Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
160 points by mvexel 2 years ago | 113 comments- dang 2 years agoRelated:
Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - 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 - April 2021 (117 comments)
536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - 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 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)
Others?
- Adiqq 2 years agoThere's good document about 536: https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s
- julienchastang 2 years agoThanks. I just watched the entire video though this documentary pins the culprit on Krakatoa and not an Icelandic volcano. It was interesting nonetheless.
- julienchastang 2 years ago
- Adiqq 2 years ago
- vegetablepotpie 2 years agoI’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 2 years agoThe 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 2 years agoBut we will lose recent years first, so that could impact what sort of research would still be possible
- mjhay 2 years agoNot 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.
- chrisco255 2 years agoWe have the most extensive data available for recent years, though. Ice core samples are also nothing new, they've been extensively studied for decades. Many of these cores are carefully removed and placed in ice cold storage warehouses: https://qz.com/1590747/an-antarctic-ice-core-may-show-1-5-mi...
- mjhay 2 years ago
- henearkr 2 years agoThis is way too optimistic, and the melting rate is accelerating.
Not thousands of years. Centuries probably, but also maybe only decades.
- gcanyon 2 years ago> decades
The ice in Greenland is up to 3000 meters thick, and Antarctica is up to almost 5000 meters. Are you suggesting the net melt could average up to half a meter a year?
- gcanyon 2 years ago
- amanaplanacanal 2 years ago
- jiveturkey 2 years agowhen that happens, data in the ice will be the least of our worries
- chrisco255 2 years ago
- ProjectArcturis 2 years agoThe worst year was probably something more like 70,000 years ago, when the human population fell as low as 2,000 individuals.
- jchanimal 2 years agoIt 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.
- merek 2 years agoPossibly caused by the Youngest Toba supervolcano eruption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
See "Genetic bottleneck hypothesis"
- hkdobrev 2 years agoIt seems this hypothesis has been dismissed: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22355515https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects....
- hkdobrev 2 years ago
- jchanimal 2 years ago
- ch33zer 2 years 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 2 years agoThey 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 2 years agoMy understanding was that dendrochronology records go back about 12k years. Is there anything about that in the book you’re reading?
- navane 2 years agoI 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.
- navane 2 years ago
- physicles 2 years ago
- navane 2 years ago
- herrrk 2 years agoSo far!
- irrational 2 years agoReminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes comic
https://www.socomic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ch140325.g...
- irrational 2 years ago
- rnk 2 years agoAnd nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.
- ericmcer 2 years agoIt 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 2 years agoCoordination 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 2 years agoIn 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.
- nostrademons 2 years ago
- tjkrusinski 2 years ago
- Archelaos 2 years agoMost 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 2 years agoThe 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 2 years agoCountries 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.
- ProjectArcturis 2 years ago
- quickthrower2 2 years ago
- xenospn 2 years agoWe have electricity and insulation. We won’t starve. Will it suck? Absolutely.
- chrisco255 2 years agoYou 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 2 years agoThe 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.
- ProjectArcturis 2 years ago
- tjkrusinski 2 years agoYes, 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 2 years ago
- jeltz 2 years agoMuch 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.
- askvictor 2 years agoI 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).
- Retric 2 years agoThat’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...
- askvictor 2 years ago
- smitty1e 2 years agoI 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 2 years agoTo 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.
- rnk 2 years ago
- barbariangrunge 2 years agoGreenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast
- pfdietz 2 years agoThe big backup is diverting certain animal feeds to instead feed people.
- Baeocystin 2 years agoYup. There's a reason corn subsidies are what they are, for example, and it's not (just) politics.
- Baeocystin 2 years ago
- VoodooJuJu 2 years agoMicrogreens and winter tomatoes aren't going to stave off famine.
- gandalfian 2 years agoMore likely Quorn style fungus fermented/grown in dark vats connected to nuclear reactors for power. Might be tricky to ramp up in time but eventually could actually lower the cost of food, if more boring food. Flavoured fungus burgers all the time, kids might actually like it...
- chrisco255 2 years agoYou can't put greenhouses over entire states, which is what would be necessary to prevent mass famine.
- yetanotherloser 2 years agoHow many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they take to build? What do they cost to run?
- AngryData 2 years agoModern 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.
- Mezzie 2 years agoAnd 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 2 years agoA 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
- AngryData 2 years ago
- pfdietz 2 years ago
- ericmcer 2 years ago
- alexfromapex 2 years ago
- csomar 2 years 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 2 years agoDefinitely! 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.
- alejohausner 2 years ago
- garbagecoder 2 years agoI 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.
- yterdy 2 years 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 2 years agoIf 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".
- yterdy 2 years agoThat'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 2 years agoThis 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.
- twblalock 2 years ago
- askvictor 2 years agoCouldn'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 2 years ago
- gcanyon 2 years agoTrees in North America, at least, also reflect this effect -- their rings in these years are extremely narrow, showing poor growing conditions.
- DoughnutHole 2 years ago
- 2 years ago
- ummonk 2 years agoThe years after the Younger Toba Eruption would have been objectively far worse than this.
- quickthrower2 2 years agoCould 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 2 years agoProbably when, instead of if.
- irrational 2 years ago
- optimalsolver 2 years agoI hear 1348 wasn't too great either.
- guerrilla 2 years 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
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 2 years agoThey 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.
- tux2bsd 2 years ago
- guerrilla 2 years ago
- xdavidliu 2 years agoI assumed referring to the Plague of Justinian, but apparently that happened a few years later in 541-549
- nostrademons 2 years agoPlague 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.
- nostrademons 2 years ago
- tamaharbor 2 years agoWe are just one volcano eruption away from global cooling.
- timbit42 2 years ago*temporary global cooling.
- timbit42 2 years ago
- Kaibeezy 2 years agoWhat was the best year?
I’ll take 1977.
- throwaway6734 2 years agoDefinitely the best year for music.
Television, Kraftwerk, Eno, Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Clash, Fleetwood Mac, and The Ramones all released great albums
- hossbeast 2 years agoBecause Star Wars was released in theaters?
- timbit42 2 years agoThe 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.
- timbit42 2 years ago
- throwaway6734 2 years ago
- jaggs 2 years agoHow 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.
- dang 2 years agoMaybe so, but please don't fulminate or call names on HN. You may not owe tech nutcases better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
- jaggs 2 years agoI apologise. In my defence, it's only geo-engineering which gets me so riled up. But of course you're right, and I should, and will, tone it down completely.
(I'm not sure I have been guilty of 'fulmination' though :) )
Happy New year.
- jaggs 2 years ago
- twblalock 2 years agoThe climate change we have right now has been caused by geoengineering too -- accidental geoengineering.
Intentional, careful geoengineering is the only real chance we have of holding back climate change. Human societies simply will not be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to roll back climate change solely by reducing emissions.
A combination of politically acceptable emission cuts, geoengineering, and acceptance of/adaptation to higher temperatures and their consequences is the only possible outcome in the real world. So hold back on the knee-jerk reactions to geoengineering and take it seriously.
- pfdietz 2 years agoBecause gradually injecting sulfur is the same as massive uncontrolled natural injections, right?
- aquaticsunset 2 years agoNobody 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 2 years agoThis 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.
- pfdietz 2 years ago
- jaggs 2 years agoWho knows? Nobody, especially on a global scale, which is what they're suggesting.
- pfdietz 2 years agoWe have natural experiments where sulfur aerosols were injected. The 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for example. It injected 17 megatonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, causing a global cooling of 0.4 C and a northern hemisphere cooling of 0.5-0.6 C. This also affected ozone, which suggests aerosols other than sulfuric acid droplets might be a better idea.
- pfdietz 2 years ago
- aquaticsunset 2 years ago
- dang 2 years ago