Columbus Ice Age

I went to a World History Blog by Dr. Miland Brown. He shared an article titled "Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age" by Devin Powell. In it the man argues that Columbus was part of a series of events that led to a mini ice age in Europe. The author says "By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University." So they are saying that Columbus is the one to blame for the cooler weather that overcame Europe during a portion of time.

It does sound like a very plausible idea but for me it sounds a little farfetched. I do not believe that someone could cause a huge shift of global weather that effects a whole continent. They need a little more data to prove something like that was caused by Columbus. It is interesting the things that people come up with though and the ways they look at history. It is important though to look at how times in history have affected the environment because that can help us learn and change the ways we do things so that it does not happen again.

It was just an interesting post and something that not many people would ever think to look at.

http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2011/10/columbus-blamed-for-little-ice-age.html