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Seriously — no irony, sarcasm, or edginess implied at all — isn’t the whole point supposed to be to remain objective, and dismiss the bias, wherever it’s coming from?

I’ll admit that I do have a personal take on this discussion.

.....In the late 70’s, a very good friend, a mining engineer, went to Mexico. As a former official representing the U.N. delegation for the Greek Colonel’s military regime, he needed a new job. To make a long story short, he wandered through the jungle as the point man for a consortium of partners and found a very, very old silver & gold mining site. According to the original, Spanish colonial (17th century) map of the area, the location he’d found was a valley almost a mile deep. But the topography was more or less flat. The valley — roughly an oval, miles wide by many miles long — had been completely filled in with “tailings,” the rock left over after all the valuable bits had been taken away.

I always wondered how many slaves had had to work, digging how many hours every day, every week, every month, for how many decades and centuries (the opening of the mine had pre-dated the Spanish Armada and it probably continued to 1815), to fill in that nearly mile-deep ‘valley.’

So, reading about the “CO2 drop linked to Columbus’ Arrival” that did tend to reinforce my own presupposition that there may have been many more locals on hand than people realized. Which seemed to be confirmed by the Antarctic ice core samples.

As far as the relative benefit or harm, though, of CO2 in the atmosphere, no matter who (or what) is responsible for pumping it out, the most recent data (sponsored by the coal industry, of all people) would seem to suggest there is cause for concern, based on the **rate of change,** and perhaps prior history. If one can make the leap of logic that there some degree of human causation had a hand in kicking off the “Little Ice Age.”