[HN Gopher] Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)
Author : mvexel
Score : 102 points
Date : 2023-01-01 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| alexfromapex wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230101194203/https://www.scien...
| rnk wrote:
| And nothing prevents new volcanic explosions from doing this
| again. How would the northern world deal with this today? Not
| that well.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Most 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| jeltz wrote:
| Much 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.
| xenospn wrote:
| We have electricity and insulation. We won't starve. Will it
| suck? Absolutely.
| tjkrusinski wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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.
| tjkrusinski wrote:
| 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.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Greenhouses and vertical farms would make the famine less
| severe; although our population is so high that it would get
| complicated fast
| gandalfian wrote:
| More 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 wrote:
| You can't put greenhouses over entire states, which is what
| would be necessary to prevent mass famine.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| How many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they
| take to build? What do they cost to run?
| AngryData wrote:
| 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.
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| 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 "Americans
| consume" (including livestock grazing, which can't be
| magic-ed into anything else) and "You can get by on"
| (measured in hypothetical perfect-acres) - it would take
| esoteric casuistry to make these really comparable
| anyway. Nevertheless the gap is so large that AngryData's
| fundamental point is extremely robust: growlamp-ing
| everyone's basic needs is fantasy-land. I thought that,
| but didn't realise the case against it was as strong as I
| now suspect it might be)
| robocat wrote:
| > 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
| chlorophyll, some edible plants grow in shade).
| Mezzie wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| A 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
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| Either {[[citation needed]]} Or {"Did you mean to post on
| the Things Silicon Valley Doesn't Understand About
| Agriculture thread?"}
| pfdietz wrote:
| The big backup is diverting certain animal feeds to instead
| feed people.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Yup. There's a reason corn subsidies are what they are, for
| example, and it's not (just) politics.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Microgreens and winter tomatoes aren't going to stave off
| famine.
| greesil wrote:
| Beans beans the magical fruit
| dmix wrote:
| Yeah vertical farming/hydroponics only gets you a very
| limited set of vegatables.
| [deleted]
| tamaharbor wrote:
| We are just one volcano eruption away from global cooling.
| ch33zer wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jaggs wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Because gradually injecting sulfur is the same as massive
| uncontrolled natural injections, right?
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Our proposed planet-scale terraforming will be done
| gradually, don't be irrational!
|
| We'll just see how it goes...
|
| Are you serious?
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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?
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Assuming your doomsday predictions are correct and all
| this time... then assuming your counter to the prediction
| is correct.
|
| Ya'know what... go right ahead and try to terraform the
| Earth to whatever you think is... best.
|
| Your doomsday prediction may then come true actually.
| Self fulfilling prophecy and all that.
|
| God speed in making your artificial ice age.
| superluserdo wrote:
| Without taking a side on sulphur injection, it should be
| noted that we are already doing very rapid planet-scale
| terraforming.
| jaggs wrote:
| Who knows? Nobody, especially on a global scale, which is
| what they're suggesting.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| mariuolo wrote:
| Would we diffuse it in the same way at the same speed? If
| not, would the results be any different?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Could 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 wrote:
| Probably when, instead of if.
| ummonk wrote:
| The years after the Younger Toba Eruption would have been
| objectively far worse than this.
| dang wrote:
| 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 was 'the worst year to be alive'_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4
| comments)
|
| Others?
| Adiqq wrote:
| There's good document about 536: https://youtu.be/cKUz5Vjq9-s
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I hear 1348 wasn't too great either.
| guerrilla wrote:
| "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.
| herrrk wrote:
| So far!
| irrational wrote:
| Reminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes comic
|
| https://www.socomic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ch140325.g...
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| But we will lose recent years first, so that could impact
| what sort of research would still be possible
| mjhay wrote:
| 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 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 wrote:
| We 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...
| yterdy wrote:
| *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 wrote:
| 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".
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-01 23:00 UTC)