Climate Change

Peter Berkeley passed this item along from Snopes:

A 14 August 1912 article from a New Zealand newspaper contained a brief story about how burning coal might produce future warming by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.

If anyone had any doubt about climate change being real The New York Times has published data from NASA scientific studies showing that the “Earth’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest in nearly 140 years of record-keeping and a continuation of an unmistakable warming trend.” 

Even worse the last 5 warmest years recorded have been the last 5 years. And the last 18 of 19 warmest years have been since 2001.

Even though 190 nations have signed the Paris Agreement it just may be too late.

In school you may have read about the “Little  Ice Age” that occurred in Medieval times and caused very cold temperatures in Europe. Now a group of scientists at University College in London England are advancing a theory that it was not volcanic activity or cyclical decreases in solar radiation that caused this cooling, but the impact of European colonization of America.

Researchers estimated from population data that 60 million people were living in the Americas at the end of the 15th century, representing a tenth of the world population. Within one hundred years of first European contact, that population “was ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse.” 

First Nations were devastated, with an estimate of five to six million people remaining after the first century post European contact. Such a calamitous reduction in civilizations meant that land that was cultivated by First Nations was abandoned, and “repossessed” by the forest and bushland. The size of that cultivated land reclaimed by nature is estimated to have been 56 million hectares, “close in size to a modern country like France”.