No, not today: the China of the Han Dynasty.
I'm not sure I believe her: if for no other reason that the high death rate of the Black plague and reforestation didn't cause the climate to become colder: in Europe, at least, the high mortality was because the climate had already started to get colder and there were a lot of local famines before the Black death hit Europe...
A period covering the heyday of both the Roman Empire and China's Han dynasty saw a big rise in greenhouse gases, according to a new study... Methane was probably released during deforestation to clear land for farming and from the use of charcoal as fuel, for instance to smelt metal to make weapons, says lead author Celia Sapart of Utrecht University in the Netherlands...
True,some articles proclaimed the depopulation by Genghis Khan destroying 40 million folks in China and the middle East caused global cooling because the land reforested itself after those inconvenient polluting homo sapiens died off...but I'm not sure they are right either: That assumes the depopulated areas reverted to forests...
What happened was the green irrigated lands became deserts...and the climate change was the cause of the Mongols invasion of China, not the result of it.
But rice paddies do produce a lot of methane, so maybe this is the real reason.
But the article hardly discusses rice paddies, probably because the author doesn't know much about rice growing, let alone much about Asian history...
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