Columbus stopped global warming

Here is some climate science news:

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.

Got that? The Aztecs and other American Indians were wrecking the environment by clear-cutting forests and causing global warming. Columbus was not intending to save the climate in 1492, but his discovery had the effect of restoring the trees and cooling Europe. Columbus should be a hero to tree-huggers everywhere! Especially those who value trees and global cooling more than people.