12 ms·

Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)

160 points by mvexel 4y ago

rnk 4y ago
And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.
- xenospn 4y ago
  We have electricity and insulation. We won’t starve. Will it suck? Absolutely.
  - tjkrusinski 4y ago
    Yes, but our economy is flexible, demand for commodities will fluctuate widely shortly after any catastrophic event, having a likely negative cascading effect on the rest of the economy.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    You can't eat electricity or insulation. There's close to 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S. alone. If we were to suffer a decade of volcanic winter, large parts of the midwest would become non-productive. If the reports of the sun being as dim as the moon due to the ash are true, there would be massive crop failure. One or two years like that, we might be ok. But any longer than that and our stores would be rapidly depleted. Famines can knock out huge percentages of populations and have led to the collapse of civilization on several occasions in the past few millenia.
    - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
      The vast majority of that food is grown as animal feed. Only 27% is consumed directly by people. That's a huge buffer in an emergency.
      - chrisco255 4y ago
        No it's not. This is false. First of all, for example, WRT to soybeans, only 20% of the bean can be used to derive oil, which is the ingredient most often used in processed human foods (not the healthiest but I digress). The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs [1]. But if the beans do not grow at all you don't get meal or oil. Same is true of corn silage. These parts of the plant are not edible by humans. But by far the biggest fallacy in your argument is that you don't recognize that animals are eaten by humans and provide valuable nutrition and essential nutrients. If the livestock is dying off because there's not enough feed, there are humans downstream of that who will not be getting fed. Livestock and crops have symbiotic relationship with humans and with each other. A lot of wasted plant matter that humans would have to discard (not to mention grass that cows, deer and other ruminants eat) can be consumed by farm animals. And animal manure can be used as fertilizer to re-invigorate soil and improve crop yields. In addition, animals upcycle crops into higher quality proteins and essential amino acids. Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans. 1. https://ncsoy.org/wp-content/uploads/11731980513_d53ca2a99e_k.jpg https://ncsoy.org/wp-content/uploads/11731980513_d53ca2a99e_...
        ProjectArcturis 4y ago
        >The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs No. That is how it is currently used, but in an emergency you could make soy flour, tofu, etc. The calories are consumable even if it's not what we typically eat. Or, more relevantly, the land that is used to grow soy could instead be planted with corn (or perhaps winter wheat in a post-volcanic scenario). Right now we're planting out crops to optimize for market value, which is driven by livestock feed use. If we instead optimized for human nutritional value, we could easily double output by mostly eliminating livestock (even accounting for the loss of nutrition provided by the livestock). >Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans. An incredible oversimplification.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast
  - yetanotherloser 4y ago
    How many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they take to build? What do they cost to run?
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      And how soon would their building be turned into yet another polarizing issue, or their building farmed out to contracting companies who would make most of the money disappear?
    - barbariangrunge 4y ago
      A global response on the scale of Covid to build vertical farms would reduce the severity of the famine dramatically. It would be expensive, but the alternative would be burning cities and food riots. I can hardly imagine the USA avoiding a civil war considering how divisive and hostile things already have gotten You can get hydroponics going fairly quickly, the bottleneck would be the supplies and supply chain — materials to build the with
      - yetanotherloser 4y ago
        Either {[[citation needed]]} Or {"Did you mean to post on the Things Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand About Agriculture thread?"}
    - AngryData 4y ago
      Modern LED grow lights require minimum 35 watts per square foot to grow things beyond just lettuce, which is around 1.5 million watts per acre. Americans currently consume a bit over 2.5 acres of farmland produce per year, however you could get that down to 1 acre without much problem by cutting out some of the less land efficient crops likes fruit trees, especially when talking indoor grow. So I would expect bare minimum energy requirements to be near 1.5-2 million watts per person for 12-16 hours a day for indoor food sustainability. This is of course not accounting for fertilizer which has large energy requirements or anything more than the most simple and basic of climate control.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  It might be even more bleak because we have 100X the population. I live near San Francisco and yesterday it rained more than usual which resulted in some highways literally shutting down and hours long traffic diversions. I have pretty low faith in us.
  - tjkrusinski 4y ago
    Coordination of governing bodies at the regional level is really bad in the US. A different agency manages the highways than the roadways than the waterways, each having their own incentives and budgets.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      In this case the problem (other than weather) was 100% infrastructure: many of these roadways are built below grade, which means that when it rains, they flood. Floods are generally not part of the threat model for Bay Area infrastructure (though perhaps they should be), so when civil engineers trade off drainage vs. earthquake safety vs. land use vs. traffic, drainage is usually the first thing sacrificed. The mid-peninsula had 5 consecutive avenues underneath El Camino & the Caltrain tracks washed out; most of them have been recently rebuilt as grade-separated underpasses as part of the Caltrain electrification project, so that traffic would not need to cross the tracks. They probably would not have flooded as at-grade intersections. Arguably this was the right choice, as everybody just stayed home during this storm, so real impacts were relatively light. By contrast, Bay Area traffic is a disaster every rush hour, so getting a few folks to take Caltrain instead of driving or avoiding just one collision on the tracks already puts you ahead of the cost of this weekend's storm.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  Most of the northern world would not have much trouble buying its food wherever possible. For a high price, of course, but USA, Europe, Japan and even China are so extremely wealthy compared to others that they can outbid the majority of the South on the global food market without much difficulty. Thus, a decline in food production in the North would primarily affect the global South.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    The rich countries are also going to be outbidding each other though. Some nations may decide not to sell it all because they need to eat themselves. This would be worse due to limited supply and no way to quickly ramp up.
    - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
      Countries like the US and Canada, who are net food exporters, would basically be fine. China would face huge problems. Failed states would experience catastrophic famine.
      - Beltalowda 4y ago
        They are currently net food exporters, but with catastrophic harvest failures that would probably change. I'm not sure if anyone has run a detailed analysis taking all the factors in to account, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume they would "be fine".
      - rnk 4y ago
        I agree rich countries could buy food up to a point, but if the us and canada had drastically lower yields for a few years, there would be world wide shortages, countries would limit exports eventually. I asked the question about what would northern countries do because the volcanic eruption impacts seemed to be more focused on the north in the article. But of course the world is connected, and the south is relatively poorer, and we are all connected, and there's not that much excess food. When a huge eruption does occur, or other destructive things like a CME, it will affect the world.
- jeltz 4y ago
  Much better than it did back then. Modern farming is much more resilient than farming back then as is proven by how rare famnes are today when they used to be common in the past.
  - Retric 4y ago
    That’s more a function of over production due to subsidies than inherent resilience. Annual crop production still varies wildly, we just have much larger buffers and better distribution than our ancestors before starvation kicks in so a 12% drop isn’t noticeable for the average consumer. https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity=corn&graph=production https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity...
  - askvictor 4y ago
    I think that it's more of a supply-chain thing than modern farming being inherently more resilient. We can irrigate when it's dry (as long as there's a pipe from water _somewhere_, which isn't always a given). But can't do much about floods. Certain pests can be controlled, but monocultures make for very brittle systems when a pest evolves past the known defenses (see: bananas). Ultimately, we have transport and distribution across the entire globe, so a crop failure in one place doesn't mean a famine there as we can ship food there (unless you're a poor country, in which case the rest of the world doesn't care much).
- smitty1e 4y ago
  I submit that there would be some initial weeping and gnashing of teeth, but then human ingenuity would kick in and we would muddle through. Ingenuity >>> Chicken Little
  - rnk 4y ago
    To some extent I agree with you but it won't be quick. Poor people will suffer the most. That ingenuity might not come for years, people would suffer before new food arrives. I am probably unusual because I bought 90 days dried food supply for my family in an emergency. But almost all the food I have and eat normally was bought in the last month, except for a few canned goods. I think most people in the us would run out of food in a month or two at most.
dang 4y ago
Related: Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39 comments) Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to be alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April 2021 (117 comments) 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments) Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments) Others?
- Adiqq 4y ago
  There's good document about 536: https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s
  - julienchastang 4y ago
    Thanks. I just watched the entire video though this documentary pins the culprit on Krakatoa and not an Icelandic volcano. It was interesting nonetheless.
herrrk 4y ago
So far!
- irrational 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes comic https://www.socomic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ch140325.gif https://www.socomic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ch140325.g...
jaggs 4y ago
How interesting that a bunch of tech nutcases now want to geoengineer the planet by dispersing sulphur into the stratosphere to dim the sun to 'tackle' climate change. Mind-blowing stupidity.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Because gradually injecting sulfur is the same as massive uncontrolled natural injections, right?
  - aquaticsunset 4y ago
    Nobody knows. Which is why it's colossally reckless to propose anything around this as a guaranteed solution, instead of a proposal that needs more research.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      This is irrational pearl clutching. If sulfur is added, it will be done gradually, with the results monitored. There would not be some sort of catastrophic cooling. The real sticking point would be that some countries would not want the cooling. Russia, say.
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        Our proposed planet-scale terraforming will be done gradually, don't be irrational! We'll just see how it goes... Are you serious?
        pfdietz 4y ago
        So let me get this straight: in the face of a failure to control global warming by other means, you'd prefer your anxiety about possible risks to prevent any attempt to counter the warming by this approach, dooming the world to potentially catastrophic temperature increases? Are YOU serious?
ummonk 4y ago
The years after the Younger Toba Eruption would have been objectively far worse than this.
optimalsolver 4y ago
I hear 1348 wasn't too great either.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  "By June 24 – The Black Death pandemic has reached England,[1] having probably been brought across the English Channel by fleas on rats aboard a ship from Gascony to the south coast port of Melcombe (modern-day Weymouth, Dorset);[2][3] by November it will have reached London and by 1350 will have killed one third to a half of its population." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1348 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1348 Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough, I just hope we never experience something like the plague on a large scale again.
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
    They blamed cats, not knowing it was the fleas. It wasn't until the 1800s that hand washing was tied to health (Semmelweis). The 1300s would have been a filthy, filthy existence it's not a great surprise the plague spread like wildfire (past its initial vector). Basic hygiene has helped humanity massively. > Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough That is how you die, regardless of events it's ultimately brain death due to lack of oxygen to the brain - pray your heart stops one day (everything else is worse). > Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough I know you were making a reference to c19. Yes, being kept in solitary confinement while you suffocate to death by order of the state would be a miserable way to go (tax extracted and left in an "exit room"). Here in NZ the state forced an elderly man to watch from the roadside as his wife was buried but politicians were allowed to go swimming during the same lock down... Disgusting.
vegetablepotpie 4y ago
I’m amazed by the amount of historical information held in ice. Activities from silver mining to volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago can be found as chemical traces in the cores. There’s just a few years where this kind of research will be possible. I hope we can maximize our discoveries before the world loses most of its ice.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  The ice in Antarctica and Greenland is not going to melt altogether and it would take thousands of years for it to melt away at current pace even if trends aren't reversed by another series of similar volcanic events.
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    But we will lose recent years first, so that could impact what sort of research would still be possible
    - mjhay 4y ago
      Not at ice divides (like hydrological divides) where ice cores are taken (ice cores are almost always taken at divides because the ice flows apart, so the stratigraphy is not as disturbed). It's too cold to melt out there anytime soon. These are high-elevation locations, so there is either no melting (East Antartica ones ~3000 m) or extremely minimal melting, rarely, during the height of summer (Greenland and some other places in Antarctica). In Antarctica, surface melt is a rounding error everywhere, and response to climate change is almost entirely due to ice sheet-ocean interactions with a warming ocean and changing currents, and a thing called the marine ice-sheet instability. At any rate, these locations will always be accumulation zones where more snow falls then melts (with the mass balance preserved by diverging flow so as to continuously thin the ice, to approximately compensate), with melt events occuring only rarely. The concern there is that meltwater could contaminate near-surface compacted snow (firn) layers, but even then it wouldn't be enough to do much. As such, stratigraphy will be reasonably preserved even if the ice sheet as a whole draws down significantly (including at divides). Really extreme climate change (which is in the cards long-term) could eventually change this, especially if the ice sheets reduce enough in height such that a significant ice sheet-elevation feetback occurs. However, we'd have much bigger things to worry about at that point.
yterdy 4y ago
*in Europe and Asia. I kind of weep for the loss of oral and comprehensible physical histories in the Americas and Africa, since scholarship like this shows that one can combine those with unlikely natural records and scientific analysis to triangulate on remarkable narratives about our past.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  If 536 was particularly bad due to a massive volcanic eruption blotting out the sun, they can't have been having a great time in the Americas or Africa either. 536 would have stiff competition from every year of the century following 1492 for the title of "Worst Year to be Alive in the Americas".
  - askvictor 4y ago
    Couldn't the Coriolis effect basically keep it mostly to the Northern hemisphere? There would be secondary effects to the Southern hemisphere due to cooling in the North (e.g. ocean and atmospheric currents), but depending on where the volcano was, the direct cooling might have been localised.
  - yterdy 4y ago
    That's not an unfair assumption to make, but it is an assumption, since no records pertaining to conditions in Africa or South America are mentioned (or Australia and on Pacific islands, for that matter). That's where my despair comes from; a consideration of the peoples of those regions was not included, even though the headline seems to be a general statement about human life on Earth in 536.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      This is where history and archeology diverge. We know how bad things were in Europe and East Asia because written records survive which describe the crop failures etc. We don't have records from that time period from Africa or South America. All we can do is assume that people there suffered as well, due to the global nature of the problem. Sometimes people get left out of historical narratives because there just aren't any written records. You can make assumptions, or you can try to make stuff up, but an intellectually honest historian is also likely to just say "we can't know." In contrast, archaeologists will try to make a case for how hierarchical a society was, or whether it was male-dominated, or what kind of religion it had, on the basis of a few tombs belonging to "high-status individuals" and a couple of pieces of pottery. It's always a bit of a stretch. A lot of what archaeologists believed about prehistory. especially migrations of people groups, has been overturned by genetic studies in the past decade. David Reich wrote a good book about it several years ago, which is probably itself outdated now due to the pace of discovery in that field.
alexfromapex 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230101194203/https://www.science.org/content/article/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive https://web.archive.org/web/20230101194203/https://www.scien...
sour-taste 4y ago
> The team deciphered this record using a new ultra–high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core. Each of the samples—some 50,000 from each meter of the core—is analyzed for about a dozen elements. The approach enabled the team to pinpoint storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution down to the month or even less, going back 2000 years, says UM volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov. How do they know for sure that the ice samples are chronological? What happens if in a given year the top layer of ice melts away?
- navane 4y ago
  They match the ice samples up with tree rings. There exists tree ring data of 7k+ years, the ice contains more info, but the tree rings allow for absolute pinpointing on a year. They match them on common info. I am reading "tree story" by valerie trout.
  - physicles 4y ago
    My understanding was that dendrochronology records go back about 12k years. Is there anything about that in the book you’re reading?
    - navane 4y ago
      I had forgotten the exact number, i knew it was at least 7k. I didnt want to lie in my comment, but im almost sure you are right. Im at work right now so cant look it up.
tamaharbor 4y ago
We are just one volcano eruption away from global cooling.
- timbit42 4y ago
  *temporary global cooling.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Could we handle a similar eruption these days? Should we be building more nuclear power stations as well as solar, because if this happens, solar even with batteries is going to be useless?
- irrational 4y ago
  Probably when, instead of if.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ProjectArcturis 4y ago
The worst year was probably something more like 70,000 years ago, when the human population fell as low as 2,000 individuals. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm
- merek 4y ago
  Possibly caused by the Youngest Toba supervolcano eruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory See "Genetic bottleneck hypothesis"
  - hkdobrev 4y ago
    It seems this hypothesis has been dismissed: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22355515 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22355515 https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects.html https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects....
- jchanimal 4y ago
  It doesn’t mean the population fell that low. It means some sub population that size happened to be the ancestors of today’s humans. Nothing is proven about why the other sub populations aren’t represented today or when they died out. It could have been gradual, after our common ancestor group had successfully outcompeted the other groups.
Kaibeezy 4y ago
What was the best year? I’ll take 1977.
- hossbeast 4y ago
  Because Star Wars was released in theaters?
  - timbit42 4y ago
    The Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Atari VCS/2600 were released. Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers. Fleetwood Mac released Rumours. Howard Stern began broadcasting. Voyager 2 probe was launched. Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, and Bing Crosby died.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  Definitely the best year for music. Television, Kraftwerk, Eno, Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Fleetwood Mac, and The Ramones all released great albums
csomar 4y ago
> The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640. Islam first appeared on 610. I wonder if these events had any effects on that.
- alejohausner 4y ago
  Definitely! The Byzantine and Parthian empires had just fought a long war, and were very weak. That left the near East easy pickings for the Muslim invaders coming up from the Hejaz.
xdavidliu 4y ago
I assumed referring to the Plague of Justinian, but apparently that happened a few years later in 541-549
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Plague of Justinian is assumed to be related, as it spread through crop-failure-driven migrations across a population already weakened by famine. There's a reason the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are depicted as riding together: famine, war, plague, and death usually accompany each other.
garbagecoder 4y ago
I read a book called like Justinian’s Flea I believe that argues the plague was the real end of any chance at a Roman state in the west because it stopped the East’s reconsolidation of the west and wounded the successor kingdoms. A different book on the collapse of Britain I will always remember for the quote “the horseman ride together.” Anyway, I still doubt this is true. The worst year was probably long before 536.

160 points by mvexel 4y ago

rnk 4y ago

And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.

xenospn 4y ago
We have electricity and insulation. We won’t starve. Will it suck? Absolutely.
- tjkrusinski 4y ago
  Yes, but our economy is flexible, demand for commodities will fluctuate widely shortly after any catastrophic event, having a likely negative cascading effect on the rest of the economy.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  You can't eat electricity or insulation. There's close to 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S. alone. If we were to suffer a decade of volcanic winter, large parts of the midwest would become non-productive. If the reports of the sun being as dim as the moon due to the ash are true, there would be massive crop failure. One or two years like that, we might be ok. But any longer than that and our stores would be rapidly depleted. Famines can knock out huge percentages of populations and have led to the collapse of civilization on several occasions in the past few millenia.
  - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    The vast majority of that food is grown as animal feed. Only 27% is consumed directly by people. That's a huge buffer in an emergency.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      No it's not. This is false. First of all, for example, WRT to soybeans, only 20% of the bean can be used to derive oil, which is the ingredient most often used in processed human foods (not the healthiest but I digress). The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs [1]. But if the beans do not grow at all you don't get meal or oil. Same is true of corn silage. These parts of the plant are not edible by humans. But by far the biggest fallacy in your argument is that you don't recognize that animals are eaten by humans and provide valuable nutrition and essential nutrients. If the livestock is dying off because there's not enough feed, there are humans downstream of that who will not be getting fed. Livestock and crops have symbiotic relationship with humans and with each other. A lot of wasted plant matter that humans would have to discard (not to mention grass that cows, deer and other ruminants eat) can be consumed by farm animals. And animal manure can be used as fertilizer to re-invigorate soil and improve crop yields. In addition, animals upcycle crops into higher quality proteins and essential amino acids. Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans. 1. https://ncsoy.org/wp-content/uploads/11731980513_d53ca2a99e_k.jpg https://ncsoy.org/wp-content/uploads/11731980513_d53ca2a99e_...
      - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
        >The other 80% of the bean would have to be discarded if not used for meal to feed chickens and pigs No. That is how it is currently used, but in an emergency you could make soy flour, tofu, etc. The calories are consumable even if it's not what we typically eat. Or, more relevantly, the land that is used to grow soy could instead be planted with corn (or perhaps winter wheat in a post-volcanic scenario). Right now we're planting out crops to optimize for market value, which is driven by livestock feed use. If we instead optimized for human nutritional value, we could easily double output by mostly eliminating livestock (even accounting for the loss of nutrition provided by the livestock). >Needless to say though, if our agricultural systems are producing 73% less crops and livestock there will be ~73% less humans. An incredible oversimplification.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast
- yetanotherloser 4y ago
  How many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they take to build? What do they cost to run?
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    And how soon would their building be turned into yet another polarizing issue, or their building farmed out to contracting companies who would make most of the money disappear?
  - barbariangrunge 4y ago
    A global response on the scale of Covid to build vertical farms would reduce the severity of the famine dramatically. It would be expensive, but the alternative would be burning cities and food riots. I can hardly imagine the USA avoiding a civil war considering how divisive and hostile things already have gotten You can get hydroponics going fairly quickly, the bottleneck would be the supplies and supply chain — materials to build the with
    - yetanotherloser 4y ago
      Either {[[citation needed]]} Or {"Did you mean to post on the Things Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand About Agriculture thread?"}
  - AngryData 4y ago
    Modern LED grow lights require minimum 35 watts per square foot to grow things beyond just lettuce, which is around 1.5 million watts per acre. Americans currently consume a bit over 2.5 acres of farmland produce per year, however you could get that down to 1 acre without much problem by cutting out some of the less land efficient crops likes fruit trees, especially when talking indoor grow. So I would expect bare minimum energy requirements to be near 1.5-2 million watts per person for 12-16 hours a day for indoor food sustainability. This is of course not accounting for fertilizer which has large energy requirements or anything more than the most simple and basic of climate control.
ericmcer 4y ago
It might be even more bleak because we have 100X the population. I live near San Francisco and yesterday it rained more than usual which resulted in some highways literally shutting down and hours long traffic diversions. I have pretty low faith in us.
- tjkrusinski 4y ago
  Coordination of governing bodies at the regional level is really bad in the US. A different agency manages the highways than the roadways than the waterways, each having their own incentives and budgets.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    In this case the problem (other than weather) was 100% infrastructure: many of these roadways are built below grade, which means that when it rains, they flood. Floods are generally not part of the threat model for Bay Area infrastructure (though perhaps they should be), so when civil engineers trade off drainage vs. earthquake safety vs. land use vs. traffic, drainage is usually the first thing sacrificed. The mid-peninsula had 5 consecutive avenues underneath El Camino & the Caltrain tracks washed out; most of them have been recently rebuilt as grade-separated underpasses as part of the Caltrain electrification project, so that traffic would not need to cross the tracks. They probably would not have flooded as at-grade intersections. Arguably this was the right choice, as everybody just stayed home during this storm, so real impacts were relatively light. By contrast, Bay Area traffic is a disaster every rush hour, so getting a few folks to take Caltrain instead of driving or avoiding just one collision on the tracks already puts you ahead of the cost of this weekend's storm.
Archelaos 4y ago
Most of the northern world would not have much trouble buying its food wherever possible. For a high price, of course, but USA, Europe, Japan and even China are so extremely wealthy compared to others that they can outbid the majority of the South on the global food market without much difficulty. Thus, a decline in food production in the North would primarily affect the global South.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  The rich countries are also going to be outbidding each other though. Some nations may decide not to sell it all because they need to eat themselves. This would be worse due to limited supply and no way to quickly ramp up.
  - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    Countries like the US and Canada, who are net food exporters, would basically be fine. China would face huge problems. Failed states would experience catastrophic famine.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      They are currently net food exporters, but with catastrophic harvest failures that would probably change. I'm not sure if anyone has run a detailed analysis taking all the factors in to account, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume they would "be fine".
    - rnk 4y ago
      I agree rich countries could buy food up to a point, but if the us and canada had drastically lower yields for a few years, there would be world wide shortages, countries would limit exports eventually. I asked the question about what would northern countries do because the volcanic eruption impacts seemed to be more focused on the north in the article. But of course the world is connected, and the south is relatively poorer, and we are all connected, and there's not that much excess food. When a huge eruption does occur, or other destructive things like a CME, it will affect the world.
jeltz 4y ago
Much better than it did back then. Modern farming is much more resilient than farming back then as is proven by how rare famnes are today when they used to be common in the past.
- Retric 4y ago
  That’s more a function of over production due to subsidies than inherent resilience. Annual crop production still varies wildly, we just have much larger buffers and better distribution than our ancestors before starvation kicks in so a 12% drop isn’t noticeable for the average consumer. https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity=corn&graph=production https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity...
- askvictor 4y ago
  I think that it's more of a supply-chain thing than modern farming being inherently more resilient. We can irrigate when it's dry (as long as there's a pipe from water _somewhere_, which isn't always a given). But can't do much about floods. Certain pests can be controlled, but monocultures make for very brittle systems when a pest evolves past the known defenses (see: bananas). Ultimately, we have transport and distribution across the entire globe, so a crop failure in one place doesn't mean a famine there as we can ship food there (unless you're a poor country, in which case the rest of the world doesn't care much).
smitty1e 4y ago
I submit that there would be some initial weeping and gnashing of teeth, but then human ingenuity would kick in and we would muddle through. Ingenuity >>> Chicken Little
- rnk 4y ago
  To some extent I agree with you but it won't be quick. Poor people will suffer the most. That ingenuity might not come for years, people would suffer before new food arrives. I am probably unusual because I bought 90 days dried food supply for my family in an emergency. But almost all the food I have and eat normally was bought in the last month, except for a few canned goods. I think most people in the us would run out of food in a month or two at most.

dang 4y ago

Related: Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39 comments) Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to be alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April 2021 (117 comments) 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments) Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments) Others?

Adiqq 4y ago
There's good document about 536: https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s
- julienchastang 4y ago
  Thanks. I just watched the entire video though this documentary pins the culprit on Krakatoa and not an Icelandic volcano. It was interesting nonetheless.

herrrk 4y ago

So far!

irrational 4y ago
Reminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes comic https://www.socomic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ch140325.gif https://www.socomic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ch140325.g...

jaggs 4y ago

How interesting that a bunch of tech nutcases now want to geoengineer the planet by dispersing sulphur into the stratosphere to dim the sun to 'tackle' climate change. Mind-blowing stupidity.

pfdietz 4y ago
Because gradually injecting sulfur is the same as massive uncontrolled natural injections, right?
- aquaticsunset 4y ago
  Nobody knows. Which is why it's colossally reckless to propose anything around this as a guaranteed solution, instead of a proposal that needs more research.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    This is irrational pearl clutching. If sulfur is added, it will be done gradually, with the results monitored. There would not be some sort of catastrophic cooling. The real sticking point would be that some countries would not want the cooling. Russia, say.
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      Our proposed planet-scale terraforming will be done gradually, don't be irrational! We'll just see how it goes... Are you serious?
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        So let me get this straight: in the face of a failure to control global warming by other means, you'd prefer your anxiety about possible risks to prevent any attempt to counter the warming by this approach, dooming the world to potentially catastrophic temperature increases? Are YOU serious?

ummonk 4y ago

The years after the Younger Toba Eruption would have been objectively far worse than this.

optimalsolver 4y ago

I hear 1348 wasn't too great either.

guerrilla 4y ago
"By June 24 – The Black Death pandemic has reached England,[1] having probably been brought across the English Channel by fleas on rats aboard a ship from Gascony to the south coast port of Melcombe (modern-day Weymouth, Dorset);[2][3] by November it will have reached London and by 1350 will have killed one third to a half of its population." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1348 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1348 Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough, I just hope we never experience something like the plague on a large scale again.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  They blamed cats, not knowing it was the fleas. It wasn't until the 1800s that hand washing was tied to health (Semmelweis). The 1300s would have been a filthy, filthy existence it's not a great surprise the plague spread like wildfire (past its initial vector). Basic hygiene has helped humanity massively. > Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough That is how you die, regardless of events it's ultimately brain death due to lack of oxygen to the brain - pray your heart stops one day (everything else is worse). > Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough I know you were making a reference to c19. Yes, being kept in solitary confinement while you suffocate to death by order of the state would be a miserable way to go (tax extracted and left in an "exit room"). Here in NZ the state forced an elderly man to watch from the roadside as his wife was buried but politicians were allowed to go swimming during the same lock down... Disgusting.

vegetablepotpie 4y ago

I’m amazed by the amount of historical information held in ice. Activities from silver mining to volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago can be found as chemical traces in the cores. There’s just a few years where this kind of research will be possible. I hope we can maximize our discoveries before the world loses most of its ice.

chrisco255 4y ago
The ice in Antarctica and Greenland is not going to melt altogether and it would take thousands of years for it to melt away at current pace even if trends aren't reversed by another series of similar volcanic events.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  But we will lose recent years first, so that could impact what sort of research would still be possible
  - mjhay 4y ago
    Not at ice divides (like hydrological divides) where ice cores are taken (ice cores are almost always taken at divides because the ice flows apart, so the stratigraphy is not as disturbed). It's too cold to melt out there anytime soon. These are high-elevation locations, so there is either no melting (East Antartica ones ~3000 m) or extremely minimal melting, rarely, during the height of summer (Greenland and some other places in Antarctica). In Antarctica, surface melt is a rounding error everywhere, and response to climate change is almost entirely due to ice sheet-ocean interactions with a warming ocean and changing currents, and a thing called the marine ice-sheet instability. At any rate, these locations will always be accumulation zones where more snow falls then melts (with the mass balance preserved by diverging flow so as to continuously thin the ice, to approximately compensate), with melt events occuring only rarely. The concern there is that meltwater could contaminate near-surface compacted snow (firn) layers, but even then it wouldn't be enough to do much. As such, stratigraphy will be reasonably preserved even if the ice sheet as a whole draws down significantly (including at divides). Really extreme climate change (which is in the cards long-term) could eventually change this, especially if the ice sheets reduce enough in height such that a significant ice sheet-elevation feetback occurs. However, we'd have much bigger things to worry about at that point.

yterdy 4y ago

*in Europe and Asia. I kind of weep for the loss of oral and comprehensible physical histories in the Americas and Africa, since scholarship like this shows that one can combine those with unlikely natural records and scientific analysis to triangulate on remarkable narratives about our past.

DoughnutHole 4y ago
If 536 was particularly bad due to a massive volcanic eruption blotting out the sun, they can't have been having a great time in the Americas or Africa either. 536 would have stiff competition from every year of the century following 1492 for the title of "Worst Year to be Alive in the Americas".
- askvictor 4y ago
  Couldn't the Coriolis effect basically keep it mostly to the Northern hemisphere? There would be secondary effects to the Southern hemisphere due to cooling in the North (e.g. ocean and atmospheric currents), but depending on where the volcano was, the direct cooling might have been localised.
- yterdy 4y ago
  That's not an unfair assumption to make, but it is an assumption, since no records pertaining to conditions in Africa or South America are mentioned (or Australia and on Pacific islands, for that matter). That's where my despair comes from; a consideration of the peoples of those regions was not included, even though the headline seems to be a general statement about human life on Earth in 536.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    This is where history and archeology diverge. We know how bad things were in Europe and East Asia because written records survive which describe the crop failures etc. We don't have records from that time period from Africa or South America. All we can do is assume that people there suffered as well, due to the global nature of the problem. Sometimes people get left out of historical narratives because there just aren't any written records. You can make assumptions, or you can try to make stuff up, but an intellectually honest historian is also likely to just say "we can't know." In contrast, archaeologists will try to make a case for how hierarchical a society was, or whether it was male-dominated, or what kind of religion it had, on the basis of a few tombs belonging to "high-status individuals" and a couple of pieces of pottery. It's always a bit of a stretch. A lot of what archaeologists believed about prehistory. especially migrations of people groups, has been overturned by genetic studies in the past decade. David Reich wrote a good book about it several years ago, which is probably itself outdated now due to the pace of discovery in that field.

alexfromapex 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230101194203/https://www.science.org/content/article/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive https://web.archive.org/web/20230101194203/https://www.scien...

sour-taste 4y ago

> The team deciphered this record using a new ultra–high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core. Each of the samples—some 50,000 from each meter of the core—is analyzed for about a dozen elements. The approach enabled the team to pinpoint storms, volcanic eruptions, and lead pollution down to the month or even less, going back 2000 years, says UM volcanologist Andrei Kurbatov. How do they know for sure that the ice samples are chronological? What happens if in a given year the top layer of ice melts away?

navane 4y ago
They match the ice samples up with tree rings. There exists tree ring data of 7k+ years, the ice contains more info, but the tree rings allow for absolute pinpointing on a year. They match them on common info. I am reading "tree story" by valerie trout.
- physicles 4y ago
  My understanding was that dendrochronology records go back about 12k years. Is there anything about that in the book you’re reading?
  - navane 4y ago
    I had forgotten the exact number, i knew it was at least 7k. I didnt want to lie in my comment, but im almost sure you are right. Im at work right now so cant look it up.

tamaharbor 4y ago

We are just one volcano eruption away from global cooling.

timbit42 4y ago
*temporary global cooling.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Could we handle a similar eruption these days? Should we be building more nuclear power stations as well as solar, because if this happens, solar even with batteries is going to be useless?

irrational 4y ago
Probably when, instead of if.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ProjectArcturis 4y ago

The worst year was probably something more like 70,000 years ago, when the human population fell as low as 2,000 individuals. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm

merek 4y ago
Possibly caused by the Youngest Toba supervolcano eruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory See "Genetic bottleneck hypothesis"
- hkdobrev 4y ago
  It seems this hypothesis has been dismissed: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22355515 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22355515 https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects.html https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects....
jchanimal 4y ago
It doesn’t mean the population fell that low. It means some sub population that size happened to be the ancestors of today’s humans. Nothing is proven about why the other sub populations aren’t represented today or when they died out. It could have been gradual, after our common ancestor group had successfully outcompeted the other groups.

Kaibeezy 4y ago

What was the best year? I’ll take 1977.

hossbeast 4y ago
Because Star Wars was released in theaters?
- timbit42 4y ago
  The Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Atari VCS/2600 were released. Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers. Fleetwood Mac released Rumours. Howard Stern began broadcasting. Voyager 2 probe was launched. Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, and Bing Crosby died.
throwaway6734 4y ago
Definitely the best year for music. Television, Kraftwerk, Eno, Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Fleetwood Mac, and The Ramones all released great albums

csomar 4y ago

> The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640. Islam first appeared on 610. I wonder if these events had any effects on that.

alejohausner 4y ago
Definitely! The Byzantine and Parthian empires had just fought a long war, and were very weak. That left the near East easy pickings for the Muslim invaders coming up from the Hejaz.

xdavidliu 4y ago

I assumed referring to the Plague of Justinian, but apparently that happened a few years later in 541-549

nostrademons 4y ago
Plague of Justinian is assumed to be related, as it spread through crop-failure-driven migrations across a population already weakened by famine. There's a reason the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are depicted as riding together: famine, war, plague, and death usually accompany each other.

garbagecoder 4y ago

I read a book called like Justinian’s Flea I believe that argues the plague was the real end of any chance at a Roman state in the west because it stopped the East’s reconsolidation of the west and wounded the successor kingdoms. A different book on the collapse of Britain I will always remember for the quote “the horseman ride together.” Anyway, I still doubt this is true. The worst year was probably long before 536.