81–90 of 115 posts
I assumed referring to the Plague of Justinian, but apparently that happened a few years later in 541-549
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It 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.
Coordination 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.
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.
I hear 1348 wasn't too great either.
"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…
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.
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But we will lose recent years first, so that could impact what sort of research would still be possible
Not 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 ot…
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wow, if that is all true then vertical farming is even less relevant to this scenario than I thought. I'm not sure I'm qualified to check your figures and I suspect some of your assumptions are more pessimistic than mine, but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs. amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots). (Just to preempt some likely replies from other people: I'm sure there is a big difference between "Americ…
> but the fundamentals pass a reality check vs amount of energy delivered by the sun (lots). Solar panels produce about 150 watts of energy per square meter since most solar panels operate at 15% efficiency this translates to 15 watts per square foot. Which is 100 Watts solar energy per square foot, so 35 Watts certainly has the right order. (LEDs are not 100% efficient, sunlight is not 100% efficient with chlorophyl…
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Not 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 ot…
Tangent but do you happen to use a Colemak-layout keyboard?
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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.
This is way too optimistic, and the melting rate is accelerating. Not thousands of years. Centuries probably, but also maybe only 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?
*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.
> 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 ev…
They 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.
> 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.