Guest post by David Middleton
From the American Association for the Advancement of Science! in America:
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
By Ann Gibbons Nov. 15, 2018
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” 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.
Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.
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It doesn’t seem possible that the worst year to be alive didn’t occur during the fake Anthropocene Epoch, the Climate Hellscape or the Trump administration. How could the worst year in human history have occurred before ExxonMobil? Before SUV’s? Way back when the climate was cooler and CO2 was safely below 300 ppmv?
But there you have it… 536 AD was the pits.
This raises the question, “Would people have been better off dead in 536 AD?”
The push by Green vege groups to remove all human consumed live stock, appears to forget that we do have plenty of wild life. So if all the cattle, pigs etc. cease to be on the land, then wild life will take over and the CO2 will continue to be produced. This of course negelects the fact that we humans are animals too, and we produce lots of CO2 all by ourselves.
MJE
Remember that there were an estimated 60 million plus buffalo on the North American prairies before they were exterminated and since replaced with the cattle that the Greens hate.
If they were still extant, would the Greens be asking for their removal?
We’re next on the Green’s hit list, but they may have already started actually, what with abortion, euthanasia, banning of DDT, etc.
1979 was pretty ordinary too.
It wasn’t 2016 and the Trump election?
Glancing thru this dandy offering of posts and repostes I am surprised to find no mention of David Keys and his book “Catastrophe”, published in 1999. I believe a pretty good documentary was made (BBC?) and ended with looking for evidence of a suitably timed volcanic event in Indonesia. Nothing was turned up. So the book, a world wide compilation of historical events, seems to have faded away. Memory says David Keys was an independent scholar working at home . Not in the establishment, and so easy to dismiss.
This is another fine example of David Middleton’s craftsmanship and wide range of interests. Please keep up the good work!