71–80 of 115 posts
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
Possibly caused by the Youngest Toba supervolcano eruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory See "Genetic bottleneck hypothesis"
And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not that well.
Ingenuity >>> Chicken Little
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.
Not thousands of years. Centuries probably, but also maybe only decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our proposed planet-scale terraforming will be done gradually, don't be irrational! We'll just see how it goes... Are you serious?
Without taking a side on sulphur injection, it should be noted that we are already doing very rapid planet-scale terraforming.
We may change the climate in our entire history as much as a super volcano does, or many times less.
*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".
Islam first appeared on 610. I wonder if these events had any effects on that.
Related: 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 w…
There's good document about 536: https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.