Columbus as Climate Despot?

[Phidippides]

While some historical figures become rehabilitated over time, others have the opposite happen to them:

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

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, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University.

Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age   

Does this mean that cutting down trees (by hand) has an almost immediate effect on the Earth?  Does this theory have merit or is it yet another attempt to "pile on Columbus" by modern leftists?  Discuss.

[skiguy]

Poor, Columbus.  He is under attack from all angles. 

What is there to discuss?  This is one of those "you gotta be kidding me" theories.   IF this is even feasible, are they tryng to say that sparsely scattered clearances in an area the size of Central America, which is relatively small on a global scale, have that much affect on the global climate?

[Phidippides]

I was under the impression that the Little Ice Age began sometime in the mid-15th century - or, in other words, before Columbus arrived at America's shores.  FWIW, here is a Wikipedia description of events leading up to it, and the initial reversal of the Medieval warm period seems to have begun as early as the 13th and 14th centuries.

The bottom line is that the guy with the theory about chopping down trees and the decrease in global temperatures has to place a tremendous amount of faith in the ability of a few lumberjacks.

[Aetheling]

The problem with these lunatics is that whatever someone from western civilisation did, it's bad and wrong.  As if climate change pre-existed the Industrial revolution, perhaps the goats of Ancient Israel triggered global warming !