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Inmates at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center left without power for days during polar vortex

by isabellinker30 Posted on February 7, 2019

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The scene at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park this past week was harrowing: prisoners — many of whom have yet to be convicted of a crime — relentlessly banged their fists against jail windows, some of them waving lights inside their pitch-black cells. The jail, which houses more than 1,600 inmates, had been without heat for days, just as the city’s temperatures had plummeted to single digits amid a polar-vortex event.

“This is an example of how people who may be voiceless are going to be affected by recurrent extreme weather events,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director of UPROSE, a Brooklyn-based community group (located in the same neighborhood as the detention center) that works on issues involving climate change and racial justice.

Indeed, detention centers like the one in Brooklyn are on the front lines of climate change. When temperatures plunge, inmates often lack access to heat; and during heat waves, inmates are often trapped in unbearable conditions sans air conditioning. When detention centers have lain in the path of hurricanes, many facilities have ignored evacuation orders, instead forcing prisoners to ride out the potentially deadly storms in their cells.

“It’s a clear violation of human rights,” Yeampierre told Grist.

As soon as word got out about the facility’s nightmarish conditions, the problem erupted into public outrage. “Disturbing reports have surfaced that the federal government left more than a thousand prisoners without heat, hot water or electricity during subzero temperatures at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement. “No one in New York should live in fear that they may freeze to death alone in the dark.”

(The Bureau of Prisons, which runs the Metropolitan Detention Center, did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment.)

Last Friday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center demanding that power and heat be restored. According to the Washington Post, some protesters even remained overnight in below-freezing temperatures in solidarity with inmates still without power.

“We’re really happy to see how many people stepped up and organized immediately; there was almost an organic rapid response from the community,” Yeampierre said.

During the demonstration, activists chanted “Move them out!” and demanded answers from jail officials. Some carried signs with the words, “Shut it down,” and “Torture at the MDC.” Tensions reached a boil on Sunday when police guards pepper-sprayed protesters, including family members and legal defenders, who attempted to enter the detention facility.

Prison officials attributed the power outage to an electrical fire that shut down primary power to much of the facility on January 27. But, according to a flurry of federal hearings this week, conditions in the prison started to go downhill as early as mid-January — two weeks before the fire.

Full power was restored to the facility on Monday, according to a Bureau of Prisons’ statement.

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Inmates at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center left without power for days during polar vortex

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Loop wants us to rethink consumption. It seems like a logistical disaster that might actually work.

by JITDietercovqb Posted on February 7, 2019

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Americans generate a lot of waste — so much that we’re running into problems with how to get rid of it. We’re poised to run out of space in landfills within two decades, according to one estimate. Historically, we’ve sent tons of our used plastic to China (693 metric tons in 2016, mostly from single-use food containers), but as of last year, it is no longer accepting that waste.

A new possible solution to this problem comes from a surprising source: Major brands like Unilever and Procter and Gamble are collaborating to reduce waste in an innovative shopping platform called Loop, announced last week. When you order, say, Häagen-Dazs ice cream from the service, the company will ship it to you in a sturdy container for which you’ll pay a small deposit. You’ll get that money back when you return the container via UPS. The company cleans the container, and refills it with product to sell again.

It kind of sounds like corporations are giving themselves a giant pat on the back for reinventing recycling — now with the annoyance of consumers having to do additional shipping! Luckily, it’s a bit better than that: Loop seems like a genuinely good idea that can tangibly help solve a clear problem, even if the process will inevitably face at least a few snafus as it gets up and running.

Loop calls itself “the milkman reimagined,” which is a pretty catchy description. While you might immediately fret about an under-recognized carbon footprint of all this shipping, it turns out it thought of that. Reusing the containers will save more material and energy than fashioning new ones each time — even with all the additional shipping. In fact, the full process is predicted to be as much as 75 percent better for the environment, according to estimates Loop shared with Fast Company.

There’s an additional possible benefit, too: Mindfully shepherding containers in and out of your house seems like a good way to be more aware of consumption more generally. Loop might even inspire you to reconsider some of your specific purchases: There’s a slightly higher mental barrier to impulse-purchasing lotion at CVS if you’re committing to this system of using the entire thing and investing in its carrier. That’s exactly the kind of additional consideration we should be giving all of this stuff.

There are some kinks to be worked out. For example, the timing of the subscription service seems a little wonky: Another shipment of a product could be set to be triggered when you return a container, as Fast Company explains. This helpfully eliminates the hazard of a bunch of, say, toothpaste piling up at your house faster than you can use it. But it also leaves a gap of however long it takes new toothpaste to ship during which you’ll be toothpaste-less. And speaking of toothpaste, it won’t come in tubes in the Loop model, Fast Company notes — they’re too difficult to refill. Instead, Unilever designed a chewable toothpaste. The possibility that this toothpaste is good seems … low. Loop is at least aware that there will be pitfalls: A press release says it will launch in just two cities to start, New York and Paris, so the platform can conduct “in-market learning experiments.”

For the consumer’s part, the logistics of shuttling these containers back and forth aren’t effortless, but it’s not as difficult as, say, taking beer bottles to the supermarket for reuse. You can send back several containers at once in a reusable Loop box, which is picked up from your door by UPS. Loop says it won’t require customers to clean the containers before sending them back, which might make it an even lower lift than recycling. The annoyance factor seems in line with other successful services that involve a lot of shipping, like Rent the Runway or Trunk Club (but without the liability of sending multi-thousand dollar gowns via post).

One other benefit? The sample container designs look much nicer than your average containers. Packaging displayed on Loop’s website includes a pair of Pantene Pro-V bottles made from lightweight aluminum. The marketing claims are less blaring, the brand lettering is smaller. Instead there’s “I reuse, I love the oceans” in faux-cursive on the side along with illustrations of friendly sea life. Honestly, seems like a nice thing to have in your bathroom! I’m into personal care products that don’t make it seem like you need to buy a zillion things to look good.

It’s also clear that this green halo presents a real upside for companies that participate. If consumers get into Loop, they’ll loosely lock themselves into a suite of specific products, something brands are eager to do. (This is the point of Amazon Dash buttons.) Companies participating will no doubt enjoy this benefit, along with the positive branding boost that comes from being involved in an innovative recycling platform. Plus, they’ve made no commitment to stop filling up landfills with traditional non-Loop packaging in addition to participating in Loop.

Still, I’m inclined to root for Loop, even if it will be hard to execute. It’s this very element — how hard it will be — that confirms how lofty its goals are. This isn’t a feel-good baby step like banning plastic straws, nor is it a feel-good commercial about using more wind power. It’s an attempt to change how we think about the products we currently consume mindlessly. In that light, its first victory might be making us think about them at all.

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Loop wants us to rethink consumption. It seems like a logistical disaster that might actually work.

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The House Natural Resource Committee’s climate change hearing turned into a heated conversation about race

by IndianaTraeger7 Posted on February 7, 2019

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On Wednesday, while the rest of the nation was busy scrolling through Pelosi State of the Union golf clap memes, two major panels — the House Natural Resources Committee and a separate subcommittee on energy and commerce — met to discuss the impact of global warming on the nation as a whole.

This marks the first time the Natural Resources Committee has held a hearing on climate change in a decade, and newly empowered House Democrats have even more hearings on climate planned throughout the month.

The hearing started off on a contentious foot, with speakers calling into question everything from climate science, to poverty, to whether the timing of the hearings was somehow disrespectful to Black History Month.

“I know you have made February as climate change month, I appreciate the fact that that you picked the shortest month of the year to to do that,” said Republican Rob Bishop, former chair of the Natural Resources Committee, to the current chair Raul Grijalva. “It also happens to be of course Black History Month, which I wish we could deal with other things.”

Bishop, who is white, went on argue that it would be more within the committee’s purview to focus on the preservation of sites historically relevant to the African-American community — such as historically black colleges or Central High School, where teens later known as the “Little Rock Nine” forced Arkansas to enforce federal desegregation laws — than for the panel to pontificate on climate change.

Throughout the hearing, speakers both emphasized and clashed over climate and energy as a racial and social justice issues.

Reverend Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, a nonprofit organization that produces a podcast combining hip hop music and climate action, called climate change “a civil and human rights issue,” and the “lunch counter moment for the 21st century.”

Elizabeth Yeampierre, representing the Brooklyn community-based organization UPROSE and the nationwide Climate Justice Alliance said that, “Our communities are the first and most impacted by the storms, fires, floods and droughts, and are disproportionately burdened by the pollution, poverty and systemic violence associated with the multinational corporations driving these ecological crises.” While she called for a transition away from fossil fuels, she acknowledged that it would not be “smooth” and that efforts would need to be made so no communities are left behind.

Not everyone agreed on how to uplift low-income families and neighborhoods of color. Derrick Hollie, president of Reaching for America, a group that advocates for affordable energy for communities of color, argued that African-American communities need cheaper sources of energy, as black residents tend to spend a larger proportion of their budgets on heating and cooling costs, partially due to lower-quality housing construction and insulation.

“The African-American community, we don’t have the luxury to pay more for green technologies, we need access to affordable energy to help heat our homes, power our stoves, and get back and forth to work,” said Hollie, who is black.

Instead of focusing on a transition to renewable energy, Hollie argued for greater investment in natural gas, which he said was more affordable. “For many Americans, this allows them not to have to choose between keeping the lights on and feeding their families,” he said.

Reverend Yearwood and Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado — both of whom are black — pushed back on Hollie, pointing to research into how black communities have disproportionately borne the health burdens of natural gas and other fossil fuels.

“For me as a minister, having buried a young girl because of asthma, that mother no longer cares about how much that utility bill would have cost.” said Yearwood. “We can definitely fight poverty and pollution at the same time.”

Several other speakers highlighted the ways in which Americans are already coping with the effects of climate change on health and safety.

“North Carolinians know about [climate change] the hard way. We have weathered two so-called 500 year floods within two years,” Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina told the committee. “For survivors of these storms, the true costs are incalculable.”

Governor Cooper (a Democrat) and Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts (a Republican) then teamed up to defend climate science and denounce efforts to open the Atlantic to offshore drilling.

Republicans invited controversial climatologist Judith Curry, whose work has been used by climate skeptics as an argument against taking action, to speak to the committee. She has voiced doubts over how much of an impact human activity has on the climate, and questions whether climate models projecting the effects of a warming world are reliable. (As a group, climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is a real threat and a result of human activity)

Curry was joined on the panel by her former colleague Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Curry retired in 2017). Unlike Curry, Cobb gave vehement testimony during the hearing’s second panel on the disastrous consequences of climate change, including prolonged droughts, wildfires, and storms.

Although the economic costs of those events “can be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” Cobb said,“their real toll, the vast human suffering left in their wake, is immeasurable.”

The Natural Resources Committee will meet again Thursday afternoon for more livestreamed debate on climate change and ocean health.

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The House Natural Resource Committee’s climate change hearing turned into a heated conversation about race

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Don’t look now, but the House just woke up to the cost of climate inaction

by margoclore3 Posted on February 6, 2019

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A bunch of Republicans and Democrats from the U.S. House of Representatives got together and came to a shocking bipartisan agreement: Climate change is a thing. And boy is it going to cost us.

A newly-minted subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce held its first hearing on Wednesday, looking at the environmental and economic consequences of climate change. And that’s a big deal: The Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change had not held a hearing on climate change in six years, after a long drought under GOP control.

Throughout the subcommittee hearing there was a constant theme: the high cost of inaction.

“Some of our colleagues may protest the cost of climate protection,” said Representative Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York, in his opening statement. Tonko noted that Americans are already suffering the costs of wildfires, storms, and flooding. “I implore you: Now is the time to join us. We want to work together but inaction is no longer an option.”

To drive home their points, Democrats invited a mix of high-profile witnesses including Brenda Ekwurzel, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She opened by talking about the Polar Vortex (a clapback on Trump’s tweet that mocked global warming?). She compared it to a “weak seal on a freezer door,” allowing cold blasts to sweep down from the Arctic.

Speaking about the productivity losses from a changing climate, Ekwurzel noted that, because extreme temperatures take a toll on workers, climate change could cost people $155 billion in lost wages every year. “Under a low emissions scenario, we could take a bite out of nearly half of those damages.” Ekwurzel made sure to highlight the two bombshell climate studies released last year: the federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment and the IPCC report.

Reverend Leo Woodberry of the Kingdom Living Temple Church in Florence, South Carolina, put stories and faces to the places already hit by Hurricanes Florence, Michael and Irma. “We don’t have to wait 12 years for a switch to be flipped. Americans are suffering the impacts of climate change right now, Woodberry said. “People are being displaced, communities are getting destroyed.”

Republicans, led by subcommittee ranking member John Shimkus from Illinois, had their own witness list, seemingly aimed to highlight what businesses are doing to combat climate change, instead of trying to challenge the science behind the issue.

Of note: The majority of Republicans on the climate subcommittee don’t have the best track record when it comes to understanding climate change.

Rich Powell, head of the conservative clean energy group ClearPath, talked about “politically-realistic” and “technology-inclusive” solutions to the challenge of climate change.

The U.S. Energy Association’s Barry Worthington emphasized the need for a diverse repertoire of renewables to fossil fuels to nuclear power, and fossil fuels. When Shimkus asked if it’s reasonable to drop fossil fuels entirely, Worthington balked, because the country depends on domestic oil and gas. But you know what else is domestic? Sunshine and wind.

Regardless, there was a measure of bipartisan agreement. Representative Diana DeGette from Colorado asked all the witnesses: “Do you all agree that climate change is real and human activity contributes?” All witnesses said yes. Quite the plot twist.

“That in itself is a revolutionary step for this committee. Thank you for that,” DeGette said.

Could this be a good omen in this time of climate upheaval? Ekwurzal, in her closing thoughts, put it thus: “I think it is going to be a cleaner, healthier world–when we act now.”

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Don’t look now, but the House just woke up to the cost of climate inaction

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We’re getting close to a bill for the Green New Deal. Here’s what we (kinda) know.

by MagaretGWDY Posted on February 6, 2019

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The Green New Deal, that bold proposal to avoid catastrophic climate change, has been heralded as exactly the sort of large-scale action such an existential threat demands. But what’s in it? As New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey prepare to unveil their bill in the coming days, details about what’s actually in the plan are, well, fuzzy.

The draft framework for the bill, championed by Ocasio-Cortez and an activist group called the Sunrise Movement, and originally posted on AOC’s website, promised a bounty of liberal delights: universal healthcare, a federal green jobs guarantee, a transition to local-scale agriculture, carbon-neutral by 2045, and more. But a lot can change in a month. An ambitious Green New Deal strode into Washington, D.C., at the start of the new Congress last month; a different version could soon emerge.

Most of the negotiation around what is and isn’t in the soon-to-be-released bill is being hammered out behind closed doors, between the two representatives presenting the draft and various justice and environment groups. Some of that haggling has wound up on Twitter.

Here’s a snapshot of where things stand so far: First, a Politico reporter noted that two of the most ambitious tenets of the bill, a federal jobs guarantee and universal healthcare, were on the chopping block. AOC’s Chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, immediately responded to the rumors, saying those elements are still in play.

Then, bans on nuclear power and carbon capture, and the call for an end to oil, gas, and coal development (a distressing development for some activists) were reportedly axed as well. At a Sunrise Movement watch party on Tuesday night in New York City, representatives of the organization said those bans are still part of the proposal. Bloomberg, on the other hand, is still reporting that the early version of the plan “doesn’t explicitly include the ban on fossil fuels.”

Clarity should come next week, when twin resolutions from AOC and Markey are expected to be introduced, according to representatives from Sunrise. But it’s no surprise that AOC and Markey’s legislation has changed during its gestation in D.C.; it will likely continue to evolve as it moves through the Washington meat grinder.

Democratic candidates for president have been proclaiming their support for the “idea” or the “concept” of a Green New Deal. Why the vague language? It might have something to do with the risk involved in backing a proposal that could require $7 trillion, and a commitment to universal healthcare and a ban on fossil fuels. So, if the bill does drop the more ambitious elements of the original draft, it could encourage more candidates to dream up their own versions that could still garner stamps of approval from progressive politicians.

The hard truth is that any Green New Deal bill, even with a number of concessions, has a zero percent chance of making it through the Senate. And, if by some miracle Congress managed to pass the bill, it would surely perish upon reaching Trump’s desk. But the effort could answer an important question: Is 2019 the year the House rallies behind climate legislation?

Grist staff writer Justine Calma contributed reporting to this article from New York City.

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We’re getting close to a bill for the Green New Deal. Here’s what we (kinda) know.

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Valve turners try to shut off Minnesota pipelines, say ‘politicians won’t act’

by Fausto99T761 Posted on February 5, 2019

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Four climate activists attempted to shut down the Enbridge Line 3 and Line 4 pipelines, which carry oil from Canada’s tar sands region into the U.S., on Monday.

In a statement, the group called themselves “The Four Necessity Valve Turners,” a nod to the so-called “necessity defense,” which it will likely use to defend its actions in court in the coming months.

“The extraction of the tar sands oil flowing through these pipes represents an ongoing atrocity against the boreal forests of Canada,” said Daniel Yildirim, one of the activists. “I refuse to stand by in silence as this river of death flows through the Great Lakes region.”

Added Allyson Polman, another of those involved in the action: “This is an act of grief for the state of violence the world is in. This is an act of celebration for the beauty of the earth.”

The four activists disrupted the pipeline near Grand Rapids in northern Minnesota. According to the Four Necessity Valve Turners website, their intervention involved cutting the locks on an emergency cut-off valve in the pipeline, and then manually turning the valve closed.

The group had informed Enbridge before conducting the action — and the company subsequently shut the pipeline off remotely. The activists, who are members of the Catholic Worker movement, have been arrested and are currently being held at the Itasca County jail. The quartet posted a video of its action on Twitter, writing: “Since politicians won’t act, we did.”

A Minnesota judge recently dropped charges against another group of activists for a similar valve-turning action in 2016. The decision meant the defendants were not able to make the argument that climate change has grown into such a dire emergency that it requires acts of civil disobedience.

A replacement for the Line 3 pipeline, which is more than 50 years old, has become a sticking point in Minnesota politics with youth activists and tribes arguing against new fossil fuel infrastructure on both climate and pollution grounds.

In a statement provided to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Enbridge said: “The actions taken to trespass on our facility and tamper with energy infrastructure were reckless and dangerous.”

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Valve turners try to shut off Minnesota pipelines, say ‘politicians won’t act’

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Citizen Scientist – Mary Ellen Hannibal

by Myrna Posted on February 5, 2019

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Citizen Scientist

Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction

Mary Ellen Hannibal

Genre: Environment

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 6, 2016

Publisher: The Experiment

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2016: “Intelligent and impassioned, Citizen Scientist is essential reading for anyone interested in the natural world.” Award-winning writer Mary Ellen Hannibal has long reported on scientists’ efforts to protect vanishing species, but it was only through citizen science that she found she could take action herself. As she wades into tide pools, spots hawks, and scours mountains, she discovers the power of the heroic volunteers who are helping scientists measure—and even slow—today’s unprecedented mass extinction. Citizen science may be the future of large-scale field research—and our planet’s last, best hope.

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Citizen Scientist – Mary Ellen Hannibal

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Is Budweiser the king of green beers? We unpacked its Super Bowl ads.

by ChristiFryman Posted on February 4, 2019

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Super Bowl LIII made history yesterday as the lowest-scoring NFL championship of all time. In other words, it was kind of a snoozefest. But if the lack of touchdowns — combined with shirtless Adam Levine — didn’t compel you to turn off the TV, you may have noticed an interesting trend in the big game’s beer commercials. Budweiser, the so-called “king of beers,” is trying really hard to make itself the beer of tree-hugging, health-conscious millennials.

In at least two (we’re going to leave the nature-filled, ASRM ear porn one alone for now) of its eight Super Bowl commercials for various products, beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev seemed to lean hard on environmentally-themed marketing messages.

In the most blatant enviro-targeting ad, the scene opens with a Dalmatian sitting atop a Bud-laden wagon pulled by Clydesdales romping through a picturesque field, which upon zoom-out reveals itself to be a wind farm. Cue the line “Now brewed with wind power, for a better tomorrow.” Oh, and did we mention it’s set to the tune of “Blowin’ in the Wind?” Subtle.

Then, in a Monty Python-esque epic sequence of royal mishaps and alcoholic adventuring, the company made it clear Bud Light is brewed with no corn syrup, directly calling out its competitors — Miller Lite and Coors Light — for using the much-maligned syrup.

Anheuser-Busch is far from the first company to take advantage of Americans’ growing concerns over climate change. Remember those midterm election campaign ads touting candidates’ climate credentials? We certainly do. But to see green issues front and center (at least for 30 seconds at a time) during the Super Bowl was a little surreal to some viewers.

“I never thought there’d be an intersection between AGRICULTURE and FOOTBALL, but then came the BREW-HA-HA about CORN SYRUP in BEER!” Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel tweeted about the king’s quest ad. But as Haspel points out in her extended thread, being an environmentally friendly beer company takes more than a few commercials.

The criticism of Bud’s Super Bowl ads has been swift. Understandably, the corn industry was pretty miffed that America’s favorite beer would publicly turn on corn farmers.

Bud Light uses rice to do the same job that corn syrup or other added sugars do in competing brews. So … how much does that really matter, planet-wise? Corn syrup, rice syrup, or no syrup, beer has never exactly been a health beverage. Rice and corn both have their associated emissions — but so do all foods. So maybe we should just eat less meat, and get over it?

As for the wind power, Anheuser-Busch InBev is indeed making moves to get to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2025. That’s big coming from such a massive company — the largest brewer in the world. AB isn’t just responsible for big names like Bud and Michelob, it also owns hipster favorites like Elysian, Devils Backbone, and hundreds more. The company set goals to improve sourcing, water stewardship and packaging for all its brews over the next several years. This is all great, and so is the push for greater transparency of ingredients in alcoholic beverages — but before we raise a glass, there are a few more things to consider.

Anheuser-Busch InBev is still a gigantic corporation, and one with apparent ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose rejection of climate science and environmental regulation is so extreme that even Exxon Mobil decided to jump ship.

So at the end of the day, how should we view the green-tinged promise (and it’s not even Saint Patrick’s Day yet!) of these beer ads? Supporting progressive climate action on a political scale, in addition to its company-wide initiatives, would likely be in Anheuser-Busch InBev’s best interest. It’s also in our best interest if we want to keep drinking beer in the years to come. Climate change is coming for our crops, including rice, corn, hops, and barley — so unless we act fast, we won’t even have a frothy pint to drown our sorrows in.

Now if that doesn’t send you running for the vegan chicken wings and electric cars, I don’t know what will.

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Is Budweiser the king of green beers? We unpacked its Super Bowl ads.

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European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate

by SanfordTomlinso Posted on February 4, 2019

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found.

Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90 percent in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.

This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.

The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15 degrees C (0.27 degrees F) in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found.

“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the UCL team of Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin, and Simon Lewis.

The drop in temperature during this period is known as the “Little Ice Age,” a time when the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal, and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries.

The UCL researchers found that the European colonization of the Americas indirectly contributed to this colder period by causing the deaths of about 56 million people by 1600. The study attributes the deaths to factors including introduced disease, such as smallpox and measles, as well as warfare and societal collapse.

Researchers then calculated how much land indigenous people required and then subsequently fell into disuse, finding that around 55 million hectares, an area roughly equivalent to France, became vacant and was reclaimed by carbon dioxide-absorbing vegetation.

The study sketches out a past where humans were influencing the climate long before the industrial revolution, where the use of fossil fuels for the manufacturing of goods, generation of electricity, and transportation has allowed tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.

Widespread deforestation for agriculture and urban development has also spurred the release of greenhouse gases, causing the planet to warm by around 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) over the past century. Scientists have warned that the world has little over a decade to drastically reduce emissions or face increasingly severe storms, drought, heatwaves, coastal flooding, and food insecurity.

The revegetation of the Americas after European arrival aided declines of global carbon content in the air, dropping by around 7 to 10 parts of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere. This compares to the 3 ppm of carbon dioxide that humanity is currently adding to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels.

“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaching and using tree-planting to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” study coauthor Chris Brierley told the BBC. “And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the great dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few parts per million.”

“This is useful,” he continued, “it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”

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European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate

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European colonization of the Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate

by LavonneGrimley Posted on February 4, 2019

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found.

Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90 percent in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.

This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.

The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15 degrees C (0.27 degrees F) in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found.

“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the UCL team of Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin, and Simon Lewis.

The drop in temperature during this period is known as the “Little Ice Age,” a time when the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal, and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries.

The UCL researchers found that the European colonization of the Americas indirectly contributed to this colder period by causing the deaths of about 56 million people by 1600. The study attributes the deaths to factors including introduced disease, such as smallpox and measles, as well as warfare and societal collapse.

Researchers then calculated how much land indigenous people required and then subsequently fell into disuse, finding that around 55 million hectares, an area roughly equivalent to France, became vacant and was reclaimed by carbon dioxide-absorbing vegetation.

The study sketches out a past where humans were influencing the climate long before the industrial revolution, where the use of fossil fuels for the manufacturing of goods, generation of electricity, and transportation has allowed tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.

Widespread deforestation for agriculture and urban development has also spurred the release of greenhouse gases, causing the planet to warm by around 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) over the past century. Scientists have warned that the world has little over a decade to drastically reduce emissions or face increasingly severe storms, drought, heatwaves, coastal flooding, and food insecurity.

The revegetation of the Americas after European arrival aided declines of global carbon content in the air, dropping by around 7 to 10 parts of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere. This compares to the 3 ppm of carbon dioxide that humanity is currently adding to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels.

“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaching and using tree-planting to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” study coauthor Chris Brierley told the BBC. “And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the great dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few parts per million.”

“This is useful,” he continued, “it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”

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European colonization of the Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate

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