American colonization caused Little Ice Age
Epidemics brought by European settlers killed such a huge number of indigenous Americans that there was a drop in CO2in the atmosphere, cooling the climate. Regrowth of forests on depopulated land caused around half of the drop in carbon that has been observed in Antarctic ice cores, and contributed to the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the 1600s. Researchers estimate that colonization led to the deaths of 56 million of the estimated 60 million inhabitants of North and South America between 1492 and 1600.
BBC | 6 min readReference: Quaternary Science Reviews paper
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