The DOI matches its Crossref record; 46 of the 46 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Coupled climate–carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric CO 2 between ad 800 and 1850
Abstract
Historic events such as wars and epidemics have been suggested as explanation for decreases in atmospheric CO 2 reconstructed from ice cores because of their potential to take up carbon in forests regrowing on abandoned agricultural land. Here, we use a coupled climate–carbon cycle model to assess the carbon and climate effects of the Mongol invasion (~1200 to ~1380), the Black Death (~1347 to ~1400), the conquest of the Americas (~1519 to ~1700), and the fall of the Ming Dynasty (~1600 to ~1650). We calculate their impact on atmospheric CO 2 including the response of the global land and ocean carbon pools. It has been hypothesized that these events have contributed to significant increases in land carbon stocks. However, we find that slow regrowth and delayed emissions from past land cover change allow for small increases of the land biosphere carbon storage only during long-lasting events. The effect of these small increases in land biosphere storage on global CO 2 is reduced by the response of the global carbon pools and largely offset by concurrent emissions from the rest of the world. None of these events would therefore have affected the atmospheric CO 2 concentration by more than 1 ppm. Only the Mongol invasion could have lowered global CO 2 , but by an amount too small to be resolved by ice cores.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Citations
Cites
Soil carbon stocks and land use change: a meta analysis
Guo, L. B., & Gifford, R. M. (2002) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1046/j.1354-1013.2002.00486.x · Cited by 3,972
Ecology of Coarse Woody Debris in Temperate Ecosystems
Harmon, M. E., Franklin, J. F., Swanson, F. J., Sollins, P., Gregory, S. V., Lattin, J. D., Anderson, N. H., Cline, S. P., Aumen, N. G., Sedell, J. R., et al. (1986) · Advances in Ecological Research · doi:10.1016/s0065-2504(08)60121-x · Cited by 3,749
Journal of Geophysical Research
(1949) · Nature · doi:10.1038/163436b0 · Cited by 3,480
The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago
Ruddiman, W. F. (2003) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1023/b:clim.0000004577.17928.fa · Cited by 1,658
HOUGHTON, R. A. (2003) · Tellus B · doi:10.1034/j.1600-0889.2003.01450.x · Cited by 1,197
Etheridge, D. M., Steele, L. P., Langenfelds, R. L., Francey, R. J., Barnola, J. ‐., & Morgan, V. I. (1996) · Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · doi:10.1029/95jd03410 · Cited by 1,142
Atlas of World Population History
B., J.-N., McEvedy, C., & Jones, R. (1978) · Population (French Edition) · doi:10.2307/1531978 · Cited by 963
Houghton, R. A., Hobbie, J. E., Melillo, J. M., Moore, B., Peterson, B. J., Shaver, G. R., & Woodwell, G. M. (1983) · Ecological Monographs · doi:10.2307/1942531 · Cited by 928
The Max-Planck-Institute global ocean/sea ice model with orthogonal curvilinear coordinates
Marsland, S. J., Haak, H., Jungclaus, J. H., Latif, M., & Röske, F. (2003) · Ocean Modelling · doi:10.1016/s1463-5003(02)00015-x · Cited by 913
Climate and human influences on global biomass burning over the past two millennia
Marlon, J. R., Bartlein, P. J., Carcaillet, C., Gavin, D. G., Harrison, S. P., Higuera, P. E., Joos, F., Power, M. J., & Prentice, I. C. (2008) · Nature Geoscience · doi:10.1038/ngeo313 · Cited by 823
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- Etheridge D, 2001, Law Dome Atmospheric CO2 Data, Technical Report
- 10.1029/2006gl02615 · doi:10.1029/2006gl02615
Cited by
Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2015) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature14258 · Cited by 3,441
Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change?
Hepburn, C., O’Callaghan, B., Stern, N., Stiglitz, J., & Zenghelis, D. (2020) · Oxford Review of Economic Policy · doi:10.1093/oxrep/graa015 · Cited by 771
Holocene carbon emissions as a result of anthropogenic land cover change
Kaplan, J. O., Krumhardt, K. M., Ellis, E. C., Ruddiman, W. F., Lemmen, C., & Goldewijk, K. K. (2011) · The Holocene · doi:10.1177/0959683610386983 · Cited by 659
Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492
Koch, A., Brierley, C., Maslin, M. M., & Lewis, S. L. (2019) · Quaternary Science Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004 · Cited by 528
Representation of natural and anthropogenic land cover change in MPI‐ESM
Reick, C. H., Raddatz, T., Brovkin, V., & Gayler, V. (2013) · Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems · doi:10.1002/jame.20022 · Cited by 499
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Pongratz, J., Caldeira, K., Reick, C. H., & Claussen, M.
- Affiliations
- Carnegie Institution for Science (US)
- Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (DE)
- Universität Hamburg (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Pongratz, Julia
- Venue
- The Holocene
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2011-01-20
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 843-851
- ISSN
- 0959-6836 (ISSN-L)
- 1477-0911
- OpenAlex
- W1964220360
- Semantic Scholar
- 7421744f4251f2477d92e9c82894e87a3ddb5fde
- Cited by
- 49
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2024: 2 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 9 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 2.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
- Locations
- The Holocene (publishedVersion)
- Max Planck Digital Library (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Geology and Paleoclimatology Research
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate variability and models
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics
- Keywords
- atmospheric CO2, historical climate change, war, epidemics, Mongol invasion, Black Death, conquest of the Americas, fall of the Ming dynasty, land carbon storage, land cover change, ocean carbon uptake
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Coupled climate–carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric CO 2 between ad 800 and 1850. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0959683610386981
- The paper
- Pongratz, J., Caldeira, K., Reick, C. H., & Claussen, M. (2011). Coupled climate–carbon simulations indicate minor global effects of wars and epidemics on atmospheric CO 2 between ad 800 and 1850. The Holocene. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683610386981
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
