Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Collective Soul - Scream

Did smallpox suspend manmade global warming in the 1500s?
Wild theory of the nonce: did the devastation of the American populations post-contact-with-Europe allow nature to retake enough agricultural land that plants removed enough carbon from the air for temperatures to drop, causing the Little Ice Age? Fewer manmade fires would also put less carbon into the air to begin with.

I'm not convinced. Consider the Black Death of 1347 which wiped out a third of the more industrial European population and millions more worldwide. That should have had a similar effect on atmospheric carbon, but the Little Ice Age did not start until the mid-1500s. The European population was rebounding at the time that the Americans were being wiped out, so the effects of the drop of American population should be offset to a fair degree by this increasing population and industrialization overseas.

It does seem that they've found something in "a precipitous drop in the amount of charcoal in the [earth] samples" about 500 years ago, but their samples are selected to be near "population centers and ... sites from the surrounding areas". The charcoal difference in these samples is going to be overstated because that's where most of the charcoal burning was taking place until the people died and it wasn't there anymore. We need analysis of samples from around the world to get a better reading of the effect on the atmosphere.

Stray thought: If the Americans were practicing slash and burn agriculture before the Europeans got there, their carbon output per person might have been greater than in Europe.

Stray thought: I read a while back that Roman industry might have had an effect on the climate. Apparently pollution was found in Greenland ice cores. I can't find a link about climate effects, but people have used ice cores to measure the processing of copper and lead and trace part of this processing back to the mining source.