Science By the colonization of the American continent died there so many people that the climate of the earth it was disturbed. That suggests already a team of scientists from University College London in a new study, that the cause is investigated from the Little Ice age in the 15th and 16th century.
The explanation behind the thesis, which the scientists explain is simply stated the following: because, after the colonization by the Europeans, many indigenous peoples by disease and violence to the lives, kept millions of agricultural land in Central-, South – and North-America in the rough. The grounds were re-covered by vegetation, and the woods that were brought at an abnormally high pace, as much CO2 from the air, that the global temperature decreased.
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That in the years after the arrival of the Europeans in 1492, millions of native inhabitants died, is fixed. Estimates of the population of the entire American continent at the end of the 15th century vary, but nowadays, scientists out of approximately 60 million, ten percent of the world’s population. One hundred years later, remained there less than 5 to 6 million of over. the
Residents were shipped to Europe as slaves or died in massaslachtpartijen, but the vast majority came to life because they have no resistance against the diseases that the Europeans brought, such as measles. Mexico, around 1500, for example, still 22 million inhabitants, kept at 1600 only a little more than 1 million of over.
the temperature on earth in the same period suddenly decreased, is also. Scientists speak about the Little Ice age, where the global temperature suddenly fell by half a degree, and in Europe even with 1 to 2 degrees. Also in our regions, it was suddenly much colder, and the winters much more severe.
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Both of these phenomena seem now to agree more with each other than was previously thought. Because along with the millions of native American population was 56 million acres of farmland, there is suddenly unused and could be the nature in an area as large as the whole of France, again to take its course. And the millions of trees and plants that it once again could grow, taking as much CO2 out of the air that the earth sometimes unnatural quickly cooled.
“The great mortality of the indigenous peoples of the Americas led to the leave of so much land that the carbon uptake by trees and plants have a clear impact on the global CO2 level and global temperature”, write the researchers, Alexander Koch and his colleagues in the study.
