A closer look
Mongol Empire founder Genghis Khan slaughtered so many millions of people across Eurasia during his violent thirteenth-century conquests that he actually caused a measurable drop in global carbon levels because massive amounts of cultivated farmland reverted back to untamed, carbon-absorbing forests. While modern environmentalists chain themselves to trees and beg corporations to recycle, this notoriously brutal warlord accidentally scrubbed roughly seven hundred million tons of carbon from the atmosphere simply by completely erasing entire civilizations from the face of the earth. It is the darkest, most incredibly morbid climate change solution imaginable, proving that humanity's biggest carbon footprint is basically just the fact that there are way too many of us breathing and farming at the same time. You definitely cannot put him on a green energy brochure, but history's most terrifying conqueror inadvertently did more to lower global temperatures than any modern international climate summit has ever managed to achieve
