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BBC - American colonization killed so many people it literally cooled the planet’s temperature

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Sibersk Esto

Sibersk Esto

Changed the hierarchy of thread titles
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Oct 25, 2017
16,488
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/science-environment-47063973?__twitter_impression=true
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.
That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
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It's a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the "Little Ice Age" - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.
"The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures," Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews .
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Aprikurt

Aprikurt

▲ Legend ▲
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Oct 29, 2017
18,775
It's a good job Trump doesn't believe in climate change because this is probably the next thing he'd suggest
 
danowat

danowat

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
5,783
Don't let trump see this ffs, that would be some thanos way to combat global warming.
 
Terrell

Terrell

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Oct 25, 2017
3,624
Canada
This is all we need, people waving this around to put a positive spin on ethnic cleansing.

But at least I learned that we're in the process of defining a new geological epoch, "Anthropocene", as geology records will likely live on for a long time to show how our presence has irrevocably changed the Earth in such a minimal period of time compared to the holocene epoch where we lived significantly more harmoniously with nature by comparison to the last 50 years.
 
Inuhanyou

Inuhanyou

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
14,214
New Jersey
millions of people died or were enslaved with the indirect positive being that global warming could be staved off....but as a result of our current actions, millions of people will still die as a result of global warming... So was it worth it in the end? yeah...my ancestors and the natives definitely don't think so
 
Metal B

Metal B

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,396
This could be the next popular cliché villain plot of your 08/15 science fiction story:
"Do you wanna kill all those people because of overpopulation?"
"No, what nonsense! The population goes down, because people need less children, thanks to better medicine, services, infrastructure and machines!"
"So … why do you still wanna kill so many people?!"
"BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE!"
*dumm dumm dumm dummmmmmmmmmm*
 
rubidium

rubidium

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,323
I wonder what would happen if we experimentally withdraw civilization from heavily urbanized city like NY (or Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City or whatever), and let natural erosion and mother nature take over. How long it would take a city to become forest indistinguishable from natural ones?
 
Sander VF

Sander VF

The Fallen
Oct 28, 2017
25,943
Tbilisi, Georgia
Metal B said:
This could be the next popular cliché villain plot of your 08/15 science fiction story:
"Do you wanna kill all those people because of overpopulation?"
"No, what nonsense! The population goes down, because people need less children, thanks to better medicine, services, infrastructure and machines!"
"So … why do you still wanna kill so many people?!"
"BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE!"
*dumm dumm dumm dummmmmmmmmmm*
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"Actually, I want to kill people because that girl who looked at me once died"
 
rubidium

rubidium

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,323
Metal B said:
This could be the next popular cliché villain plot of your 08/15 science fiction story:
"Do you wanna kill all those people because of overpopulation?"
"No, what nonsense! The population goes down, because people need less children, thanks to better medicine, services, infrastructure and machines!"
"So … why do you still wanna kill so many people?!"
"BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE!"
*dumm dumm dumm dummmmmmmmmmm*
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think it is text book cliché for villains. There are so many bad guys in fiction who aren't really bad.. they just love nature too much to the point they'd exterminate human civilization.
 
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