The online German-language Die Presse reports here on new climate research out of Stanford. Did this get picked up in the US press? Too nutty probably.According to the new research, Christopher Columbus was likely the cause of the Little Ice Age.
How, you may ask? Columbus, a really dirty European, and his fellow colonizers sailed the ocean blue in 1492, just before the LIA began in earnest. He brought along with him some nasty diseases which quickly spread across the new world and wiped out the indigneous population. As so after a very short time, there was no one left to burn down trees, and so tree growth exploded, sucked up huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere in the process, which in turn lowered global CO2 concentrations, which led to global cooling, and thus the production of the Little Ice Age.
Hey, at least they admit now that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age weren’t just local North Atlantic phenomena.
Global temperatures began dropping after the end of the Medieval Warm Period, in the 14th century. Richard Nevle, geochemist at Stanford University, claims that the Maunder Minimum, a period of low solar activity from 1653 to 1715, had less to do with causing the Little Ice Age and thinks he has solved the mystery and found the real culprit.
The cooling was already in full swing by the time the Maunder Minimum began and so it had to be something else. Die Presse writes:
It was Columbus and the following colonists. They caused the not so sparsely populated New World to get practically wiped out in a very short time. Back then at the end of the 15th century as Columbus was on the way, between 40 and 80 million people were living mostly in Central and South America, and they cleared forest with fire. But as the Europeans arrived, most of them died of unknown diseases – measles, pox, diphtheria – 90% of them were wiped out, or one fifth of the global population. The forests suddenly stopped being cleared.”
I wonder if this brilliance will be taken up by the IPCC’s next assessment report. What conclusion shall we draw? It confirms how desperate the warmists are in their quest to remove the sun from the climate equation. Pretty damn desperate.
Finally, before you parents think about spending $250,000 to educate your child at Stanford, you may want to think again.
Hi Pierre,
I did cover the same “news” in my blog. Also I added yours to the blogroll when mentioning the German peat measurements a few weeks ago.
Keep up with the fun..
Cheeres – Figaro
Hi Pierre.
I fear that in a previous attempt I closed the window before clicking submit, or I clicked it and nothing happened. If the answer is duplicated, please bear with me.
I find most interesting your views from Germany on the climate bruhaha. Differences with the other side of the pond are appalling.
Anyway, when covering the Dürres Maar peat history I made referrence to your blog and added it to my “frequently visited blogs” list.
Keep up with the good work and thanks for allowing us to learn from you.
Cheers – Figaro
It’s nice to see that the cooling was already underway before the start of the Maunder Minimum. Still, the minimum coincides far too closely to the reign of Louis XIV – le roi soleil – to be mere coincidence. It has to be causation – and since the sun does not cause monarchs, but humans cause all events with any bearing on climate (however small, like solar radiation), it clear beyond doubt that sa majeste was the responsible party. I have not yet come up with the causative mechanism (hint: more funding needed), but at least he was not responsible for the conditions of the Little Ice Age, or the financial situation of France after his death, or the Scientific Revolution (= the Académie francaise), or other such nasty things.
Yes, it was reported in the USA;
http://www.real-science.com/climate-vatican-blames-ice-age-columbus
Er, changing the subject [if I may PG], WTF is going on in Germany, I think Merkel has more than one face, or is it cognitive dissonance?
[…]When Angela Merkel, then the German Environment Minister, returned from the 1997 UN climate summit in the Japanese imperial city of Kyoto, she was exhausted after long nights of negotiations. But she was also proud. The industrialized nations had pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for the period from 2008 to 2012 by 5 percent from the 1990 levels. The conference was a “milestone in the history of environmental protection,” she said, noting that an “irreversible process” to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases had been initiated.[…]
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,792224,00.html
And now…………….”Back To Black: Germany Looks To Mongolian Coal To Secure Energy Future” !!
[…] Last Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel signed a resource trade agreement with her Mongolian counterpart in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. Surrounded by a contingent of German industry leaders, the German delegates were eager to secure access to Mongolia’s burgeoning mining economy, specifically its coal, rare earth elements and other commodities, in exchange for German technology and skills to support local mineral processing operations.[…]
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/4167-back-to-black-germany-looks-to-mongolian-coal-to-secure-energy-future.html
OR, changed your mind Angie? [looks like it – you little tinker!]
Then, please inform EU climate commissar Connie [Hedegaard] and thus with the EU not looking to extend the [nearly fossilised] Kyoto insanity any longer, there would then be [logically without EU advocacy], no need of a UN piss-up……..er Bier-fest in Durban S.A. – QED.
Merkel is the ultimate pragmatic; she will play the cards as she sees them fit. In a way, one could say she’s responding to the wishes of the population – after Fukushima, everybody in Germany ran around like a headless chicken; so she decided to kill the nukes, and sooth everyone, CO2 be damned, and as a side benefit take away the Greens only scoring point. Since March the Greens are on the decline, now at 17% approval rating.
Does Merkel really believe in a CAGW disaster scenario? Obviously not.
While the leftist media will try to reanimate climate fears all the time, Merkel will have nothing of it.
She tried to pull another Kyoto at COP15; the Chinese were too smart to have themselves crippled, and since that day not a word from her about the climate crisis or whatever; her pollsters told her it’s a poisoned theme. She will still say “sustainability” all the time, mind you, that touches a nerve with the Germans, we have a deep-seated trauma that our resources will run out and the outside world will embargo us. Which actually happened in WWII.
And remember that a precursor to Kyoto itself was penned by a committee of the Bundestag, only slightly adapted and became the Kyoto treaty. That’s why Germany was done with it by shutting down old GDR factories and power plants – it was designed specifically for our needs. Kyoto was German power politics from the start.
It has outlived its usefulness now.
And Connie Hedegaard is just a bureaucrat who does as she is told. She just announced that the EU won’t go it alone if noone else does.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/10/kyoto-ii-is-dead-eu-bails-out-as-australia-tries-to-save-earth/
The 20:20:20 goal of the EU? Forget it. We have other cats to whip, as the French say.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/10/green-agenda-unravelling-around-the-world-ex-australia/
Thank you Dirk, always interesting to hear what our cousins the Germans really think and are thinking – a country and a people I get on with and like……even if wonder about their motives sometimes [Brits do].
This sums up the lunacy: [from Jo Nova – your link Dirk]
“Insanity in Britain: With people dying from the cold because they can’t afford enough home heating, the government is deliberately raising heating costs in an attempt to make it slightly colder outside “ Tom Nelson. [So well put, I nearly fell off my chair!]
But, I think a ‘cooling’ is due, now that very harsh economic reality is setting in across the world.
I don’t like Angie but at least she is pragmatic – shame we haven’t some realist politicians here in Britain.
Germany IS getting there…..Britain lagging behind as per bloody usual. All-in-all though, it’s………… coming round to climate realism and about time too, though it is vital that: we [must] all keep the pressure on.
Notice how Der Spiegel in its Durban piece does not once mention the German nuclear phase-out as a contributor to CO2 emissions… This connection is never reported in German leftist media; it is taboo. Maybe they have brainwashed themselves so much that they don’t think about it themselves. With regard to this, Monbiot is more honest.
Too right, sticks a bit – to say Monbiot is ‘honest’.
On the nuclear phase out by Germany…………..if there is a cold winter and all the signs point to it [I think it will be imho], then, will the German power companies buy nuclear generated electric power from France [again]?
There is a little irony there………………….. somewhere.
Ending nuclear power generation in Germany is not good for the German people – the ‘cheap’ [relatively – and far better than green alternatives] and reliable power it produces, is good for the consumer and also for large industrial plant [ie, smelting] – for a very logical people – it’s not logical.