In the 13th century, Genghis Khan killed so many peasants that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were significantly reduced as a result.
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During his 21-year reign, Genghis Khan’s destructive armies were responsible for the deaths of up to 40 million people. While his intentions for the massacres were anything but pure, with nobody left to farm the lands owned by the peasants they were eventually allowed to grow back into carbon-absorbing forests. It’s estimated that 700m tons of carbon were wiped from the atmosphere – around the same amount of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption!
In 1518 the city of Strasbourg was hit by a ‘dancing plague’ where people would dance uncontrollably for days at a time.
It began with a single woman dancing solo for a few days, before eventually more and more people became affected. Doctors proclaimed that the illness was caused by overheated blood, and recommended that the inflicted should continue to shimmy and sway the fever away – musicians were even called in and a stage was set up in the town center to give the ‘dancers’ more room. While the idea may seem funny at first, most of them kept dancing till they fell unconscious, and some died from exhaustion, heart attack, or stroke.