Why Warmists Think Genghis Khan Was Cool

A study from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology to be published in The Holocene online journal outlines an unexpected benefit of rampaging Mongolian hordes – they’re great for helping remove Co2 from the atmosphere.

How did Genghis and his hordes manage to have such an effect? Simple – massive depopulation led to reforestation. Less people = more trees. As greenie website Mongabay notes:

The answer to how this happened can be told in one word: reforestation. When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Mongabay. How Genghis Khan Cooled the Planet.

The author of the study, Julia Pongratz, looked at other instances of massive die-offs of human population, but concluded they didn’t quite cut it in terms of reducing Co2 output:

“We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn’t enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil,” explains Pongratz. “But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion and the conquest of the Americas there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.”

You see, it just goes to show you – if you’re going to do a job, you need to do it properly. Ms Pongratz believes that her work can be of great use in planning future carbon reduction strategies:

Pongratz argues that her study has relevance for the world’s current climate crisis: “Today about a quarter of the net primary production on the Earth’s land surface is used by humans in some way, mostly through agriculture. […]. In the past we have had a substantial impact on global climate and the carbon cycle, but it was all unintentional. Based on the knowledge we have gained from the past, we are now in a position to make land-use decisions that will diminish our impact on climate and the carbon cycle. We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained.”

Call me cynical, but what’s with this latest trend amongst the warmists to link all historical events with climate change? Here again we have a study which links pre-industrial human activity with the climate. I thought the IPCC – holder of the holy consensus – had stated that anthropogenic influence on the climate could only be detected from 1970?

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UPDATE:

Looks like The Daily Mail and others have picked up on this story and are now running it.

Cheers!