Well there you go. Although I am adamantly opposed to any large-scale geoengineering, it is good to know there is an historic record of what works.
And Stanford's Paul Ehrlich? His 1968 book "The Population Bomb" gave pseudo-scientific credibility to the idea that humans in large areas of Africa and South Asia should be sterilized. Voluntarily or coerced or forced. I've forgotten how many men in India were subjected to this, it's in the millions. (8 million in 1975 alone)
So the story below should be right up his alley.
From the BBC, January 31, 2019:
Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.
That's the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.
The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.
This pulled down enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere to eventually chill the planet.
It's a cooling period often referred to in the history books as the "Little Ice Age" - a time when winters in Europe would see the Thames in London regularly freeze over.
What does the study show?"The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO₂ and global surface air temperatures," Alexander Koch and colleagues write in their paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
The team reviewed all the population data it could find on how many people were living in the Americas prior to first contact with Europeans in 1492.It then assessed how the numbers changed in following decades as the continents were ravaged by introduced disease (smallpox, measles, etc), warfare, slavery and societal collapse.
It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years....
....MUCH MORE, video, ice fairs etc.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now”
—Ehrlich, Population Bomb, 1968 - didn't happen
“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct,” Ehrlich said. “Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”
—Ehrlich, 1970, - didn't happen
New York Times, November 25 1969:
A STERILITY DRUG IN FOOD IS HINTED; Biologist Stresses Need to Curb Population Growth
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 24--A possibility that the Government might have to put sterility drugs in reservoirs and in food shipped to foreign countries to limit human multiplication was envisioned today by a leading crusader on the population problem....
If interested see also:
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-salt-lake-tribune-1967-dire-famine-b/100164086/
