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

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

#31

Post by chrisco255 »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by chrisco255 »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #6
rnk wrote: post #4

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

Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast

You can't put greenhouses over entire states, which is what would be necessary to prevent mass famine.

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

#33

Post by DoughnutHole »

yterdy wrote: post #24

*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.

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".

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

#34

Post by AngryData »

yetanotherloser wrote: post #8
barbariangrunge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast

How many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they take to build? What do they cost to run?

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.

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

#35

Post by mariuolo »

pfdietz wrote: post #27
jaggs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows? Nobody, especially on a global scale, which is what they're suggesting.

We 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.

Would we diffuse it in the same way at the same speed? If not, would the results be any different?

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

#36

Post by Baeocystin »

pfdietz wrote: post #9
barbariangrunge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less severe; although our population is so high that it would get complicated fast

The big backup is diverting certain animal feeds to instead feed people.

Yup. There's a reason corn subsidies are what they are, for example, and it's not (just) politics.

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

#37

Post by chrisco255 »

xenospn wrote: post #5
rnk wrote: post #4

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

We have electricity and insulation. We won’t starve. Will it suck? Absolutely.

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.

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

#38

Post by MrOwnPut »

pfdietz wrote: post #18
aquaticsunset wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Our proposed planet-scale terraforming will be done gradually, don't be irrational!

We'll just see how it goes...

Are you serious?

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

#39

Post by pfdietz »

MrOwnPut wrote: post #38
pfdietz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our proposed planet-scale terraforming will be done gradually, don't be irrational! We'll just see how it goes... Are you serious?

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?

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

#40

Post by amanaplanacanal »

chrisco255 wrote: post #31
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #23

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.

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.

But we will lose recent years first, so that could impact what sort of research would still be possible
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