It is the icy 16th century. Europe is winter and fear bound. The Ottomans led by Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the Belgrade fortress in a decisive battle and moved into Europe. Turks have expelled Hungarians from Banat and Slavonia, reaching Vienna – and they are to spend a century ruling over the southeast of the continent. The Medieval times are over, old empires have vanished, and the world is ruled by epidemics, wars and death.
Nevertheless, the continent wakes up in the dark – the first sprouts emerge under the snow. Crop yields are low, bringing about famine, and the soil is ravaged, but this also unsettles the old aristocracy – behind the thick walls, towns are developing, the interests of powerful artisan guilds surpass the old nobility, hungry peasants revolt, the oppressed seek their rights, newspapers are being developed and Copernicus’ ideas gradually gain ground. German theologian Martin Luther has nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg – the reformation commences, and Europe descends into wars which are to last the entire century and forever change the character of the Old Continent.
In distant oversea countries, Spanish and Portuguese sailors discover a new, promised world – America. Sailing ships bring treasures untold from warm waters to European ports – the colonialism era and the rise of the West have begun. A century later, travelling directions are to change – Europeans in ever larger numbers escape old injustices and religious confinement by travelling into the New World, which appears deserted, almost desolate.
Still, developed civilizations existed here and vanished in the early 16th century with the arrival of the first European conquistadors. Around 60 million American natives perished – in disease epidemics brought by colonists, warfare, plunders and genocide, which swept the coasts of the New World in decades after Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.
Their exodus left a far-reaching, unexpected mark – a new study by a team from the University College London revealed that the destruction of indigenous people of America brought about the decrease in global temperature and the Little Ice Age. The study titled Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492 by Alexander Koch and associates found itself in the limelight of most world and domestic media.
The 16th-century chronicles noted a drop in temperatures in Europe and crop failure, while the largest river courses froze during winters – the world looked like the scene in the famous Bruegel painting Hunters in the Snow, which was created in the mid-century.
The decimation of around 10% of the global population, which was the percentage that lived in the Americas, transformed the character of the American continent in the following century – agricultural use of land was interrupted, vegetation regrowth occurred, and forests started to spring. It is considered that forests regrew in a region of the size comparable to a part of Europe ruled by the Ottoman Empire at that time.
With the profusion of new vegetation, the carbon-dioxide concentration radically dropped in the atmosphere – ice samples point to it decreasing for about 7-10ppm. As the amount of CO2 decreased (similar to its rise in the industrial era), global warming was reduced – the global temperature was low enough to cause winters in Europe and along with it, dramatic changes in the Old Continent.
The study has also caused an uproar because it demonstrates how Earth’s climate system is delicate – reforestation of large regions evidently can stop and reverse global warming. Regrettably, the amounts of CO2 which people emit into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels appear completely beyond our reach – the IPPCC reports state that it amounts to 3 ppm annually. Thus, in just two years, the amount of emitted CO2 is so significant that it completely cancels the effect of the reforestation that led to the destruction of the Native Americans.
S.B.
Photo: The Hunetrs in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565. / Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / Google Art Project – Wikimedia Commons