https://www.capebretonpost.com/opinion/columnists/gwynne-dyer-the-great-dying-the-little-ice-age-and-us-282336/
GWYNNE DYER: The ‘Great Dying,’ the ‘Little Ice Age,’ and us
Gwynne Dyer
Published: Feb 07 at 7:38 a.m.
Despite advances, world does not appear poised to prevent the next major
threat to our population
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 lead researcher of the team at University College London who joined
up all these dots is doctoral candidate Alexander Koch. (He hasn’t even
got his PhD yet.) He borrowed the phrase ‘The Great Dying’ from the
paleontologists, who use it to describe the mass extinction event at the
end of the Permian era 252 million years ago, the worst of them all. It
works just as well for human beings.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, there were
about 60 million people living in the Americas, and 99 per cent of them
were already farmers. Eurasian civilisations had a bit of a head-start
on them – iron tools, ocean-going ships, even gunpowder – but their
numbers and their economies were very similar: there were 70 or 80
million Europeans, and most of them were farmers too.
A century later there were only six million native Americans left: a 90
per cent fatality rate. Yet at that time, there were still only about a
quarter-million Europeans in the Americas. They clearly couldn’t have
killed the other 54 million natives – but their diseases did.
Even now, journalists reporting on this story go on referring to the
European ‘genocide’ of the native peoples, but that’s nonsense. The
Europeans killed some tens of thousands of Incas, Aztecs and others in
various battles, and they took slaves to work their mines and grow their
sugar, but why would they cause a genocide?
The problem was that the native Americans had absolutely no inherited
resistance to the quick-killer Eurasian diseases that the Europeans
brought with them. Those diseases had emerged in the densely populated
countries of Europe and East Asia one at a time over thousands of years,
passing from the herds and flocks of domesticated animals to their human
owners, who now also lived in herd-like conditions.
Each one of these new diseases killed millions before the survivors
developed some resistance, but the Asian, European and African
populations had time to recover before the next one emerged. The native
Americans got all the plagues at once, and they had no comparable
plagues of their own to give back to the invaders because they didn’t
keep large herds of animals.
The tragedy was inevitable from first contact. If the only Eurasians to
reach the Americas had been peace-loving Spanish nuns – or peace-loving
Chinese monks, for that matter – the Great Dying would have happened
anyway. And the farms of those who died would still have been abandoned.
What really interests Alexander Koch and his colleagues is that this
caused the largest abandonment of farmland in all history. The six
million survivors didn’t need all those farms, so the forests came back
quickly. As they grew they absorbed huge amounts of carbon dioxide,
cutting the amount in the global atmosphere by about ten parts per
million (10 ppm).
That dropped the average global temperature, which was already a little
lower than usual because of cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit. The
Little Ice Age lasted for more than two hundred years and probably
caused a couple of million extra deaths in local famines in Eurasia, so
at least a little bit of the misery travelled the other way.
But our impact on the environment has now grown so large that a ten ppm
cut in our emissions is almost meaningless. We are currently adding
around ten ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every four years.
On the other hand, if we were to reforest all the land that was cleared
around the world in the past 150 years but is not prime agricultural
land, we could sequester 50 ppm of carbon dioxide. That might win us the
time we need to get our carbon emissions down without triggering runaway
warming.
Instead, the Brazilians elect Jair Bolsonaro to clear-cut the Amazon and
the United States elects Donald Trump to outsource United States climate
policy to the fossil fuel industry. We know a great deal more than the
native Americans did about the elements that would decide their fate,
but we may be no better than they were at avoiding it.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and
Work)’.
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