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 the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).
It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.
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.
I am not too certain of the logic of the arguement - namely because fossil fuels are actually pretty damn advanced in terms of "actual technology and societal infastructure to access and exploit them". We already went through this long ago with surface deposits of copper ore as well essentially millenia ago.
Effectively the time when it is useful is "when we don't have cheaper alternatives yet". We still should strive to make renewables and storage the cheaper option though.
To get really pedantic our 20th century understanding of power and energy are exactly backwards colloquially from what is really provided. Power is energy over time. The "power" infastructure was actually largely an energy infastructure with the exception of say hydro electric dams - you can only burn fuel once no matter how clever your ability to extract it. Meanwhile "renewable energy" provides power over its period of existence.
There are a lot of surface level coal deposits right now that can be harvested with hand tools. It’s simply a question of efficiency, if a deposit is not vast nobody turns it into a mine.
Localized earthquakes are one. Also companies doing fracking actually have a legal exemption to the typical requirement to disclose the chemicals they pump into the ground. I believe they argue its a trade secret. I assume that if it was not really toxic they might disclose them.
That’s why a broad basket is preferable to a monoculture of production.
Where I live is a perfect microcosm of this - in the summer, we get ample power from our solar array, but in the winter, when it can be dark and raining for weeks on end, it doesn’t come close - so I’m building out hydro and wind, as when it rains, a stream appears that we can harness, and the wind blows.
The same applies to renewables at grid scale - overdependence on a single source is absolutely risky, which is why most renewable energy efforts involve quite a bit of diversification.
So use that while we can and leave the fossil fuels for when renewable are cut off from the sun.
I wonder how much wind there would be under these circumstances though.
“It can't work if you do it that way" is a pretty bad argument if nobody actually does it that way. Maybe you are accidentally misrepresenting reality in order to support your world view here, but if not please go somewhere else, where facts don't matter.
As others mentioned: every nation that does renewables is looking into robust energy mixes and this (at least in industrial nations) includes catastrophic scenarios as well).
I would think the combination of windmills and wood supplies should almost always provide a (ssllooww) recovery path.
There will plenty of metals on the surface. Use the wood to melt iron. Use iron to make saws. Use saws to cut trees into beams and planks. Use beams and planks to build windmills. Use windmills to generate power and electricity. Etc.
Using coal and oil we went through the part from using mills for power to where we are now in about 250 years. On the one hand, if knowledge is retained, that can be sped up. On the other hand, it will be a lot harder to go through that process without coal and oil.
I would guess the net effect will be that it will take longer, as one of the effects of not having coal and oil will be lower yields in agriculture and, hence, a much smaller world population that also has to make a bigger effort to produce food.
> There's no way for anyone to make money by being responsible
Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and China). Two disconnected factoids to illustrate the level of dependency and consumption we have today: without ammonia synthesis from fossil fuel, worldwide organic fertilizer stock could sustain only about 4bln people - globally; China in-serviced more cement (which requires fossil fuels) in like five years than the US did in the last 100 years.
To reduce carbon output, you need to switch coal use to natural gas where possible. That's the best near term solution right now - isolate coal and oil consumption to the industries that really need them - e.g. transportation, manufacturing - and work on alternative sources of electric generation, i.e. hydro where available, nuclear where not, unless some miracle net-positive and reliable electric generation method becomes available in the meantime.
EDIT: I mean, you guys are downvoting these comments, and I'm sorry to tell you things you don't want to hear, but would prefer that you respond with contrary information rather than downvoting. Happy to alter my views and engage in information sharing.
You're simply wrong, and we will continue to tell you things YOU don't want to hear.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is altogether more practical and economical than doing so with a combination of new nuclear and renewables. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but the costs of renewables have fallen so fast that it's now the case. At the same time, the supposed "Nuclear Renaissance" was revealed to be an illusion. Nuclear is now a dead technology walking. And renewables (and associated technologies like batteries and electrolyzers) continue to show cost declines at a rate nuclear could only dream of.
BTW, summarize the argument in the video. I don't waste my time watching video links.
I'm not sure whether nuclear is better, and renewables definitely is a good thing to have in the mix. But comparing the carbon emissions of Germany and France, and the cost of electricity in both countries would suggest that at least currently, renewables without nuclear isn't as effective for supplying our power needs as renewables with nuclear.
If I've misunderstood this somewhere, I would love to learn more.
You're making an invalid argument there. The current generation mix in France and Germany reflects decisions made up to decades in the past, when relative prices were very different from what they are now. Back in the 20th century when France was building reactors, renewables were much more expensive. What was the low cost option then is not what it is now.
Going forward, even France is having a very hard time building reactors, and is finding renewables are cheaper. This is one reason why France's nuclear industry is in such trouble.
Germany deliberately pushed renewables in order to send them down their experience curves. This was spectacularly successful, but it has come at a high price to their consumers, who are still paying that down. The rest of us have reaped the benefit of far lower renewable costs.
Japan, one of the most technologically developed place in the world, cannot use renewables when they shut down nuclear. Instead they turn back to coal.
I'm not saying renewables are always inferior - e.g., California would be a perfect place for solar. But in every story I've heard of, when nuclear power is turned off fossil fuels pick up the slack.
First, 2011 is nine years ago. Utility scale solar has declined in cost by a factor of about 5 in the last decade. Decisions made even then do not say anything about how solar would compete today. Wind has also declined considerably in cost in that decade, although not as steeply.
Second, the argument I was making was that renewables beat new nuclear. I wasn't arguing that renewables beat fossil fuels unencumbered by CO2 charges, or even necessarily existing nuclear plants in which the construction and financing costs are sunk. So your observation is irrelevant to the claim I made.
I have to wonder why you guys never notice that the anti-renewables arguments you make are such non sequiturs. Myself, if I found defending my position required I resort to bogus logic, would reevaluate whether what I believed was actually true.
Continuing to operate their existing reactors would certainly have been cheaper for Japan. So the decision to replace them with fossil fuels (now LNG + CC, not the fossil fuels of decades ago) wasn't driven by economics.
After 2011, nuclear plants in Japan need to be audited that means plants must be stopped near the future. It causes massive power supply crisis so power companies built power plant as fast as possible. IIRC LNG power plant is said fastest plant to build and start operating.
Sure, so that partly explains why electricity costs so much more in Germany than France. But for a lay person (ie me), I can't help but compare the carbon emissions and air quality between the two countries, and attribute the difference to fossil-fuel vs nuclear power plants?
Also, I always assumed the lower renewable costs have come from economies of scale due mainly to China exploding it's energy production (which renewables makes a decent chunk of)
Germany jumped the gun. They started investing heavily in renewables when they were still very costly and storage technologies weren’t practical. Things have changed a lot in the last 30 years.
This is great. I think the summary understates his points regarding the burden on energy demand that will come into play over next several decades by developing regions. The numbers are astonishing.
Also underrepresented are his comments on just how unrealistic the assumptions are in the models calling for temperature reduction, specifically about the implications for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Reducing energy consumption (whether through bans or price hikes) has a known humanitarian impact in present terms. The idea that you can convince your poor neighbor that he doesn't really need to eat better or have access to more resources is a tricky problem.
pfdietz, I think the case is made quite plainly in his presentation that renewables cannot catch up to much less displace ("100%") fossil fuels anytime in the near future. If you don't see that in the sum of what he presents in the notes, I'd encourage you to watch the source material to hear him say it, sector by sector. It's full of real data from a guy that's been studying energy use in human civilization for many decades.
Nowhere does he make the case that 100% renewables is impossible. It is, of course, a tall order, but maintaining and growing a global energy infrastructure OF ANY KIND is a tall order.
Smil has argued that energy transitions happen only slowly, but I think he's being misled because the current rate of cost decline in renewables is unprecedented in its speed, as is the willingness of increasing numbers of countries to impose CO2 taxes or the equivalent.
Second factor is historically new energy sources required rolling out different technologies to utilize it. And you often couldn't switch back and forth. Renewables are generally about electric power and electron is an electron and we already have fully built out distribution networks.
And you're right about regulatory pressure being a big motivator.
It's simply this: our DAILY growing (not declining, not stable) demand for hydrocarbons is so profoundly huge, that the improvements in renewables (even if taken at generous face value) do not dent it today nor will they in the future even with the most generous assumptions about efficiency and storage improvements. This is just data you can look up to see the trends for daily barrel of oil demand, and the improvement rate of solar/wind and storage efficiencies. The numbers are the truth, not hope.
Developing societies such as Africa, India and China are increasing their consumption for the next few decades at least, radically accelerating the demand for hydrocarbons. India expects a quintupling of coal use in the next 4 decades. Airline miles will quintuple in much shorter period of time (like ten-twenty years). There is no shortage of hydrocarbons to naturally limit these demands. Politically there is no way to restrain newly developing nations. Technologically there is no net-positive energy generation source that competes on a density basis with fossil fuels. Again, the numbers tell the story.
I sincerely appreciate your frustration and hope for something different/better, but you need to come up with contrary data to argue these points. A hope in technical improvements year-over-year is all you've pointed to, and the trendline of capacity and efficiency improvements doesn't back that up. Further cost paid for a solar panel is not a benchmark. Energy intensity of its emplacement to bring it online is what its output needs to be balanced against. Its output, limited by useful life and useful operating hours really hamstrings its total lifecycle cost after the fossil fuel intense journey it takes.
You seem to be saying that renewables require improvement just due to the scale of the problem. But once renewables are sufficiently cheap, or once CO2 taxes cause fossil fuels to reflect their true cost, all that's required is just building more of them. This is a matter of scaling up, not improving the product, although improvement will almost certainly also occur, due to experience effects if nothing else.
That renewables are still a fairly small percentage of global energy demand is a good thing. It means that these experience effects still have room to kick in. Extrapolating the demonstrated experience curve gives that resistive heat from PV will be cheaper than heat from burning any form of fossil fuel, by the time PV has expanded fully.
The investment required to go 100% renewable will be many trillions of dollars. But the world GDP is $87 trillion, and the world spends about 10% of that on energy each year. There is enormous capacity to invest in energy infrastructure -- which is good, because enormous investment will be needed, regardless of what that infrastructure is.
> seem to be saying that renewables require improvement due to the scale of the problem.
Certainly they must be competitive in terms of energy density otherwise how can they substantially displace another energy source? Today renewable tech is not energy dense enough.
> Once renewables are sufficiently cheap
..cheap in total lifecycle cost (not end user cost of panel), carbon negative and sufficiently energy dense (transportable at light weight/low volume relative to stored energy)
> it's just building more of them.
For all of this, please remember we're talking global scale for electricity generation (<30% of fossil fuel use today), plus transportation, and manufacturing, not just electric use at my house or even a small country.
Straight cost - you mention taxes and regulation. This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We nearly deforested the US east coast and almost killed off a whale species until coal came along and saved both (true story). Now we couldn't go back if we wanted to because civilization assumes a certain amount of energy input. Reducing it would have huge humanitarian impacts. Stabilizing it would be good, but this unfairly puts a huge burden on developing regions who would likely not tolerate it anyway.
Technology improvement - Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery. That's the gap it needs to make up at 5% efficiency gain per year (many orders of magnitude). It's beyond optimistic to say that would be covered any time soon barring a miracle (the track record shows that Moore's law doesn't apply to solar cells and batteries).
Even if you doubled the rate of efficiency improvements to 10% annualized, it's still an unrealistically wide gap to make up in my lifetime at least.
Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology. And/or you have to assume some global-scale rational decision making (or force) to reduce consumption voluntarily (or involuntarily :/), in contrast with the whole of historic human behavior regarding energy consumption. Seems like there's a lot of hope involved there.
> This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found.
We have plenty of examples of humans forgoing technologies that turned out to have downsides. And it's a near universal truth that dire warnings were given about these restrictions, warnings that turned out to be vastly overblown. Technology does step up to the plate when market incentives are in place.
> Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery.
Li-ion batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel for fossil fuels to be displaced. Some applications don't require that energy density. We are already seeing battery electric buses, for example. In other cases something other than batteries can be used, for example hydrogen. In the worst case, net zero CO2 diesel can be made synthetically, using energy from renewables (and carbon from either CO2 capture or biomass; use of biomass would be limited to these edge cases.)
We are already at the point technically where a great deal of fossil fuel for transportation would be displaced if transport paid the true cost of CO2 emission.
> Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology.
No, the roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing. That is the biggest obstacle.
> batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel
We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption.
Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship would materially reduce its cargo capacity because it's wasting so much space and mass on literally tons of batteries. Compare the capacity, speed, and installed power of MV Yara Birkeland (electric container ship) to the OOCL Hong Kong (diesel powered cargo ship) for an idea. Another example is Tokyo suffering a predictable 3-day cyclone every year, where 27 million people need 22 gigawatts of electricity. Imagine the battery array needed for that (with its inherent cost, maintenance, limited lifespan and acres of space in a space-constrained land). So these are two easy examples of why storage density needs to increase by orders of magnitude to meet the bar you set of 100% replacement.
It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet and the track record of an annualized 5% efficiency improvement for storage tech (which is generous but imagine even doubling it to 10%) per year won't catch up in our lifetimes. The math speaks for itself.
> roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing
If it were just pricing, it presumes that I have equivalent systems to implement and I just need to pay a premium for one vs the other. But that's not the case as illustrated in the examples above (and there are many, many more - airplanes, continuous smelting) where the existing energy storage tech doesn't work. So technology is an enormous roadblock.
As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
So limiting fossil fuel usage in a situation where there is no suitable replacement as described above, ultimately means you need to tell some guy in India that he can't have an air conditioner and some family in Africa that their agriculture development programs need to take a hit for lack of synthesized ammonia. This is a very unequal proposition. Alternatively, you can preserve that growth rate in the developing world and tell people in the developed world that they need to rewind their lifestyles in all ways (housing, vehicle mass, etc) to the early 1960's, which is when the US last had a consumption rate at the level needed to impact global warming. This is probably the preferable solution, but how tenable do you think either of these propositions really are?
There are undeniable humanitarian costs - not just monetary costs - to reducing fossil fuel use today when there are no (at scale) suitable replacements.
> I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources.
There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time".
> It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet
Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies.
It's a common canard that anti-renewable polemics make to represent batteries as the only storage option. And you've continued to make this argument even after I listed alternatives earlier.
When you make an argument that no solution is possible, it puts the responsibility ON YOU to rule out not just batteries, but every conceivable solution and combination of solutions. You can't just adopt a lazy attitude of lousy engineering to make your case.
> As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
It will likely involve carbon tariffs. If some country refuses to control CO2 emission, trade with that country will be blocked. This will coerce the holdouts.
Your attitude there also smacks of fatal defeatism. What is your alternative, burning fossil fuels until we have a replay of the end-Triassic greenhouse mass extinction?
A matter of fact isn't an argument, it just is. It's usefulness here is that IF your solution depends on humans doing something for the first time ever in not just recorded history but also in the entire archeological record, it's a big assumption to be weaving into a proposal and weakens (but granted does not make impossible) the idea that you may be on the right track in assuming it will happen now. It's like the famous "How to draw an owl" meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Are miracles possible? Sure. Should you bet on it in your planning? No.
> Hydrogen, ammonia
Both of these require fossil fuels to synthesize in quantities to meet today's needs, let alone new at-scale quantities. Hydrogen certainly may be better than burning coal or even natural gas, but it still would require fossil fuels. The amount of organically sourced ammonia we have on the planet _in total_ is only sufficient to support crops for ~4 bln people globally. There is no solution right now to synthesize enough ammonia at scale without hydrocarbons.
> [embargoes] will coerce the holdouts
We'll not get a chance to test this, but as a thought exercise let's consider how well embargoes work today. Then consider who the embargoes will be placed on from a justice perspective or from an effectiveness perspective. You are either advocating a form of colonialism in the developing world or telling your French neighbor to pay way more for heating, cooking, driving, etc. Both these things have taken place in isolation, and both had bad outcomes. Scaling it up doesn't make a good outcome any more likely.
> What's your alternative?
Rational thinking isn't defeatism - it's application _is_ the solution.
I would gently ask - very gently and politely as I would a friend - that you to re-read your initial response to my statement. You said it was "utter nonsense" and equated it to saying the earth was flat. I'm sure you can appreciate now with more data how the critique is actually the reverse. Your response to my points assumes a miraculous technological development at an indeterminant future date whose likelihood is not supported by existing efficiency improvement data. It disregards the voraciousness with which the planet is consuming fossil fuels today, the future burden forecasted by developing economies, and the insufficiency of current technologies to scale.
I empathize with your sense of hope and am similarly shocked at the risk we face as a species, but people typically do two things in the face of this shock that are equally irrational: deny global warming or believe the solution for energy transition is easy.
Bill Gates said in a talk at Stanford a few months ago that the "easy" people are a bigger barrier to decarb progress than the deniers. I don't know if I would agree in the ranking (or care), but agree that neither are helpful. The problem is enormously difficult (as befitting a planetary emergency). My view of solutions is informed the same way as my assessment of current energy use is. Seek knowledge, be rational, be very skeptical, watch out for the hucksters, support what's left over.
It does feel like Tokamak will never arrive. An acquaintance did their doctorate last year on modelling some aspect of the containment; they didn't seem hopeful.
Nuclear might have been an answer ten years ago, but one cannot make the case today that it is the answer. The raw economics have pushed nuclear out of the picture now.
Renewables + storage. For long term storage and covering rare extended dark windless periods, the key is hydrogen, for which the cost per kWh for underground storage can be far lower than for batteries (efficiency is lower, but that's ok.)
If you go to https://model.energy/ and optimize such systems in various places, using real weather data, you find nuclear (called "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced options) get optimized to 0%. It's just too expensive. That site uses plausible cost numbers, except electrolysers are already cheaper than their target cost for 2030.
They will eventually - at the moment Sun is radiating the was majority of it's energy into basically empty space. There is no reason not to put all that energy to good use by a Dyson swarm.
I mentioned nuclear. It is secondary to the conversion from coal to gas though in terms of near-term realized benefit.
Nuclear requires a lot of dereg and testing that will be decades out if we start today. This assumes the barriers of popular rejection can be overcome. China might pull it off, but I don't see the US radiating enthusiasm for it. But yeah, since few places on earth can take advantage of hydro, I don't see any long-term alternative to nuclear.
Many developed nations are reducing nuclear energy dependency as a matter of policy and preventing new reactors as a matter of regulation so dereg is a barrier that needs to be addressed for nuclear to become an alternative source in the highest carbon-impacting nations.
The key parameters in a nuclear build are:
1) the construction time (impacted by regulatory regimes)
2) the cost of capital (interest rate of tying up money)
3) an uncertainty factor about getting shut down (impacted by regulatory regimes)
In China, 1&2 are 3-4 years and 2% respectively. In the US they are 8-9 years, 15% and maybe 50% chance you'll be shut down before you can finish. [0]
It just isn't as hot right now as "renewables". What's needed is a good marketing campaign, people will follow, and so will imvestments. Downsides will be gleefully ignored, just like with solar.
> We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine
Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
It would almost be reasonable to say "They are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine".. whoever they are. The ones with cocaine mustaches presumably.
EDIT: Someone paid a lot of money to make this not an "our" choice but instead a "their" choice. If you feel like this is something you have any real control over, I urge you to change things.
You kidding me? We're all getting the coke. Just because you're not Scarface doesn't avoid the fact that all of us are awash in plastics, silicone, rare earth metals, concrete, steel, precious metals, alloys, goods from far flung lands, industrial agriculture and many assumptions about available services that rely on the same and ravenous upstream fossil fuel consumption. We (as human consumers) never had it so good, and if that luxury is unevenly distributed, the fact remains that the tide continues to lift all boats globally. You certainly benefit from the aggregate bounty society as a whole has reaped (enjoy that Starbucks!) and directly are living a better life today than someone of your station would have lived 300 years ago. I don't even know you in the least, but am comfortable making that statement categorically because the difference is global capabilities is that profound.
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison?
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I don't know enough to make that comparison.
I think folks are generally confusing three different topics here: per capita share of wealth, per capita material consumption, and per capita CO2 production.
Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.
Seph-reed posted:
>Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.
It’s not either/or, you can have community with or without material goods. I do have community and a sense of purpose and a satisfying life with my family around me. Many don’t, but that has always been true at all times and all places through everything we know about the history of human life. You’re writing as though misery and suffering were recent inventions of Capitalism, previously unknown to mankind.
The fact is though we are all in the developed world swimming in material wealth and comfort unimaginable to most humans from even a few generations ago. Only an incredible abundance of cheap energy and raw materials make this possible.
Yes the very wealthy have yachts and helicopters, but if you have a reasonably up to date smartphone and laptop, a can of Coke or a Starbucks, maybe a PlayStation and a microwave oven, etc, there isn’t really much a billionaire can spend that will get them anything significantly better. The main advantage of wealth is getting other people to do things for you, but in terms of material life were in an incredibly democratic and egalitarian era.
I agree that things have gotten better over time, but how can you be so smug about it?
The amount of hoarding, infighting, and extortion has been disgusting. We're advancing as slow as species seemingly could short of completely falling apart and destroying their Earth, and even that's in question right now.
If we did things the way I'm speaking of, I guarantee you we'd have all of these things and more. Going slow and doing things right is worth it. Having value for creativity, community and labor is worth it. Not justifying oppressive decisions we couldn't have changed on the basis that we got some cheap consumer crap from it... it's worth it to me at least.
This line of thought is unpopular now, but if history is any indicator, the sentience of the future will look back on these logs and question how the fuck you could read these words and not fucking get it. We would be more advanced if we didn't do these things. Not the other way around.
You’re largely right, we definitely need to move sharply in a more sustainable direction. Income inequality is a growing problem. However your assertion up thread that we in general don’t benefit is incredibly naive. I think you’re conflating disagreement with that position with disagreement with a whole host of utterly unrelated issues.
I suppose my relativity isn't from zero, but instead a sense of neutral pace. If I'm on a trek towards better lands, I don't benefit from a broken leg, but I still make progress.
To me, the concept that we're perpetually slowed down by the selfish behavior of those who generally do nothing more than seek power for themselves means we don't benefit.
I don't think there's anything that could stop humanity from moving forwards, so to say we benefit from impatient selfish jerk offs who cut the line, to build walls, and then extort resources from everyone trying to move forwards is... well, they paid a lot of money to put a nicely spinned narrative out on that.
How thankful we all should be to have been sold advancement. :)
I think you're mistaking my statements for a personal religious dogma. I'm just telling you the way the world is. We may or may not agree on the prescription for the world's ills, but it's irrelevant.
You're assuming consumption and community are mutually exclusive. They are not. Plenty of examples to be found to show they are not dependent (10, 01, 11, 00).
You ask why any of this is necessary to get these goods. I assume by "this" you mean the fossil fuel industry. It is necessary because as a high density energy source it has no competitive alternative. It's literally the best fuel source mankind has found in the strict terms of transportability and output relative to mass. Civilization's capabilities have grown in parallel with the improvement of its energy sources. Decreasing available energy means decreasing (or ceasing) growth/development. Do you want to be the one to tell China, India and Africa that they can't develop further?
Things we imagine are still constrained by physical reality. Technological progress for the next 100 years will still have unbreakable dependencies on high density energy. Unless a miracle happens.
What if one believes life in general is more or less meaningless and that the “better” feeling you get from community is nothing more than various chemical releases that can be triggered just the same as consuming as many resources as I can while I’m here?
Why seek the good feelings by relying on a community that you have no control over than pick your favorite things to consume? Why have people that lived within the community model for thousands of years defected the first chance they could?
Any other action is just going release the chemicals in slightly different but similar ways. So using your logic, why is being a selfish hedonist going to be better than the first option? You have just given a somewhat nihilistic argument that neither outcome matters.
Meanwhile, have you tried both ways? My personal experience suggests that acting benevolently to others is much less stressful, makes one much happier, and that leads to better physical health even. Compared with being a bitter curmudgeon on the other extreme, you will likely be happier and live longer. It's a much better way to release the chemicals.
Good argument. For the record I don’t actually believe that Anti-social consumption is a quality way to live a life. But I do think it’s important to kick around opinions that make a moral appeal or claim to be “the way”.
This is a xomolete misinterpretation of today's economic and resource situation. The real tragedy is that all this is a conpletely unneccesary wanton destruction. Thrre is no coke, it serves no purpose.
Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materials that does the lions share of pollution. You could replace all manufacturing with a combonation of nuclear power and reneables, and youd hardly change the price of the final product.
It's often said that most of the (developed world) economy depends on consumers. Rich people tend to have a greater proportion of financial assets compared to consumption. When people criticize the rich, it's pretty standard to say they're stingy, they hoard wealth etc. Conversely when the rich consume, they're at least "creating jobs".
So that seems to imply to me that ordinary people (in the rich countries) shouldn't be underestimated from an environmental perspective, and because our morality is pro-consumer it reinforces waste. I don't think that's brainwashing by the rich, I think that's just how people are, in Western society at least.
Sure, economic equality will lead to more direct consumption than inequality, all else equal. That said, I'd rather have equality plus appropriate Pigouvian taxation than have to rely on inequality to do the environmental rationing for us.
A more equal society would probably have a greater chance of enacting Pigouvian taxes anyway because political power and economic power would be less intertwined.
If you are an average american, you have the cocaine mustache, and your denial is the problem. There is no secret cabal where 1% of americans are using the vast majority of resources and emitting the majority of CO2. I addressed this point at greater length down thread in this post:
It's less than 30 years since we had a much, much larger eruption than Eyjafjallajökull. Mount Pinatubo erupted one June 12th 1991. That was a VEI-6 eruption.
Eyjafjallajökull was only VEI-4.
Now, one can argue about how Eyjafjallajökull caused ashfall in most of Europe, while Pinatubo is in the Philippines, but given the extent of ashfall from Pinatubo ..
> To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom
I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments.
If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them in space or on other planets.
Becoming multiplanetary IS handling it, just not in a necessarily "ideal" way. The problem is that we don't want to have the reset button hit and have every human in existence set back to the stone age technologically; having multiple self sustaining human societies on multiple planets mitigates that risk in a major way since the likelihood of a disaster being so large that it resets technology on both/all planets is much smaller than the likelihood of having a disaster that does it for just one of them.
There aren't many catastrophes that would totally wipe out Earth but still leave offworld colonies intact. Even after a supervolcanic eruption or plague or nuclear war there'll probably still be more living humans on Earth than on Mars. And supernovas and rogue AIs can wipe out both. I like the idea of settling space because I think human lives, if they're pleasant, are intrinsically valuable and I'd like there to be a trillion people in the solar system eventually. But in terms of of overcoming catastrophies you're better of donating to groups like Allfed or AI safety or arms control groups.
> There aren't many catastrophes that would totally wipe out Earth but still leave offworld colonies intact. Even after a supervolcanic eruption or plague or nuclear war there'll probably still be more living humans on Earth than on Mars.
Supervolcanos, nuclear war and meteor impacts are probably the most likely of all and could be survived by offworld colonies. And while these could still leave a lot of humans on Earth, the biggest issue is that there is a big possibility for them to evolve into full blown ice ages that could potentially last for millennia which would pretty much guarantee extinction since the initial phase would most likely also destroy a large portion of infrastructure and human knowledge.
> And supernovas and rogue AIs can wipe out both.
I'm not a scientist but I think that supernovas and solar flares could maybe be detected with enough advance to possibly make sophisticated enough space colonies time their orbital movement to get in cover behind large bodies and any non-earth planetary colonies would already have to be mostly prepared for life under radiation shielding and zero atmosphere so the damage would probably be less than for everything on Earth's surface.
Rogue AIs, assuming we're the ones building them, I feel are the least of our problems although I may be wrong of course. Viruses are also a possibility but could also be largely mitigated with multiple pockets of humanity spread by enough distance.
> But in terms of of overcoming catastrophies you're better of donating to groups like Allfed or AI safety or arms control groups.
I don't agree since it shouldn't be an either-or situation. We should strive to keep our marble safe and blue for as long as possible but preemptively prepare for any of these well known existential risks.
Thanks, it was because of having heard about the early neutrino detection that I assumed we could potentially get some sort of warning but didn't really bother to look for sources. Assuming the lead time is associated with how close the nova occurs, I guess for stars that could cause us actual damage then the warning would be even smaller than 3 hours so we'd probably get fubar.
> Viruses are also a possibility but could also be largely mitigated with multiple pockets of humanity spread by enough distance.
If I understand correctly, SARS-CoV-2 hit some "sweet spot" being rather sneaky and rather dangerous at the same time, but is nowhere near top sneakiness across all viruses.
Nothing intrinsically valuable about human life except from the fact that we're good at surviving when other similar life wouldn't. Expanding into space will be an extension of that.
The problem is that it is at least 10x easier to fix Earth than to terraform Mars, and all the problems we have on Earth are going to be there as well.
That might be the point. Few people are going to bother spending resources to fix a problem that doesn't exist. And by the time such a problem arises on Earth (inhospitable living conditions due to e.g. supervolcano), we might not have the resources to fix it. Whereas terraforming Mars creates the incentives to develop solutions while we have abundant resources, which means that we have a fix ready and waiting if something catastrophic happens on earth.
Latency provides a natural level of quarantine as well even if the volume is high enough for a sustained stream. Although there are plenty of messy details involved in sufficiency.
The idea is not to avoid black swan events entirely, it is to have pockets that are missed by a given event. Earth goes cold? Well, good thing the moon base can preserve technology and knowledge for a hundred years. Solar flare? Good thing we have the under-ice base on Europa. Europa explodes? Good thing that we are still on Earth. Now if they all happen at the same time, like the sun dying, then that is why you want to get a star base even further away.
If you already have a self sufficient colony on the moon, but don't on the earth, when the catastrophic event occurs the moon will still be self sufficient.
The technology developed to live on the moon may allow it to be rapidly deployed on Earth, saving a large number of people, but if that technology doesn't exist then you're stuck
Not only that, sufficiently advanced off-world infrastructure could be helpful for handling dangerous events.
Yelowstone blows up unexpectedly - orbital rescue forces do a quick drop, help rescue survivors in the immediate area. Later on food supplies from orbital/Lunar farms help cover food shortages and teraforming techniques can be used to fixup the biosphere.
That's the issue. If we can't handle the black swan events in time, we'll at least have a backup.
Granted, this doesn't cover bigger black swan events like gamma ray bursts, where the entire solar system is screwed, but it'll at least help with Earthside apocalypse.
The fact that we couldn't handle it is indeed incriminating against our abilities as a species, but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.
It's not possible for a gamma ray burst to 'screw' the entire solar system. It's already an incredibly unlikely event to occur near enough to do damage. Then the beam would have to be directed in our direction. And the beam would have to essentially hit the solar system edge on or face on, but not at any other angle.
Even if all that happened, underground bases would be protected, as would above-ground or in-space habitats that happened to be protected either by the mass of the body they're on by virtue of 'facing away' from the GRB; or by virtue of being behind another body (e.g. Jupiter, the sun, some body they are orbitting) relative to the GRB. With space habitats, they may also be protected by virtue of already needing some level of protection against cosmic radiation; but that's highly speculative.
A GRB also wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would do a lot of damage to its ecosystems, but the Earth would be relatively safe again not terribly long after the event, even without human intervention. If we had the technology to colonize space, we could definitely recolonize the Earth, even in a worst case scenario where the entire ecosystem collapses.
Most of them are very short lived (think seconds at most), but they can be as long as a few hours. No part of the Earth will really be 'safe' for humans in sense of 'unaffected' like other places could be, but yeah, lots of people would only suffer from the after effects.
It would be very hard and very expensive to build a space colony that was self-sufficient, instead of requiring constant supplies from Earth. In fact, it would be very hard and very expensive to build a self-sufficient society on Earth which was up-to-date with modern technology. The range of products and materials required is vast, and the manufacturing of certain state-of-the-art products, such as the most advanced integrated circuits, has been centralized in only a few locations.
It would probably also require a change of culture, away from treating information as property and/or trade secrets in favour of open-hardware with shared designs. Designs would be shared and manufacturing decentralised, to improve robustness.
I'm with you on the dangers of all these things, but I'm going to disagree that they're civilization reset events - although they could spark one.
A massive global famine could kill a billion humans or more. But if the 1 in 10 of us (likely the poorest, most vulnerable people) died, would civilization end? I don't think so.
However, if that leads to all out nuclear war, then we have two enormous correlated shocks to the system. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough, but some number of such shocks could push us over the brink.
Just like an economic meltdown or a plane crash, it's never one thing that goes wrong, it's a sequence of failures.
Yeah, UK kept harassing Iceland because of that mess with Icelandic banks. Then suddenly, volcano erupted, airplanes started having difficulties landing in Heathrow, and the harassment suddenly stopped.
12 Years since, and I still don’t understand why the UK went after Iceland for reparations. Landsbanki was a private bank operating in the UK, and one of the owners Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson is still doing business in the UK, and is now among the top 100 billionaires in the UK (even though he caused a 6 billion euro damage that the UK taxpayers paid).
In EU/EEA there are are bank regulations specifying that banks may operate on a common market under supervision of regulating body where the bank is registered. As Landsbanki UK was branch office and not subsidiary company, it falled under Iceland regulation.
These regulations also require that there is a deposit guarantee scheme for protection of depositors up to 100k EUR, based on country where bank is registered.
So when Landsbanki crashed, all its depositors were entitled to deposit guarantee from Iceland deposit guarantee scheme. But this system cannot handle crash of such size. After that, Iceland government decided to reimburse icelandic depositors, but not offshore depositors (although both have the same claims after icelanding deposit guarantee system, the local ones have political power).
To avoid political windfall, UK (and AFAIK also Dutch) government decides to reimburse their local depositors and get reparation from Iceland based on Iceland government's failure of setup proper deposit guarantee scheme / sufficient regulation, which was condition for allowing its banks access to UK/EU banking market.
a. Icelandic government failed in allowing a bank registered in the country to venture in a scheme that scales to such high amounts, given they need to guarantee their failure.
b. The EU/EEA failed in not taking in account the size of the host country economy.
c. The UK failed in not challenging this private venture at the EU/EEA level while it was happening. As they should have known Iceland was not equipped to dealing with a potential failure. The UK should have warned it's citizens as well.
d. The EU/EEA fail in not holding the people responsible for the damage caused by owners of private banks. Both Iceland and the UK share this failure since they can seek reparations on a national level.
Note that none of these failures are the fault of the UK nor the Icelandic taxpayers. Focusing the following court cases on those was a mistake. Sheltering the obvious villain of this disaster was another mistake. Allowing that villain to carry on and not pay any damage is ludicrous.
In the runup to the crash, there were a lot of new adverts on the tube about amazing high interest rates with unknown Icelandic banks - far higher than the rates given by normal banks.
I was always told if something is too good to be true, it usually is.
Not only did lots of regular people put their money in this bank, a lot of public authorities did too, and the desposit protection doesn't really help Kent council (which lost £50m), or TFL (£40m), or whatever.
UK governments gambled, with big promises, and lost.
> (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova)
My understanding is that the current leading theory is a drastic shift in outflow of Lake Agassiz (an expanded version of Lake Manitoba in Canada).
Supposedly there's an associated "black mat" visible in the soil at ~12ky depth. Since I live in the middle of North America and I own an excavator, I'm tempted to see if I can find it..
Yes, it's an actual thing and you can see lots of photographic evidence [0] [1] if you look it up on google or read some of the many papers written on the subject. They're visible on many places on Earth, some even without any excavation needed. It sits pretty much as a clear separation between the previous geological epoch (Pleistocene aka Ice Age) and our current epoch (Holocene).
If you haven’t read “Magicians of the Gods” you might enjoy it. There’s some stuff that’s a little “out there” but the general idea of a cyclic cataclysmic event with a ~12K year periodicity seems to have some merit.
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 what was to come.
I agree with you, but I also think 536 could be considered worst because of the initial shock. But as other events roll in with time, people may become used to expecting the worst.
I'm thinking this way because of our current situation with the corona virus. Initially people were all into doing everything to protect themselves but as time goes in, we kind of get used to living our lives around the existence of the pandemic and the videos of people dropping dead in china aren't going around anymore.
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.
But the title is "worst year to be alive", so while the contrast of 536 was likely the biggest, measured objectively by food availability, life expectancy etc 543 was the worst.
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?
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.
I would say we're still very susceptible to a supervolcano eruption. There is no stopping that level of force. It can dramatically shift the climate for years, if not decades. And it would be catastrophic for crop production. I suspect we would need to move a large portion of our crop production into greenhouses and growhouses in order to survive that level of event.
They were at an elevated alert level weeks before the event and the tourism company made explicit notice that they go no matter what the alert level but there's always a risk. Good luck w/ the lawsuit is all I can say. The linked Wikipedia page has details.
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.
But creating enough greenhouse capacity to feed 8 billion people would be incredibly difficult. Bottom line would be, if something causes sunlight to be largely blocked around the world for a sustained period of time, the number of people who would starve to death would likely number in the billions.
LED lighting could also be used for outdoor crops. From my perspective green houses are most beneficial for pest management and water conservation. They might actually prevent light from reaching plants to the same degree as an outdoor grow due to reflection and opacity.
Greenhouses cool down rapidly after sunset though, they still freeze if it's many deg below freezing outside. (Also mass crops like wheat and soy would have to solve harvesting machinery and resource cost vs area size)
>Greenhouses cool down rapidly after sunset though
This simply isn't true and depends on a number of factors. greenhouses can fairly easily maintain 2-30 degrees above the outside temperature. furthermore, the temperature drop described in the article was 1-2 degrees below average.
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.
I'm going to plug a charity here, Allfed, working to develop technologies to let us survive the loss of conventional agriculture for a period of years by working out efficient and economical ways to convert things like, e.g., dead trees into digestible calories and the plans to deploy them in the event of a large volcanic interruption or asteroid strike or nuclear exchange.
That's very interesting. But if we're talking about O(10 years), isn't a more foolproof and probably cheaper plan just to stockpile dried and canned food?
Thanks! I'm the director of ALLFED. dcolkitt, if we knew we had 10 years, it would be possible to store up 10 years worth of food. However, the catastrophe could come sooner, it would cost tens of trillions of dollars, and it would inflate the price of food significantly, exacerbating current malnutrition. Whereas getting prepared to scale up alternative foods quickly would only cost around $100 million: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs13753-016-0...
In what sense have we “recovered” from supply chain disruptions? I go to the store and still routinely see empty shelves where TP should be; have experienced meat shortages in recent days; and stores are still rationing things like hand sanitizer (when you can find it), canned goods, meat, and rice.
One angle on the TP problem is that we didn't just have a shock, we had a shock and then lasting change in demand. I saw an article that says demand for residential sized TP rolls is up 40% because a lot of bathroom visits are happening in homes that used to happen in work places.
I know that, but the point remains that the supply chain has not “recovered” in any meaningful sense. Capitalism, in fact, guarantees it will not (too expensive to switch production from commercial to residential TP). We’re going to be seeing this phenomenon until people can go back to work.
on the other hand, commercial-sized TP works just as well and is readily available. it just won't fit on your nice TP holder. if this is what capitalism failing looks like, I'd say it's not so bad.
I didn’t say it was a failure of capitalism, merely a property. Had it become necessary to do so, yes, I would have either ordered some commercial TP, or bought a bidet.
Now, if you want to talk about how we have zillions of brands of TP, but they’re all made by the same handful of companies (illusion of choice), I might argue that’s a failure mode of capitalism.
sorry, I've seen so many memes lately comparing US grocery stores to soviet bread lines that I read a bit of that sentiment into your comment.
it was a bit unsettling to see how much stuff was out of stock in the first few weeks of the crisis and wonder whether that was going to get better or worse. now the greatest hardship I face is having to settle for my second favorite brand of eggs sometimes. overall, I'm surprised at how resilient our system has turned out to be. despite the federal government totally dropping the ball, the individual states have more or less taken appropriate steps to handle their particular circumstances. I suspect we may be reopening a little early, but only time will tell.
also as an aside, there are certainly some positions that are very unpopular on HN. but if you post stuff like "#ShitYouCantSayOnHN", you will definitely get downvoted.
I've been seeing local or regional brands that the grocery store never used to carry, that apparently are being used to fill gaps in the supply chain. Not inferior substitutes, but things that make me ask why the heck didn't they carry these before? It makes me feel like, although yes, regulating markets can harm them, but there were problems, there must have been corruption, the distribution system wasn't handed down from on high by an invisible hand, etc.
I'm actually surprised there wasn't more supply chain disruption. Cleaning supplies, meat, TP, cold medicine (initially), disinfectants of any sort, canned goods, rice, dry beans, baking supplies, thermometers, masks, and gloves are the major things I noticed had gone "missing." My girlfriend and I could have certainly survived by modifying our diet and, as I mentioned, possibly buying a bidet.
But, we are both fortunate to still have jobs, and places to store a small stockpile of these things. I literally was able to turn a spare closet into a dry pantry by putting a wire shelving unit in there. We still have basically a lifetime supply of rice, and a nice selection of staple canned goods, just in case things go further south. We were not real particular about brands. We have access to Amazon and Costco. We will be fine.
This was nowhere near Soviet bread line status. In the Soviet Union, perhaps you had to stand in line for bread, but, at least there was bread. Here, we let some people go without bread, because they're drug addicts, mentally unstable, or just don't want to have religion pushed on them.
I'm sure this also falls into #ShitYouCantSayOnHN, and I don't care about the downvotes. I know you can't say anything against the free market or capitalism and expect to win any points here. That mildly annoys me, but I'd rather have my gray comment out there for other people to see, and sacrifice a couple of fake internet points to do it. I win enough points back in technical discussions that I'm in no danger of losing my downvoting, flagging, or vouching capabilities, so it literally does not matter to me; I've net gained 12 points just today. I'd rather draw the lightning rod to myself so people can see how rabid free-market capitalists don't even bother to argue a point, instead mashing that down arrow.
People dismiss socialist perspectives here without even comment, which is sad. They don't even give the ideas the consideration that those who claim socialists are all economically illiterate 14 year olds in their mothers' basements do. They ignore that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and other prominent intellectuals espouse socialist philosophies.
Honestly, I'd be pleased to get downvotes, if there was any actual discussion, but that's appararently verboten here.
Bread for all? In Soviet Russia they had Holomodor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor), many non-conforming people died in gulags (where bread was pretty rare).
Soviets could not emigrate, they were prisoners in their own country.
As far as I know Einstein & Hawking political views aren't in line with what Soviet Russia was, nor pretended to be.
> This was nowhere near Soviet bread line status. In the Soviet Union, perhaps you had to stand in line for bread, but, at least there was bread.
Please stop. this is outright demonstrably false by every account.
It's a nice reminder that someone with a lot of intelligence and dare I say talent in one area can be so wrong in another.
But seriously dude, please educate yourself on the history of socialism and how it's totally and completely failed everywhere it was tried from Germany to Colombia to Sweden it's never worked and every attempt has either resulted in a civil war, a world war, or just years of economic pain to walk it back.
The fact that there were a sufficient number of emigrants that they were prevented from leaving by travel prohibitions, walls, barbed wire, minefields and snipers should tell you about living conditions by itself.
The majority of people in every place where media is tightly controlled will believe what parents, teachers, papers and TV tell them. North Koreans have a positive view of Kim Jong Il, mainland Chinese have a positive view of Mao. That doesn't mean that either of them weren't objectively horrible in terms of competent leadership or morality.
You appear to be somehow even more uninformed than they are. In no sense of the word has socialism been "tried" in these countries.
FARC were Marxist guerillas and never came close to seizing power, and social democrats aren't democratic socialists aren't DDR-style socialists.
Recovery is patchy. Some locations are fine, others are still having problems.
The bigger problem is the lack of any economic or physical contingency planning. There was some medical planning of a sort for a pandemic, but there seems to be no economic planning of any kind for catastrophes.
National governments seem to have improvised economic solutions to COVID with varying degrees of competence and success.
This is negligent and inept. Catastrophes are more or less guaranteed, and there should at least be some thought given to making sure that the first thing that falls apart isn't the national economy.
From what I can see in the Boston area--not that I've gone to stores much--you still see bare shelves and you can't really go to the store and expect to get everything on your shopping list.
On the other hand...
Getting food to eat was never a problem at any point. And today, reliably getting meat, chicken, dairy, paper products even if not exactly what you want, most baking supplies, etc. is pretty much a non-problem.
True, I never had a problem getting enough food. But, I am definitely still seeing issues getting most of the things you listed out explicitly, at least intermittently.
> In what sense have we “recovered” from supply chain disruptions?
The initial shock has past, and consumer product makers have had plenty of time to do whatever they were going to do.
"Recovery" is a word that sets up certain expectations. It seems to me that what happened during the first half of this year is more usefully considered "change".
> I go to the store and still routinely see empty shelves where TP should be;
Huh, so that is why Google Maps keeps asking me whether TP was in stock every time I go the store - I did not realize there were still actual shortages on that elsewhere, I thought it was just a couple of days of panicing in March and that Google was just being weird / behind the times.
FWIW, I haven't noticed such disruptions here (Finland) since March, so it probably varies a lot regionally.
The most common questions nowadays seem to be about wheelchair access, wheelchair-accessible parking, and whether the business accepts cards (which is another weird one for Finland - who doesn't accept cards here?).
For restaurants, they may ask whether there is takeout, lunch, vegetarian options, whether the place is romantic, etc.
(And of course you can turn the questions off, but I kinda like answering them.)
Well, a country of 5.5 million where two of the three biggest paper manufacturers are based, if the TP situation was worse we would all envy you as the land of the chosen.
Funnily enough, it's very common in Finland to have hand-held sprayers beside the toilets, even in public washrooms. It's not like America, where it's either toilet paper, or hop in the shower.
Personally, I haven't seen any empty shelves or shortages since early May, and the only rationing I've seen in June is on hand sanitizer and instant noodles. I guess I don't know whether my area is uncommonly good or yours is uncommonly bad.
I'm in a mid-Atlantic state, the shortages (at all the major grocery stores) stopped after the first several weeks post initial hoarding rush. That's about two months ago now. The grocery stores here are stocked normally, you'd never know a pandemic were going on.
In my state we're going to have a serious problem if the outbreaks in our farming communities continue to grow. There are like 3 counties here that we are utterly dependent on for all our local food and they're all just now entering the "exponential" stage on the epidemiological curve.
Or, you know, people are just going to buy from closer to home. Smaller businesses are very motivated to find new markets, and distributors need to fill demand. I'm seeing this happen in real time whenever I go to the store. If you think of buying local as purely an ineffectual self-righteous movement for people with too much money you might not notice when it becomes a wave based on economics.
It's hard to find good information on this subject but from the absence of non-US comments in this thread I'm inclined to conclude that supply chain disruption of the scale described is largely (not exclusively) a US problem.
So it presumably has something to do with how US supply chains work compared to, say, Europe rather than being solely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
IDK where you live (and I won't ask! because I respect privacy and stuff), but in central Texas (Austin) and most of the urban markets I have been to (HEB, Central Market, Randall's, Trader Joe's, all the regional BBQ joints), I don't think I have seen any disruption in anything the whole time, except TP, briefly hand-sanitizer and a pop in the price of milk. I'm guessing the first two (at least) were because of people doing the lemming-thing and over-buying.
I understand that this is/was not the case across the country, and I have been a bit baffled about that. (Although I do recognize the supply chains to restaurants and to corporations (TP) and to grocery stores are not the same and don't easily switch on a dime. But, we have meat and yogurt and eggs and milk on the shelves, but some friends in Connecticut or NYC, for example, say that they do not. And I can not understand why.
Idk. In Austin, they were pretty strict. Nothing was open- stores (besides grocery and gas, I think?) - no shops, restaurants, bars, hair cuts (i need one), dentists, clinics, eye doctors, parks, DMV, churches, funerals.
I don't know about the rest of Texas, but the mayor here pretty much shut it down.
The Eastern supply chains are mostly restored but liquid soap, alcohol, Lysol, and other cleaners are unobtanium. Some frozen foods are still cleared out because nobody is eating out and stores haven't compensated for the demand.
Thanks. It's hard to get nation-wide reports by chain. All I see are pictures on social media of outraged people going: "Why don't we have any sock-eye salmon? And Look! The shelves are empty!".
Surely data are the aggregate set of anecdotes, but while I see a lot of spot anecdotes, I don't see much data.
What I'm seeing in the NY state capital is that the stuff that was out of stock early on like toilet paper, paper towels, kleenex, flour, etc. returned some times ago, but seems to still be rationed to one or two per person per day. I don't find this to be a hardship, but I don't shop for a big family.
However, I just saw packets of yeast for sale again. That was the last thing that I had trouble finding.
But take my observations with a grain of salt, because part of my response (and maybe others) to COVID is that I haven't felt like shopping around much; I mostly just go to one store and make do with what's there.
Makes sense. I never drive or shop, so I am kind of used to people bringing me off-brand stuff. And I buy in bulk, so I am already set regardless, but I am told by friends that the shelves are full (sometimes they even send pictures!)
Maybe we are lucky that so much is semi-locally sourced.
In our recent past, we experienced some disruption from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
On a less likely and more extreme level, Yellowstone has erupted 3 times over the past 2.1 million years [2] and there are other known supervolcanos [3] on Earth.
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.
I’ve recently gotten through this period in the “History of Byzantium” podcast series. Justinian had just recently retaken many of the old western Roman provinces, not least of which was Rome itself, and the breadbasket of North Africa. Things were finally looking good for the Romans again when the plague hit. The armies were unfortunately overextended and now half their ranks were dead or dying. It was an irresistible target for the Persians, the steppe horsemen and the Goths which ultimately weakened them all just in time for the Arab invasions.
I listened to this years ago but could still remember Procopius' quote. I just looked it up and apparently the consensus at the time of recording (2013) was a meteor strike rather than a volcanic eruption. Interesting.
I don't mean to be too precise, but the article is slightly undermined by the claim in the graphic that the 543 Justinian plague hurried the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire. The 'Eastern' Roman Empire fell in 1453 when the walls of Constantinople were breached by the Ottomans. Very difficult to claim that the Romans fell in the 6th Century. I mean nearly 500 years later Basil is rolling back into Syria on the back of repeated victories over the Bulgarians. Always feel let down by these sorts of overblown claims that are easy to slap into an info-graphic.
The precise date of the fall of the Roman Empire -- and the point where it became Byzantium -- is a subject of debate. There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman". Whatever your personal views may be on this matter, there indeed are some scholars that date the fall of the Roman Empire on the failure of Justinian's restauratio imperii, which coincided with the plague. [1]
> There is no unanimous agreement that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than, say, calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman".
Except that Constantinople had essentially continuous government dating from the 300s AD until it was sacked by the army of the 4th Crusade in 1204, whereas the Holy Roman Empire's first emperor--Charlemagne--was crowned in 800 AD, some 324 years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. The Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne was, as you imply, an entirely different beast from the original Roman Empire.
Byzantium is not a thing. Just Frankish propaganda that has enthralled the west for centuries. There is unanimous agreement among all scholars that referring to Constantinople as the Roman Empire is much more useful than calling the Holy Roman Empire "Roman" if "Roman" means the continuous Roman Empire that ruled from Rome and then several other (modern) Italian, French, German and Turkish cities. Certainly not the same as some overblown Frankish warlord calling himself 'Roman Emperor'. Unless you argue that Constantine the Great himself by virtue of setting up the Capital on the Bosporus became non-Roman, it is almost an impossible position to maintain. There is continuity of rule beyond the end of the 6th Century. Asia Minor and much of the East remains under Roman control.
Technically you're correct, but IMHO the Eastern Roman Empire fell at the end of the 6th - the beginning of 7th century when the Danube "limes" fell in front of the incoming Slavs and Avars. Yes, there was a renaissance between let's say ~850 and the late 1100s (with the Eastern Roman Empire getting back to the Danube, among other things), but I think that at that point they were actually a Greek empire, nothing Roman left about them.
The Roman Empire was home to many different ethnicities and was ruled at various times by different ethnicities. Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.
Even the Ottomans considered their empire a continuation of the Roman Empire – one of the Sultan's title's was "Caesar of Rome". So you can add Turks to that list too.
This is a really important point - I am reminded of a story of the 'Greek' occupation of 'Rome' in 1912:
On 8 October 1912, the island of Lemnos became part of Greece after being captured from the Ottoman Empire. Peter Charanis, born on the island in 1908 and later a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University, recounts when the island was occupied and Greek soldiers stationed themselves in the public squares.
Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of them asked.
‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied.
‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ a soldier retorted.
‘‘No, we are Romans."
An identity that had at that point endured for more than 2,600 years. There is nothing that compares to Rome.
It was already a Greek speaking Empire by the time of Justinian. The lingua franca of the Empire doesn't, imho, determine continuity. Hellenism and speaking Greek was popular from the time of Hadrian (and before). Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations in Greek and Emperors before Justinian were more comfortable in Common Greek than Latin. Calling it a Greek empire is falling for a thousand years of Papal and Frankish propaganda. They want it to seem 'other' as they never wanted the (Eastern) Roman Empire to appear legitimate. It is the church in Rome that is other. It broke from the one true Orthodox faith, not the other way around.
> 536 Icelandic volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months
I’m not aware of any evidence that the 536 eruption happened in Iceland. Ash has been found in both Antarctica and Greenland indicating that the eruption was probably much closer to the equator[1].
> 541–543 The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire.
The Roman empire stood for another 9 centuries after the Justinian plague. I was under the impression that Justinian the Great had overextended the empire in the sixth century so it naturally shrunk to a more manageable size.
Historical consensus favors the plague as quite significant, even if the city of constantinople managed to survive independently for several more centuries. The weakened mediterranian presented opportunities for the gothic tribes to take territory in gaul and italy in the decades following, and the economy nor the manpower of the empire never recovered. By the fall, Constantinople was a hollow shell of what it was, controlling hardly any territory and partially in ruins, ultimately abandoned by its few remaining allies in the face of the Turks.
You are way way way oversimplifying nearly 1000 years of history between the plague of Justinian and the fall of Constantinople.
The Justinian expansion was untenable. If you look at it on the map - there are strong enemies on literally all sides. It was a desperate but hopeless attempt to regain the Western Empire.
The plague made it worse - but was hardly the catalyst. ...and the East Roman Empire was far more than a city state for a majority of the remaining NINE centuries.
It is not that long ago, and the land is really well studied. I think I trust the Icelandic volcanologists over the middle age historian regarding the source of the 535 eruption. This size eruption would definitely leave sizeable evidence that wouldn’t be that hard to find given the barren landscape of Iceland.
See compare this to the 1783 Laki eruption which caused similar weather events. Unlike 535, the weather events from the Laki eruption were limited to the Northern hemisphere.
It is much more likely that this eruption happened close to the equator, where evidence erode much quicker and the ash has an easier time effecting the two hemispheres.
While an 18-month fog sounds terrifying, I'm absolutely fascinated by the amount of clues we can gather from geological formations like glaciers. The universe has encoded information in so many neat ways, and our ability to cross-reference these measurements with written histories is pretty cool.
Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)
Yep. Personally, I think the steady proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to snap at some point with some nut using them.
God help us all.
Humans are stupid. We think that because we survived the Cold War, that it won't happen. ...but if you read the history - it very nearly did happen a couple of times. ...it's only a matter of time.
OTOH nuclear weapons decay and we're rapidly losing the tacit knowledge required to make new ones (at least here in the US). If the Test Ban stays in place and is enforced, it may only be a few more decades until we as a species would have to do another Manhattan Project to rebuild them. This takes about 4 years of concerted effort within military and industry, and the only shortcut is the tacit knowledge that nuclear weapons designers can pass on. Maybe WW3 will actually be an "aw hell no" response to some country trying to develop nukes after they're we've lost them.
I'm not sure if you've been reading up on the latest news - but both Russia and the US have been developing and deploying hypersonic nuclear armed missiles. ...capable of circumventing any ABM platforms and delivering precision low-yield nuclear weapons without early warning detection anywhere in the world.
They're totally removing the need for ballistic missiles. These are armageddon weapons because they can be launched without detection, delivered across the world in tens of minutes, and target enemy nuclear silos before they can even launch.
It reminds me of the Hunt For Red October. They're made to start a war.
We have the ability to model nuclear explosions and desings in supercomputer simulations. I don't think it would be difficult to re-engineer nuclear warheads, even if all the original engineers are dead.
"How Are Things? Better. Better Than Tomorrow, Of Course—Worse Than Yesterday" - Credit to Eugene Volokh who posted this old saying from Soviet Europe this morning.
I imagine there will come a time when the earth is just on the cusp of no longer being able to sustain the massive population that it has grown to or human life at all. Since the earths human population will be so high even a 5th of people dying off will be drastically more deaths than any worldwide catastrophe of the past. Maybe within another 1000 years.
Current projections of Earth's population have a peak population of about 11B (only 40% higher than today) towards the end of the century and then declining. It's always hard to know what's going to happen in the future, but currently it's pretty unlikely that we'll ever see a worldwide population all that much higher than what we already have.
Human lives are worth less and less as time goes on and the population increases, so by the time this happens the loss of life might not be anymore troubling than say the amount of people killed in car crashes in a year.
The water supply and sanitation in Europe took a deep dive where the Roman infrastructure broke down.
In many places it was rather recently that sanitation was on par or better than in Rome (but of course, not everywhere in the Roman Empire the standards were as high as in the capital).
Hmm, well we saw something like it recently and it mostly just stranded people in Europe from what I recall. Eyjafjallajökull erupted in Iceland about 10 years ago and there wasn’t anything we could do but wait it out, and it was a lot less severe than what’s described in this article.
Although it's worth asking, did the eruption affect agricultural output in Iceland? Maybe modern farming is just resilient enough against volcanic eruptions, as it is against all the other things that used to cause famines.
For the recent eruption prevailing winds were from the north, and the volcano is on the south coast. So most of the effects were blown out to sea. But farms in the vicinity of the volcano certainly felt it:
The larger eruption in 1783 killed over half of livestock, and a quarter of the human population in the ensuing famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki
Modern farming is not resilient in any way. Production is centralized, mechanized and heavily reliant on outside inputs. Global trade lessens the degree to which a regional crop failure affects a population. Smaller, distributed, local farms lessen the reliance on trade but still very much rely on our gracious host to provide clean rain and sun. The only way to escape that is immense amounts of electricity for indoor farming.
It's my understanding that even the worst case eruptions described in the article didn't make it globally impossible to grow crops. IIUC they just produced a higher than normal prevalence of local issues.
That’s outside my expertise, but there’s a few good replies to your question already. My understanding is that while the eruption occurred in Iceland, the effects of it were overwhelmingly felt further south and southeast in Europe, although I’m sure there were flight delays in Iceland as a result. I’m sorry to say most of my remembrance of this event was through a few bloggers I was following at the time who were personally affected.
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)...
I looked it up, but according to this, it isn't due for a big one, it's merely media hyperbole.
>Although fascinating, the new findings do not imply increased geologic hazards at Yellowstone, and certainly do not increase the chances of a 'supereruption' in the near future. Contrary to some media reports, Yellowstone is not 'overdue' for a supereruption.
"large eruptions that took place 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 630,000 years ago"
I mean, it's not like it's due in a decade, but it is every 650,000-700,000 years, and it's been... 630,000 years.
Supervolcanoes are a phenomenon entirely different than human history has encountered. Krakatoa is a very small fraction of the ejecta of a supervolcano eruption.
What they are saying is we have no reason to think anything - there is effectively no data. Volcanos don’t accumulate magma and pressure at a constant, predictable rate. You should never say we are overdue for an eruption. There is no data to support that.
one of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans.
in the event of something like this, having the supplies to just weather the fallout would be best. a years worth of supplies on-hand would be a good start.
> one of the attributes of an act of god is being unpreventable by humans.
That may be, but the set of things that humans can prevent gets larger over time. For example, 100 years ago, an asteroid hitting the earth would be an act of God we could do nothing about, but today it is at least within the realm of possibility that we could observe a large asteroid on a collision course and send in a spacecraft or missile to divert it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
As much as I hope I never witness this, watching humanity strap a rocket to an asteroid for this purpose would probably rank #1 on the list of Most Bitchin Things Ever.
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).
> What's.......our intended process for dealing with this?
The extent of the USA's preparedness, from the federal agency in charge handling Emergencies, is a website with a bullet point list of what you should have in a first aid kit in your house:
I'm being only partially facetious. There are of course multiple agencies at the federal, state, county, and local level with their own plans and processes in place for this kind of thing.
But! We can look to the past for what would happen.
Katrina taught us that the US federal government doesn't have the resources, means, or disposition to rescue people from disaster zones. It also taught us that as an individual or family, the best thing you can do is take evacuation warnings very seriously, and be ready to be able to provide for yourself and your family for the short and long term. So, ready.gov build a kit, and stuff it full of cash while you're at it. Keep the cars gassed up.
Katrina also taught us that the US government will choose to enforce "property rights" before it will ensure people in disaster zones have shelter, water, or food. You could flip from one channel with a helicopter view of people waving for help on a roof, and another channel would be showing National Guard soldiers with rifles chasing off "looters." Hm.
The COVID pandemic also taught us that partisans and capitalists are motivated to prioritize the wellbeing of the stock market over humans lives - all the more reason to prepare to protect yourself and family rather than count on the Gov coming to your aid.
I'm not saying the homesteaders and preppers aren't a little crazy, but I'm also not saying they don't have the right idea...
Katrina has a death toll measured around 1000-2000.
The population of New Orleans alone is 1.5 million, so 1‰ of the population died.
That's a pretty small number, and tells me that society coped just fine.
Crop failures caused by volcanic eruptions, which kill 50% of the world population, is a far bigger issue. It is also something mankind will recover from in a couple of generations.
Spot on. We no longer have a government for the people, by the people, of the people. Just take a look at the net worth statistics of our congresscritters and their voting records.
In fact, we never really have. Initially, only free, white landowners could even vote!
Edit: ah, found yet another “thing you can’t say on HN,” I suppose. :) Talk about lack of TP in stores: +6. Talk about how our “representatives” don’t represent most of us: -2
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.
I try to be prepared as possible, at least for covid there was a little warning, I was extremely concerned late Jan. '20 and bought extra TP/paper towels/razors before everything went crazy. For a volcanic eruption there is little to no warning so having essentials on hand seems pretty important. I went to school/knew alot of Mormons and used to poke fun at them for having so much canned food(the church mentions stocking up on a years worth of food) and that doesn't seem that out of line now.
Also consider that you need a community with weapons to defend your "years worth of food" from those who did not have that. You can see that even in peaceful times when nothing really happened, government collapsed and left their citizens to defend themselves from bandits. Imagine a global disaster.
IMO that's the main issue with those hoarders. You can hoard as much as you can, but local gang will expropriate everything.
So may be it's better to stock guns and bullets...
Throughout the current situation, did it make sense to keep a few weeks of non-perishable food in the house in the event of quarantine and even temporary power outages? Sure.
But, if they were being logically consistent, anyone arguing for a 12 month supply of rice and beans should also have:
- Headed for a place in the hills/woods
- Stocked up on guns and ammo however unpopular an opinion that might be in certain circles
- A generator and gasoline
- Lots of large containers of water
- Seeds/tools/etc.
The list goes on. It's one thing to guard against short-term disruption to supply chains. It's another to basically guard against civilizational collapse. And if you just hoard 12 months of rice and beans in your suburban, much less urban, apartment, you're way overdoing it for the former and not preparing at all for the latter.
I'd just point out that keeping a year's worth of food for a rapid and unexpected event is nuclear bunker level prep. It also requires spending a lot of money and storage space on something that's going to have to be rotated out every few years. And while some things can last pretty much indefinitely, other things have shelf lifes and you're probably not going to use all those canned goods during normal times.
So there's a very significant annual cost to maintaining that perpetual one year supply of necessaries.
I do not eat canned beans (other than baked beans) or canned vegetables generally. Most of the things I would buy for "prepping" would be just thrown out in a few years.
It doesn't need to be expensive at all. Perboiled rice is cheap and lasts literally 15 years. Canned food can last years. ...and if you're eating food, you can naturally rotate out what you have in the basement.
Forgetting macro/micro and focusing on calories, using a cheap food source, I'd need 0.75 metric tonnes of oats to do this, for 4 people. Probably doable for $750 say, I am guessing at a bulk price. Most years I'd need to chuck it.
Probably could slim down and live off half that. Or 500 cal/day for adults with more for the kids. It is survival situation after all.
Many people have proposed putting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. It looks relatively easy and could potentially be within the means of even poorer countries like Bangladesh which have a lot to loose from rising sea levels. But we can't predict exactly how it would turn out and it would certainly make ocean acidifcation worse so it's very much a desperation play.
Yes. Marine cloud brightening has also been proposed. IMO we'll almost certainly see either that or stratospheric aerosols as nations begin to feel the increasing effects of climate change and grow more desperate.
Whether it might be uni- or multilateral is also interesting, given the possibly serious effects on e.g. agriculture in "downstream" geographic regions. It's not much of a stretch to imagine it kicking off some kind of war.
> What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
It did. Justinians gains in italy were lost not long after the plague to the lombards, who saw a power vacuum. The empire had just spent quite a bit on wars and capital expenses, and the tax base never recovered. It hobbled the economy and manpower of the empire and left it susceptible to attacks from enemies virtually on all sides, and territory shrunk by the century until Constantinople was merely a city state, mostly abandoned within its rotting walls which it no longer had the manpower to fully defend, with a few Grecian possessions and vassal states by the time it succumbed to the Turks.
I had the same reaction. Constantinople fell in 1453. That's 917 years later. Justinian maybe represented the high water mark, but the empire continued to contract and expand in the centuries to follow.
So few human institutions have lasted 917 years, it's hard to compare this claim to anything. It's a little bit like arguing that the sack of Rome in 390 BC was a mere precursor to the one that took place in 410 later, or like arguing Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance helped hasten along the Italian Renaissance.
And this is why we, as a species, need to embrace science and technology, and engineer solutions to ensure our survival and prosperity.
We need geoengineering now. If a volcanic eruption occurs and blocks out a significant portion of light, we need a way to compensate for it(solar mirroring/concentration?), or eliminate the particulates.
"What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says."
Considering when the ERE "fell", the plague did a pretty poor job of hastening it's collapse, no?
Not being familiar with the history, the dates that I found seem to support your point.
> The Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD)
> The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire..[was] in 555 under Justinian the Great, at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
> It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.
Don't disagree with the facts but the suffering of humans depends as much on the content of their thoughts as it does on material conditions. A civilisation at the apparent height of its power and security can eat itself from the inside and decline rapidly. A wealthy individual living a privileged life can be beset by anxiety, and so on. Both of these things are strongly affected by the ideas that predominate in a given era. These include subtle ideas which can't readily be identified and which nevertheless spread and cause harm. So those ideas are a relevant part of the environment when considering which was the worst year so far.
Note, that after this period (536-600), there were huge swaths of Europe that was depopulated, and or decimated, and this enabled major migration movements...
Eg. After this period, in the early 600's, Slavic tribes migrated south, all the way to Greece/Egean sea, but eventually were pushed back to current/modern areas....
So, these events contributed heavily to even modern borders and some events....
I know, there are some weird post-modernist movement to say 'dark ages were not that bad', but indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history....
The volcano being in Iceland, could explain on why Britain was one of the harshest hit areas by the dark ages....
"indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history"
I'm still inclined to believe that this is just nowadays optics. The life was very harsh in general for pretty much all but recent history. There were a lot of life risk vectors all around and the capacity to do something about that was modest at most. For us looking back only the major events stand out -- the pandemics like the black death, the major depopulating military campaigns like that of the Mongols, or the climate altering events. People died of diseases, wars, famine, or whatnot all the time though. Not just a few here and there like we see nowadays, but community-wide wipe-outs, with survivors having no-one-they-knew left alive. I doubt that for them it made much difference that the faced calamities were limited only to their region or were world spanning, or that the cause for the latest bane was this or that out-of-control event.
pretty much any metric you could come up with to "measure" civilisation -- literacy, urbanisation, economic output, monetary economy -- went to historic lows.
slightly orthogonal to this, but the original motivation behind the 'dark ages' label was that for large parts of europe there are very few written records for the 5-7th centuries. e.g., we know practically nothing what happened in 5th century england because the only written source -- gildas -- is mostly concerned with pontificating about sinful behaviour in artful ways. even some actual people he mentions in passing get biblically coded nicknames so we have to make wild guesses who's he referring to. and that's our only source for pretty much a century.
Also Bede although that was written somewhat later (8th century).
When writing Why the West Rules for Now Ian Morris attempted to quantify the overall level of social development in the Western and Eastern cores in a very detailed way. (It used to be available online as a sort of appendix but I don't immediately see it.) In any case, you see this decline in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire that wasn't reversed for many centuries.
Excellent article. I guess it is especially important to be somewhat skeptical of “exciting” new research that hits the popular press and make sure to read all the analyses.
It's interesting to imagine that the ramifications of this were still felt in the 620s when Mohamed united the Arab tribes and he and his successors pretty much overran the Byzantine and Persian empires.
Obvious, yet still interesting to imagine IMO ... all of us here had ancestors who suffered and survived that year and we're all, in some way, a result of what they went through in 536.
Back then, people had to downvote by bleaching only a portion of the illuminated manuscript. Unfortunately the original karma logs were lost when the Knights Templar were disbanded.
> Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.
I dunno, sounds like 541 was the worst year to be alive. That year also had a second volcano eruption according to the article.
I couldn't help but notice an ambiguity in the phrase
> Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C
While I now understand that it means a drop of roughly 2°C plus or minus 0.5°C, my initial reading was that the temperature dropped from 4°C (in the previous Summer) to 2.5°C (in Summer of 536).
Is the meaning of "a drop by A to B" always to be inferred from context?
In the timeline on the page, it uses both uses - "Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C" and "Summer temperatures
drop again by 1.4°C–2.7°C in Europe".
It took a few reads and an internal debate over whether European summer temperatures could possibly have been 4°C in the 6th century to understand what the author meant.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd that the graphic shows the years increasing downwards, where if you take this to graphically depict the ice core dug out of the ground, going down is decreasing in years (going back in time, earlier)? Things lower in depth were laid down earlier.
Maybe not for Americans :) The eruption was hypothesized to have occurred in North America but did the team try to cross reference with native accounts of that time period?
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, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south. When European showed up on the shores of Caribbeans and the mainland of Americas it was already too late.
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.
Though worldwide it's difficult to keep records intact for a thousand years, the Mayans had writing systems for nearly two thousand years. The Spanish priests burned any writing they found during the Mayan conquest,
Doesn't "not good" in this context mean NEVER. Are there any native tribes/peoples that had a writing system before European contact? AFAICT, it's one of the main causes so many native languages are dying/extinct.
Writing developed in America long before Europeans showed up and continued to be used until Europeans showed up, but the Europeans destroyed most books they could find and forced the natives to learn the colonizers' languages. That's the main cause why so many native languages are dying/extinct.
It looks like writing developed in present-day Mexico and never made it north of the desert border (Mojave/ Sonoran/ Chihuahua). So NONE of the estimated 296 languages spoken by natives in US and Canada had a written language that we have evidence of. [0]
"An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script."
It also says:
"The Florentine Codex, compiled 1545-1590 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún includes a history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Mexica viewpoint"
Having a writing system and using it to record history are surprisingly independent. For example, in ancient India they wrote all kinds of stuff down, but virtually none of it is history. Most of what we know about the history of India comes from the records of other peoples who came into contact with the Indians.
There's at least one script that's absolutely, a 100% definitive written language, Maya. There are about half a dozen more that qualify for certain reasonable definitions of writing. Beyond that, there are hundreds of systems of proto-writing that rely primarily on the cultural context of the speaker to interpret. These were still used to record events and stories, though.
Given that ~90% of native Americans were killed over the first decades of European contact by smallpox, measles, and war, it's entirely possible that there had been a worse year for them.
What are the estimates for those volcanic eruptions on the volcanic explosivity index? Was it an VEI-8?
If it wasn't, what would a VEI-8 eruption cause?
I have no skin in the game either way but it seems like any book that tries to tackle controversial materials would have some people who don't like it. Interestingly the Wikipedia page only lists negative feedback in the Reception section, despite the book having generally good reviews and accolades from multiple different experts.
The fact that the book won awards from NYT, Royal Society of Literature, BBC, and many other publications and is well-reviewed, yet Wikipedia only lists negative feedback in the Reception section indicates to me that there must be bias in the Wikipedia article. I don't see any other answer for why more than half of the article is just listing criticism that doesn't seem to be reflected across the broader industry.
Again I haven't read the book and don't really care about the subject matter either way, but the Wikipedia does not seem to hide its bias.
Christian 'revolution'? What nonsense. The missionaries were never interested in revolution (not in the modern sense at least), but converting people to Catholicism. St. Bede's History of the Church in England is a good example. Or the life of St. Boniface. The term "Dark Ages" was coined by anti-Christians to undermine the conversion of Europe to the Catholic faith.
I noticed there are a number of popups/stickies/banners on this site. How do folks feel about blocking them with uBlock considering it's a nonprofit, and one of those banners was asking for a donation?
Personally I find them obnoxious, if they weren't glued to the bottom of the screen it'd be better. In fact if they weren't already being blocked by ublock I would have immediately added them to my filter list manually.
Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).
It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas