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536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

sciencemag.org

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Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#81

Post by TrainedMonkey »

MannishMan wrote: post #73

I know this is pedantic, but based on the order of events in the article wouldn’t 543 be the worst year to be alive? By then you would have experienced the cumulative horror of starving and freezing through two volcanic events and watching a third to half of your friends and family die of plague. 536 would have a been frightening and confusing as the volcanic fog began to roll in, but you couldn’t know the terror of…

Objectively you are right, subjectively I think what matters is short term contrast. 535 vs 536 has a much steeped drop in quality of life than 542 vs 543.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#82

Post by chrisco255 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #72
chrisco255 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forecasting volcanoes is a lot like forecasting earthquakes, it's really difficult to do and often there's very little warning, maybe a couple of days at most, but sometimes comes with no warning at all. The White Island volcano killed several people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_e... This place was a famous tourist destination. One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic er…

How would green/grow houses help in such a situation?

The cold weather would kill crops in all but probably tropical latitudes. The lack of sunlight will slow plant growth. Placing plants in greenhouses / growhouses would keep them warm and you could supplement sunlight with LED lighting to feed the plants.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#83

Post by fsckboy »

pureliquidhw wrote: post #17

How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption? After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months? Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: h…

How susceptible are we to another catastrophic volcano eruption? We're apparently not very susceptible to a few degrees of global cooling, so at least we have that going for us.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#84

Post by [deleted] »

subsubzero wrote: post #58

How many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.

[deleted]

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#85

Post by klyrs »

deanCommie wrote: post #10

These kinds of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions could happen today right? What's.......our intended process for dealing with this? Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere? I know this is a stupidly naive question to some degree - how do you prevent acts of god, but I am curious if someone has thought about it.

Edit: don't take my word for it, apparently this is a popular myth

Read up on Yellowstone, for example -- AFAIK it's "due for a big one" but it blows up so infrequently and so catastrophically that there's no real plan other than "maybe think about not living in North America."

But hey, volcanic ash is a coolant for the climate -- a few well-placed eruptions could do some good, on a global scale (sorry about the locals)...

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#86

Post by ryandrake »

divbzero wrote: post #75
subsubzero wrote: post #58

How many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.

I hope this pandemic has opened everyone’s eyes to the benefits of disaster preparedness. If more of us get into the habit of stocking up in advance, we would experience less of a spike in demand when the next disaster strikes.

I considered myself an "aspirational Prepper" before the pandemic, but I'm getting more and more serious about it. Watching society totally freak out over as little as going without TP for a few weeks and going without their manicure for a few months has been eye-opening.

My plans to stock up on survival supplies and buy a little bug out property in a remote spot have gone from "wouldn't that be neat?" to "maybe it is time to set some money aside and start building up a savings for this" pretty quickly.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#87

Post by divbzero »

nopzor wrote: post #55
deanCommie wrote: post #10

These kinds of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions could happen today right? What's.......our intended process for dealing with this? Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere? I know this is a stupidly naive question to some degree - how do you prevent acts of god, but I am curious if someone has thought about it.

correct, it could happen today. humans are really bad at conceptualizing the risk from such events. we are also overdue for another major solar geo storm (ie. like the carrington event).

A solar storm of similar magnitude passed through Earth’s orbit in 2012 but missed hitting Earth. [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#88

Post by yummypaint »

lgl wrote: post #62

The 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull [0] was a small sample of the perturbations that a volcanic event can have on day to day lives. And it was a relatively small eruption. Anything much larger than that will most likely have devastating effects on modern society on pretty much all levels and it's not really a matter of "if" but "when". Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on…

It's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#89

Post by closeparen »

CameronNemo wrote: post #72
chrisco255 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forecasting volcanoes is a lot like forecasting earthquakes, it's really difficult to do and often there's very little warning, maybe a couple of days at most, but sometimes comes with no warning at all. The White Island volcano killed several people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_e... This place was a famous tourist destination. One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic er…

How would green/grow houses help in such a situation?

Lava flows are a relatively local and immediate problem, what will really get large numbers of people over a long period of time is clouds of ash blocking out the sun.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#90

Post by jcranmer »

murat131 wrote: post #16
jandrese wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North American natives were not good about writing stuff down, and by the time Europeans showed up it was almost a millennium later so the records would have been scanty even if the Europeans hadn't gone on insane rampages spreading death, disease, and destruction everywhere they went.

Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200BC, while in the Americas the necessity of writing things down triggered the same invention around 600BC. Main reason was because Eurasia was in the east-west plane where climate is similar and communication/commerce was not difficult to employ which helped Europe, ME, Asia, and far east to increase interaction. Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, I…

Clearly, you've read Guns, Germs, Steel, whose accuracy when it comes to anthropology is on the same level as the (Christian) Bible's accuracy with respect to cosmology.

> Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south.

It should be noted that there is rather little evidence of technologies spreading along the main East-West axis of Eurasia (particularly Neolithic technologies), while there is far more evidence of such technology spreading along the North-South axis of the Americas. For example, pottery may well have spread from its invention in the Amazon Rainforest across the Caribbean to Mesoamerica and the Southeast US; corn did spread from its initial domestication Mesoamerica to both the US (where it largely supplanted preexisting domesticants) and down into the Andes (where it supplemented the existing potato crops); and metallurgy spread from its Andean origins along the Pacific coast to Western Mexico and the Southwest US.

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