Question

**please answer all questions for good rating**

Background

Humans and the Climate

Over the last few decades, researchers have discovered evidence that the native peoples of the Americas before the year 1492 (pre-Colombian) were way more abundant than we had previously thought, with populations in the tens of millions. Not surprisingly, these abundant native populations altered the land markedly, mostly by controlled burning. Year after year they burned millions of acres of forest and prairie alike, managing the land to suit their needs. After 1492, the natives appear to have suffered huge losses of life (~90%), most likely due to an unfortunate susceptibility to diseases from their European visitors (e.g., smallpox, etc.), and the wide-scale controlled burning came to an end.

Not long after, from around 1500–1750 (experts disagree on the start and end times of this period), the Earth went through a global cooling period, often known as the Little Ice Age. Some researchers at Stanford University have speculated that the pandemic of the native American peoples, loss of burning, and subsequent reforestation could have been responsible for a significant portion of the cooling trend observed (Dull et al., 2010).

Questions

Given what you know about plants, photosynthesis, and the carbon cycle, explain how this could have happened.

• If true, what does that say about the impact of plants on the Earth's climate?

• How might this relate to present-day climate change?

Answer 1

Plants take in atmospheric carbon dioxide which is primarily responsible for heating the earth.

It can be said that emergence of plants after the pandemic has led to the cooling of global atmosphere to an extent that it led to ice age. Plants also extract minerals from earth such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron by weathering the earths surface. This process induces huge changes in the global carbon cycle and subsequently on the climate

Through transpiration, plants keep the climate stable and offset temperature and moisture fluctuations through transpiration.

Plants also offsets the greenhouse gases by taking in CO2 and releasing oxygen.