Could the depopulation of the Americas have caused Europe’s Little Ice Age?
ROME — I was living here and researching the book when I reached William Ruddiman, an American scientist who had come across a graph of historical methane levels that unlocked a fascinating new insight into the history of climate change, one that connected ancient Europe and the newly discovered Americas. Ruddiman, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Virginia, was near retirement after spending his early career examining ocean sediments for hints of ancient temperatures. He focused his later research on the major drivers of the world’s climate. But the data, gleaned from air bubbles trapped in the Antarctic ice sheet, surprised him. “I had a very clear expectation of what those concentrations should have been doing,” he said, when I interviewed him over the phone from my office in Rome. Monsoons in the tropics have been weakening for the past 10,000 years, shrinking the swamps and wetlands that create most of the world’s natural methane. The trend in the ice cores should have bee
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