+- MacResource (https://forums.macresource.com)
+-- Forum: My Category (https://forums.macresource.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=1)
+--- Forum: Tips and Deals (https://forums.macresource.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=3)
+--- Thread: Feel better! Science magazine: "Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’" (/showthread.php?tid=250781)
Feel better! Science magazine: "Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’" - SteveG - 12-24-2020
Of course, 2020 isn't over...yet
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive
536 A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640.
Re: Feel better! Science magazine: "Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’" - SteveG - 12-24-2020
The U.S. has had worse years.
https://www.axios.com/the-coronavirus-pandemic-doesnt-make-2020-the-worst-year-ever-97a3557c-1dcd-459f-81d8-53ef1ed4fd2f.html
In 1918 the U.S. lost tens of thousands of people in the trenches of World War I and hundreds of thousands more in the Spanish flu pandemic.
Deaths that year rose an astounding 46% from 1917, and life expectancy dropped by nearly 12 years, compared to a likely three-year decline in 2020.
Go back further and widen your lens, and far more terrible years begin to crop up.
Take 1816, known as the "Year Without a Summer" thanks to a massive volcanic eruption in 1815 that spread sun-blocking ash throughout the atmosphere. Average global temperatures fell and crops failed, leading to what one historian called "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world."
Or 1349, perhaps the worst year of the Black Death pandemic, which would eventually kill a third or more of Europe's population alone, equivalent to at least 247 million deaths today.
And don't forget 536, which the journal Science memorably called "the worst year to be alive." A volcanic eruption in Iceland early that year cast Europe and parts of the Middle East and Asia into a literal dark age, intensifying famines and hastening the spread of bubonic plague.
Be smart: What those anni horribili have in common is that they concentrated the two conditions that have been the default state of most of humanity until fairly recently: disease and starvation.
For all but a tiny elite, humanity until the 20th century was caught in a Malthusian trap, with any opportunity for significant population growth or material improvement constrained by limited agricultural productivity.
Re: Feel better! Science magazine: "Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’" - Paul F. - 12-25-2020
So, treading over ground already much-trodden...
https://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Investigation-Origins-Modern-Civilization/dp/0345408764
This book is almost 22 years old by David Keys.
Some of his conclusions are suspect, but he laid out the basics of the above quite well a LONG time ago.
His difference of opinion is which volcano created the 535-536 climate "foible".
Re: Feel better! Science magazine: "Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’" - sekker - 12-25-2020
Joy, still a week left for Mt St Helen’s to give us her opinion on 2020...
Re: Feel better! Science magazine: "Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’" - tenders - 12-26-2020
The improvement of the human condition resulting from the invention of synthetic fertilizers in the early 1900s cannot be overestimated.