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Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536
- atlantas 5y agoAnd to top it off, now you have a toothache and have to visit the dentist in the year 536.
- hirundo 5y agoOn the bright side, global warming is good mediation for nuclear or volcanic winters and solar minimums.
- wwweston 5y agoAssuming a system with neatly predictable dynamics that responds linearly to warming / cooling inputs. The globe may not be such a system: https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2021/03/24/weve-known-for-years-global-warming-could-lead-to-a-new-ice-age-why-is-no-one-doing-anything https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2021/03/24/weve-known-f...
- rossdavidh 5y ago"Yet, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, the average person back then may only have realised slowly just how grim conditions in their world were getting..." I just have to point out that scientists have in fact tried this, and the frog in the water, as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm, jumps out. There is no evidence that it is possible to raise the temperature slowly enough that it does not do this, and it's not for lack of trying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- bin_bash 5y agoThis and “ostrich with its head in the sand” drive me nuts
- brimble 5y agoThen there's all the social science research or pop-business/pop-psychology crap that's been disproven or failed to replicate, but nonetheless will seemingly be treated as fact by most people... I dunno, forever, at this rate. And don't you dare question it.
- Jalad 5y agoCGP Grey actually covers both of these misconceptions in some video: - https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=163 https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=163 - https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=50 https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=50 Which is neat, because I'm now also frustrated by both of these "fun facts"
- datavirtue 5y agoYeah, I would not tango with an ostrich. About fifteen years ago I had just moved to the country and had taken a quick trip by myself to the local store. Shortly after leaving my house I came upon a turkey in the road. I stopped, got out of the car and started walking up to it. It just sat there waiting. It had perched on the guard rail and as I got closer to it I noticed it's huge razor sharp talons. I said to myself "dude, your family is expecting you home safe in a few minutes...get back in the car".
- e4e78a06 5y agoClimate change is perhaps one of the many reasons both the Roman and Byzantine empires fell or lost ability to project power. The Byzantine conquest of Italy was finishing up when these plagues hit and they never recovered their original strength again. One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- trhway 5y ago>One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes 2011 Arab Spring <- bread/wheat prices <- 2010 wildfires in Russia destroying significant share of wheat harvest >or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come. Ukraine wheat production most probably will be significantly less this year.
- irrational 5y agoWell, the farmers have lots of tanks for farm work now.
- rossdavidh 5y ago...mostly non-functional.
- totetsu 5y agoBut are you locked into needing a Russian military certified technician to repair them?
- askonomm 5y agoFarmers are a resourceful bunch. Most I've met can fix just about anything.
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- datavirtue 5y agoI wonder if a large body passed through the solar system around that time? Enough to disturb gravitational forces to trigger massive volcanic activity like that.
- datavirtue 5y agoDownvoted? Hmm. It's a legitimate question.
- coding123 5y agoBut without internet they barely knew what was going on.
- rossdavidh 5y agoIt's a legitimate point, you only knew about the bad things happening right where you were, for the most part. Also, instead of obsessively refreshing your screen, you probably were out there trying to fix whatever the problem was, and regardless of whether or not it worked that would be psychologically healthier.
- _kst_ 5y ago" ... and the Roman senator Cassiodorus noted in 538 ..." If Wikipedia is correct, he wasn't a senator. His full name was Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator.
- jrace 5y agoThe worst year...so far Makes me wonder, would society today fare better than society then to the same hardship?
- MPSimmons 5y agoImpressive that to find an obviously worse year, they have to go back a millennium and half.
- rossdavidh 5y ago1918-1919 were most definitely worse. The flupandemic had about 3x the per-capita death rate in the US, and we weren't even the worst hit, and the flupandemic wasn't even the thing people were most worried about in 1918. Immediately after the end of WW1, civil wars broke out in multiple parts of central Europe. Much worse about a century ago.
- MisterSandman 5y ago2020/2021 are only candidates for the worst year in the last ~50 years or so, in my opinion. WW1/WW2 were probably much, much worse to live through. They impacted basically everyone negatively (one of the reasons being most men in most countries were drafted). The pandemic had more of a K-curved graph, were a decent proportion of the population wasn't as negatively impacted, and might have actually had improved.
- Pooge 5y agoWhat about 1347? Or 1816? Or 1914 and the 40 years that followed? Worse years did exist.
- paulpauper 5y agoimagine if the stock market existed and you bought the dip