GLOBAL warming is man-made, we are endlessly told by the climate change industry. You might think that ‘man’ in this context is a generic term for mankind. But a nutty-sounding professor has now narrowed down the culprit to one particular man . . . Christopher Columbus.
Yes, the Genoese explorer who in 1492 crossed the Atlantic from Spain in search of the Indies and instead found America (actually, he came ashore on an island in the Bahamas) is apparently the villain of the piece.
He is named and blamed in a new book called Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe, an associate professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York. I haven’t read it, but several reviews – even by sympathetic critics – suggest it’s opaque, rambling and eminently putdownable unless you’re fully signed up to the climate nonsense.
All you probably need to know is that the Guardian likes it, calling it ‘groundbreaking’. It says of Ms Goffe: ‘Throughout the book she flits from economic, scientific and natural history to literary and cultural analysis, weaving together the Eden myth with the birth of geology with lyrics from the reggae revival artist Chronixx, and moving from the stark Detroit techno of Drexciya to the life-cycle of coral to the eugenicist theories of Francis Galton.’
Chronixx? Drexciya? Me neither. Anyhow, Ms Goffe – described asa writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who specialises in colonial histories of race, geology, climate and media technologies –asserts that when Columbus’s three ships landed on the island of Guanahani (modern San Salvador) on October 12, 1492, after a nine-week voyage across the Atlantic, the whole global warming shebang got under way.
She tells us that European colonisation of the Caribbean, started by Columbus, ‘first formulated the structures of modern capitalism’ via slavery and racism. The creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the degradation of the environment ‘made territories vulnerable to extreme weather’. And so on.
I think it goes without saying that the arrival of Europeans in new lands during the age of discovery was often harmful to the indigenous inhabitants. But in this case, the author is falling into that familiar trap for historians – judging what happened in the past by modern standards. Slavery and racism are obviously reprehensible from our point of view in 2025. But, like it or not, that’s how they did things 500 years ago.
That said, Ms Goffe’s claim about Columbus, like a lot of the global warming guff that’s daily fed to us, doesn’t seem very convincing, to put it politely. I mean, people in the Old World were colonising, conquering, killing and enslaving each other, chopping down forests, planting crops and hunting wildlife for millennia before the explorer landed in the Caribbean.
However, for the true believer, the Goffe thesis must look like the gift that keeps on giving. In one neat package it condemns colonialism, capitalism, slavery, racism and global warming and lays them at the door of Columbus – who is already a hate figure for many. What more could climate fanatics wish for than a historical bogeyman to reinforce their delusions?
So what next? Well, the semi-scientific name for climate change is AGW, standing for Anthropogenic Global Warming – that is, warming caused by human activities. Perhaps we’d now better watch out for CGW . . . Columbogenic Global Warming.
