Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018) (opens in new tab)

Thanks. I just watched the entire video though this documentary pins the culprit on Krakatoa and not an Icelandic volcano. It was interesting nonetheless.

But we will lose recent years first, so that could impact what sort of research would still be possible

This is way too optimistic, and the melting rate is accelerating.

Not thousands of years. Centuries probably, but also maybe only decades.

It seems this hypothesis has been dismissed: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22355515 https://www.livescience.com/29130-toba-supervolcano-effects....

My understanding was that dendrochronology records go back about 12k years. Is there anything about that in the book you’re reading?

Coordination of governing bodies at the regional level is really bad in the US. A different agency manages the highways than the roadways than the waterways, each having their own incentives and budgets.

The rich countries are also going to be outbidding each other though. Some nations may decide not to sell it all because they need to eat themselves. This would be worse due to limited supply and no way to quickly ramp up.

You can't eat electricity or insulation. There's close to 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S. alone. If we were to suffer a decade of volcanic winter, large parts of the midwest would become non-productive. If the reports of the sun being as dim as the moon due to the ash are true, there would be massive crop failure. One or two years like that, we might be ok. But any longer than that and our stores would be rapidly depleted. Famines can knock out huge percentages of populations and have led to the collapse of civilization on several occasions in the past few millenia.

Yes, but our economy is flexible, demand for commodities will fluctuate widely shortly after any catastrophic event, having a likely negative cascading effect on the rest of the economy.

I think that it's more of a supply-chain thing than modern farming being inherently more resilient. We can irrigate when it's dry (as long as there's a pipe from water _somewhere_, which isn't always a given). But can't do much about floods. Certain pests can be controlled, but monocultures make for very brittle systems when a pest evolves past the known defenses (see: bananas).

Ultimately, we have transport and distribution across the entire globe, so a crop failure in one place doesn't mean a famine there as we can ship food there (unless you're a poor country, in which case the rest of the world doesn't care much).

That’s more a function of over production due to subsidies than inherent resilience.

Annual crop production still varies wildly, we just have much larger buffers and better distribution than our ancestors before starvation kicks in so a 12% drop isn’t noticeable for the average consumer. https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=us&commodity...

To some extent I agree with you but it won't be quick. Poor people will suffer the most. That ingenuity might not come for years, people would suffer before new food arrives.

I am probably unusual because I bought 90 days dried food supply for my family in an emergency. But almost all the food I have and eat normally was bought in the last month, except for a few canned goods. I think most people in the us would run out of food in a month or two at most.

The big backup is diverting certain animal feeds to instead feed people.

Microgreens and winter tomatoes aren't going to stave off famine.

More likely Quorn style fungus fermented/grown in dark vats connected to nuclear reactors for power. Might be tricky to ramp up in time but eventually could actually lower the cost of food, if more boring food. Flavoured fungus burgers all the time, kids might actually like it...

You can't put greenhouses over entire states, which is what would be necessary to prevent mass famine.

How many of these vertical farms do we have? How long do they take to build? What do they cost to run?

That's not an unfair assumption to make, but it is an assumption, since no records pertaining to conditions in Africa or South America are mentioned (or Australia and on Pacific islands, for that matter). That's where my despair comes from; a consideration of the peoples of those regions was not included, even though the headline seems to be a general statement about human life on Earth in 536.

Couldn't the Coriolis effect basically keep it mostly to the Northern hemisphere? There would be secondary effects to the Southern hemisphere due to cooling in the North (e.g. ocean and atmospheric currents), but depending on where the volcano was, the direct cooling might have been localised.

They blamed cats, not knowing it was the fleas.

It wasn't until the 1800s that hand washing was tied to health (Semmelweis). The 1300s would have been a filthy, filthy existence it's not a great surprise the plague spread like wildfire (past its initial vector). Basic hygiene has helped humanity massively.

> Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough

That is how you die, regardless of events it's ultimately brain death due to lack of oxygen to the brain - pray your heart stops one day (everything else is worse).

> Dying of respiratory or cardiac failure is horrifying enough

I know you were making a reference to c19. Yes, being kept in solitary confinement while you suffocate to death by order of the state would be a miserable way to go (tax extracted and left in an "exit room").

Here in NZ the state forced an elderly man to watch from the roadside as his wife was buried but politicians were allowed to go swimming during the same lock down... Disgusting.

The Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Atari VCS/2600 were released.

Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers.

Fleetwood Mac released Rumours.

Howard Stern began broadcasting.

Voyager 2 probe was launched.

Elvis Presley, Charlie Chaplin, and Bing Crosby died.

I apologise. In my defence, it's only geo-engineering which gets me so riled up. But of course you're right, and I should, and will, tone it down completely.

(I'm not sure I have been guilty of 'fulmination' though :) )

Happy New year.

Nobody knows. Which is why it's colossally reckless to propose anything around this as a guaranteed solution, instead of a proposal that needs more research.

Who knows? Nobody, especially on a global scale, which is what they're suggesting.