JoNova:
Looks like Scientific American has gone a bit “cosmic”: The Little Ice Age was apparently caused by black death, small pox, and slavery. The theory goes that there was a small spikey dip in CO2 levels in 1610, which was man-made. So hold your breath, that means a whole new era should start from then. This small dip of dubious causality, plus the correlation of oddly unclimatic things like slavery, seems to make the spike worthy of an impressive sciencey title, lo, a new era is born — The start of the Anthropocene.
Let’s not mention that temperatures started falling from 1400 AD. That’s 200 years before the CO2 spike down. Cause and effect are so passe in postmodern science.
Mass Deaths in Americas Start New CO2 Epoch
The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. 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. Based on that dramatic shift, 1610 should be considered the start date of a new, proposed geologic epoch—the Anthropocene, or recent age of humanity—according to the authors of a new study.
In any climate astrology it is important to have a hockeystick graph. I know of no global proxy that produces a temperature graph like this. But it’s easy to get this shape by comparing smoothed low res old proxies to high resolution modern adjusted thermometers. It’s just a really bad way to do science. I want the same proxy from start to end. Give me the modern temperature in tree rings or clam shells or sediments, but let’s stop pretending there are no proxies left on Earth after 1980. Has Earth ran out of mud, trees, corals or shells, or do those “modern” proxies give the wrong answer?
120 Northern Hemisphere proxies show the world was as warm as now 1000 years ago.
See how CO2 dipped in 1610. Note how temperature didn’t.The whole theory rests on the “coincidence” of a CO2 dip of 7ppm in 1610 with the depth of the Little Ice Age, er, apparently 180 or so years later (according to their graph). Greenhouses gases can absorb infra red at the speed of light, and they drive the climate, we just don’t see the correlation, right? Yeah, baby.
This blows a hole in the warmists’ solution that we all stop reproducing and die off.
That is a big part of what caused the hockey stick in the first place!
Well, according to them, anyway.
If only we could live without touching anything on earth.
Not touch it, not move around on it, not try to get warmed or cooled on it, barely let it know we are here.
But don’t die!
Actually, it might do us a solid if we simply go back to the ”scientific method” and ”cause & effect.”
I question the data and where and how it was obtained .
How was this date generated, speculation at best “smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands.”
no records were kept on mass deaths in 1492. This report should have filled in local paper that can used to garbage. This is not a dissertation paper or even a topic for dissertation research. there is no supportive validity to the work.
farmland development was non- existent in 1492. two acres were a lot of land and framing in those days.
Another flight of fantasy.