Genghis Khan the GREEN: Invader killed so many people that carbon levels plummeted

[Shogun]

:damn2:

Genghis Khan killed so many people that forests grew and carbon levels dropped | Mail Online

Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history - after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest.

The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims a new study.

The deaths of 40million people meant that large areas of cultivated land grew thick once again with trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

And, although his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to accept, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling.

‘It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,’ said Julia Pongratz, who headed the research by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology.

‘Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth's landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture,’ she told Mongabay.com.

The 700million tons of carbon absorbed as a result of the Mongol empire is about the same produced in a year from the global use of petrol.


The Carnegie study measured the carbon impact of a number of historical events that involved a large number of deaths.

Time periods also looked at included the Black Death in Europe, the fall of China's Ming Dynasty and the conquest of the Americas.

All of these events share a widespread return of forests after a period of massive depopulation.

But the bloody Mongol invasion, which lasted a century and a half and led to an empire that spanned 22 per cent of the Earth’s surface, immediately stood out for its longevity.

And this is how Genghis Khan, who repeatedly wiped out entire settlements, was able to scrub more carbon from the atmosphere than any other despot.

‘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,’ explained Pongratz.

‘But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion... there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon.’

Though the Khan will remain known as Genghis the Destroyer and not Genghis the Green, Dr Pongratz hopes that her research will lead to future historians examining environmental impact as well as the more traditional aspects of study.

‘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,’ she said.

'We cannot ignore the knowledge we have gained.’

http://carnegiescience.edu/news/war_plague_no_match_deforestation_driving_co2_buildup

Stanford, CA— Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget. Dwarfing both of these events, however, has been the historical trend towards increasing deforestation, which over centuries has released vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as crop and pasture lands expanded to feed growing human populations. Even Genghis Kahn couldn’t stop it for long.

“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” says Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, lead author of a new study on the impact of historical events on global climate published in the January 20, 2011, online issue of The Holocene. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth‘s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.”

Clearing forests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the trees and other vegetation are burned or when they decay. The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from deforestation is recognizable in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica before the fossil-fuel era.

But human history has had its ups and downs. During high-mortality events, such as wars and plagues, large areas of croplands and pastures have been abandoned and forests have re-grown, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Pongratz decided to see how much effect these events could have had on the overall trend of rising carbon dioxide levels. Working with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and with global ecologist Ken Caldeira at Carnegie, she compiled a detailed reconstruction of global land cover over the time period from 800 AD to present and used a global climate-carbon cycle model to track the impact of land use changes on global climate. Pongratz was particularly interested in four major events in which large regions were depopulated: the Mongol invasions in Asia (1200-1380), the Black Death in Europe (1347-1400), the conquest of the Americas (1519-1700), and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty in China (1600-1650).

“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,” says 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.”

The global impact of forest re-growth in even the long-lasting events was diminished by the continued clearing of forests elsewhere in the world. But in the case of the Mongol invasions, which had the biggest impact of the four events studied, re-growth on depopulated lands stockpiled nearly 700 million tons of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. This is equivalent to the world’s total annual demand for gasoline today.

Pongratz points out the relevance of the study to current climate issues. “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,” she says. “So there is a large potential for our land-use choices to alter the global carbon cycle. 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.

 

[88m3]

I'm sure the liberals will latch onto this and try and make it become a reality.

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

I'm sure the liberals will latch onto this and try and make it become a reality.

#nothekingsmen

 

[Techniec]

that motherfukker turned southern Afghanistan into a desert

 

[The Real]

 

[Brown_Pride]

until I listened to Dan Carlins pod cast on this I never gave Khan his due. Easily the gulliest man in history. Didn't they say the middle east is still recovering from the ass whoopin he put on the area? Europe lucked out becaues there was NOTHING that would have stopped them from marching all the way to the Atlantic, and as the Christians/Catholics in Europe at the time were on a very self important tip my bet is they would have attempted to fight it out and quite possibly been destroyed completely.

History is nuts that way.

 

[Techniec]

until I listened to Dan Carlins pod cast on this I never gave Khan his due. Easily the gulliest man in history. Didn't they say the middle east is still recovering from the ass whoopin he put on the area? Europe lucked out becaues there was NOTHING that would have stopped them from marching all the way to the Atlantic, and as the Christians/Catholics in Europe at the time were on a very self important tip my bet is they would have attempted to fight it out and quite possibly been destroyed completely.

History is nuts that way.

ya europe got spared

africa too, thanks to baybars and the mamluks

 

[88m3]

that motherfukker turned southern Afghanistan into a desert

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

 

[The Real]

that motherfukker turned southern Afghanistan into a desert

He got your people (and everyone else in the region) still rocking his title/last name.

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

Dailymail tho :blakeface:

no other sources..

i see this is posted on st0rmfr0nt as well

 

[Shogun]

until I listened to Dan Carlins pod cast on this I never gave Khan his due. Easily the gulliest man in history. Didn't they say the middle east is still recovering from the ass whoopin he put on the area? Europe lucked out becaues there was NOTHING that would have stopped them from marching all the way to the Atlantic, and as the Christians/Catholics in Europe at the time were on a very self important tip my bet is they would have attempted to fight it out and quite possibly been destroyed completely.

History is nuts that way.

what they did to the Russians after that raiding party slaughtered their armies tho

 

[Shogun]

Dailymail tho :blakeface:

no other sources..

i see this is posted on st0rmfr0nt as well

what you doin browsin st0rmfr0nt tho?

where i found it

http://historum.com/asian-history/59720-genghis-khan-great-not-so-great.html

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

what you doin browsin st0rmfr0nt tho?

where i found it

Genghis Khan: Great or Not-So-Great? - Historum - History Forums

I just googled the article name, it was like the 4th result

that website just links the dailymail article. There aren't any other sources and thats the problem

 

[blackzeus]

:damn2:

And, although his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to accept, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling.

Gotta love how the NWO spreads their agenda in a slick manner

 

[NkrumahWasRight Is Wrong]

Ridiculous. Genghis was a beast in many ways, good and bad.



Some of you probably know this already, but just in case (since Khan rarely comes up here):

Zerjal et al. (2003)[6] identified a Y-chromosomal lineage present in about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the world total). The paper suggests that the pattern of variation within the lineage is consistent with a hypothesis that it originated in Mongolia about 1,000 years ago, and thus several generations prior to the birth of Genghis. Such a spread would be too rapid to have occurred by genetic drift, and must therefore be the result of selection. The authors propose that the lineage is carried by likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives, and that it has spread through social selection due to the power that Genghis Khan and his direct descendants held and a society which allowed one man to have many children through having multiple wives and widespread rape in conquered cities.[7]

According to Family Tree DNA, Genghis Khan is believed to have belonged to Haplogroup C-M217.

.5% of the world population = 35490000 descendants/relatives approx..