The Great Dying, The Little Ice Age, And Us

How Columbus’ plagues sparked forest regrowth and global cooling

A really interesting article which covers diseases, man's dark side, and the cause of the Mini Ice Age.

Yoko Ono said recently tweeted -

'I love nature, but nature doesn't love me!'

Anyway, if we plant more trees we can save the environment from anthropogenic climate change.

The Black Death killed about 30 per cent of the European population in a few years in the middle of the 14th century. A century and a half later, the native people of the Americas were hit by half a dozen plagues as bad as the Black Death, one after another, and 95 per cent of them died. The plagues of the ‘Great Dying’ had much less terrifying names like measles, influenza, diphtheria and smallpox, but they were just as efficient at killing.

When the tens of millions of native Americans died,  the forests grew back on the land they used to farm. All those forests absorbed so much carbon dioxide that the average global temperature dropped, and what would otherwise have been a minor cyclical cooling became the Little Ice Age. It got so cold that lots of Europeans starved to death — so maybe there is such a thing as ‘climate justice’ after all.

The Great Dying, The Little Ice Age, And Us