The great dying, the Little Ice Age, and us

If the only Eurasians to reach the Americas had been peace-loving Spanish nuns—or peace-loving Chinese monks, for that matter—the Great Dying would have happened anyway.
When the tens of millions of native Americans died, the forests grew back on the land they used to farm. All those forests absorbed so much carbon dioxide that the average global temperature dropped, and what would otherwise have been a minor cyclical cooling became the Little Ice Age, writes columnist Gwynne Dyer.

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