3. An Unexpected Consequence of Temujin’s Conquests
As one researcher put it: “We found that during the short events such as the Black Death and the Ming Dynasty collapse, the forest re-growth wasn’t enough to overcome the emissions from decaying material in the soil … But during the longer-lasting ones like the Mongol invasion and the conquest of the Americas there was enough time for the forests to re-grow and absorb significant amounts of carbon“. The study demonstrated that the depopulation and disruptions caused by the Mongol invasions were so massive that they led to a significant drop in the amount of cleared land under cultivation. Then as now, people chopped down forests to clear land for agriculture. That automatically increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because vegetation stores carbon. Trees and shrubs are what scientists call “carbon sinks”, defined as things that absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than they release.
