots of former farmland being farrow would have happened when an estimated 1/3 - 2/3 of the European population was wiped out?
Nope. Partly because of that difference - around if not more than half of Europe's population remained, whereas only a tenth of the native American population is believed to have done so. So where in Europe much of the response was to use the same land but more efficiently - which is how many peasants weirdly benefited in the long run - so as to sustain or recover output, among a broadly semi-nomadic population the answer for many would just be to move on.
Complete nonsense and a dangerously misinformed thing to believe. Population has nothing to do with our ecological circumstances and everything to do with how we structure our society to award behaviors and practices that are actively harmful to our ecosystem. When 10% (a very select and rich portion) of the population is responsible for 70% of all carbon emissions, wtf do you imagine your culling of random people will do to curb climate change? The lottery idea is dumb and unethical precisely because it's blind; because it therefore refuses to acknowledge an actual culprit which exists.
If we come to the point where we have decided that mass killings are preferable to changing our condition; then the "everyone dies" or "or only half dies" becomes a false ultimatum, and "everyone dies" is the only answer, as it is will have become our just deserts.
The math doesn't jive with the explanation in the article though. Around 10% of the world's population was lost in the genocide of indigenous American tribes (roughly 55 million people according to the article in the OP), but that took 100 years to happen. The Black Death wiped out almost 25% of the world's population in four years. Way more people in way less time. The article attributes the CO2 changes to "a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation. " I cannot imagine this wouldn't also happen when more people are killed in less time?
I know this is a shitpost but this is extremely in bad taste
That's just it - it's also land reclamation over the process of those 100 years, with the accompanying consumption and/or lack of production of carbon to boot, again as enabled by a semi-nomadic population reduced b such a severe degree. Farms that were abandoned as a result of the Black Death weren't just left empty in the long run - many were absorbed into the farms of whoever remained alive, and often put to use as pasture.You know, for cows and stuff, because you didn't need the work force that no longer wholly existed when you often needed just one or two blokes to look after the herd.
Don't forget making an exact replica of the ship so you're creating jobs at the same time.
Guns, Germs, & Steel talks about this issue, though be warned this is a controversial hypothesis among many academic circles. A nice summary can be found in this video:
Holy hell. That's too many to bear. That's almost as many as in the second world war. Wait. Does that mean the second world war cooled the climate as well? We had like 50-80M die in the span of like 7 years.
Short term, maybe. Long term? Eeeeh. Hard to say how populations would look now if Europeans never put up shop in America.
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On the former, not so much, both because we had found ways to generate pollution beyond merely cutting down trees, but also because the population growth of the 20th century - as well as the concurrent industrialisation of many large nations such as India and China - pretty much offset the population loss in record time. Like, to use this chart as a quick and dirty reference:
Now here is the period of 1900 to 1940:
That point where the growth rate (red) suddenly eases is WW1 and Spanish Flu. It merely slowed down the global population rate, while from 1920 the population train just does not stop until we enter the new millennium. Because even with those great losses of people, the actual amount people were dying by - and how quickly they were dying - was changing drastically vs... pretty much all of human history before it. The story of the 20th century is not so much that we were breeding like rabbits, but that we stopped dropping like flies.
Sorry, but we're not ready yet. ;-)
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/b...king-submarines-new-equipment-defective-35272
Damn. Okay. Thank you for the sobering reminder of how very fast we've been growing the last century.
Coming into this thread, I though most of it would be discussing what a morally repugnant event the colonization of America's was and how wronged the Native Americans got...
...instead it's a bunch of people seemingly seriously discussing the viability of unprecedented "indiscriminate" mass killing as a means of counteracting Climate Change.
...instead it's a bunch of people seemingly seriously discussing the viability of unprecedented "indiscriminate" mass killing as a means of counteracting Climate Change.
the quote in the op clearly said that vegetation replacing agriculture was responsible. pretty sure a jungle didn't grow in poland.
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Misleading article. If carbon production was strictly about the Number of people, then climate would have changed massively in the 800 and the First half of the 900 when we added 3 billion people, but it wasn't, while we are talking about a differential of 50 million people by the largest estimates. The factor that impacted climate here was the disappearance of a population that extensively used Fire as a way to Hunt and get food , American indians. They produced an enormous amount of co2 pro capita because of that, so much that historian hipotyze that the little ice Age was caused by this. However there is not even a real consensus on if It even happened or was Simply a localized europea phenomena, so i wouldn't put too much faith in it.
I suggest "the origins of civilization" by James c. Scott on the impact of the usage of Fire on the world bioma and climate
I suggest "the origins of civilization" by James c. Scott on the impact of the usage of Fire on the world bioma and climate
The thread title is slightly misleading. America doesn't equal the Americas, and the largest impact as stated in the paper was from the depopulation in Mexico, Central America, Bolivia, the Andes, and Amazonia.
How to solve global warming:
All these quotes, while mostly joking, are disgusting but whatever, they're dumb jokes on the internet. But the fact that these fly around here while when someone using violent rhetoric against the rich gets a week-long ban, is ridiculous.