America colonisation ‘cooled Earth’s climate’

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Media captionMark Maslin and Chris Brierley: “A genocide-generated drop in carbon dioxide”
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate. “The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures,” Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews. He commented: “Scientists understand that the so-called Little Ice Age was caused by several factors – a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a series of large volcanic eruptions, changes in land use and a temporary decline in solar activity.

Source: www.bbc.com