Dear MEL Topic Readers,
America colonisation ‘cooled Earth's climate’
It is estimated that over 50 million indigenous Americas had lived in North, Central, and South America before Columbus brought the most unwelcomed gifts to the continent at the end of the 15th century. They were western civilization, colonization, and deadly diseases, such as smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, and cholera. Since indigenous people of the Americas were so vulnerable to these devastating diseases that their population was reduced to only one-tenth of what it had been a century ago. It is called the Great Dying.
The scale of population reduction in such a short period of time devastated not only the civilizations of the indigenous but also their cultivation.
A large part of their farmland, about the size of present France, was abandoned and was repossessed by forest and savannah.
Recent studies of the air bubbles trapped in ice cores in Antarctica found that there was a fall in global carbon dioxide levels during the period.
Now, a new study concluded that a decline in the use of fire and grow-back of natural vegetation in Americas caused a drop in CO2 in the air substantial enough to cool the temperature of the globe, especially in Europe combined with the little ice age.
Was that really a genocide and epidemic caused global cool-down?
Enjoy reading and learn what human activities could do to the environment.
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