Jordan Peterson on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1769

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Historians' estimates of deaths attributable to the 13th-century Mongol conquests vary widely, with the most commonly repeated figure being roughly 40 million (a number rooted in a 1978 population-history estimate whose methodology has been questioned), and some outlier estimates ranging as high as 60-100 million; a 50-70 million floor is on the high end of the range and implausible as a baseline figure given that total world population at the time was under about 450 million. The claim that the resulting depopulation measurably changed the planet's carbon footprint traces to a single 2011 modeling study (Pongratz et al., published in The Holocene) that found Mongol-era reforestation absorbed roughly 700 million tons of carbon, but the study's own authors and title describe this as a "minor" global effect, reducing atmospheric CO2 by less than 0.1 parts per million, a negligible amount next to the roughly 100 ppm rise since industrialization. Subsequent peer-reviewed work re-examining comparable mass-mortality events, including the much larger and better-documented post-1492 depopulation of the Americas, likewise finds only gradual, modest, and disputed effects on atmospheric CO2 from historical population collapses, not a large or dramatic climate signal. Overall status: exaggerated, the death toll figure is above mainstream historical estimates and the carbon-footprint claim overstates a modeling result its own authors characterized as minor.