Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 | Hacker News Reader

Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536

theconversation.com

92 pointsgoldenskye39 comments

"Yet, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, the average person back then may only have realised slowly just how grim conditions in their world were getting..."

I just have to point out that scientists have in fact tried this, and the frog in the water, as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm, jumps out. There is no evidence that it is possible to raise the temperature slowly enough that it does not do this, and it's not for lack of trying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

This and “ostrich with its head in the sand” drive me nuts

Then there's all the social science research or pop-business/pop-psychology crap that's been disproven or failed to replicate, but nonetheless will seemingly be treated as fact by most people... I dunno, forever, at this rate. And don't you dare question it.

CGP Grey actually covers both of these misconceptions in some video:

- https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=163

- https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=50

Which is neat, because I'm now also frustrated by both of these "fun facts"

Yeah, I would not tango with an ostrich. About fifteen years ago I had just moved to the country and had taken a quick trip by myself to the local store. Shortly after leaving my house I came upon a turkey in the road. I stopped, got out of the car and started walking up to it. It just sat there waiting. It had perched on the guard rail and as I got closer to it I noticed it's huge razor sharp talons. I said to myself "dude, your family is expecting you home safe in a few minutes...get back in the car".

Knowing what we know now it's almost surprising that certain species of birds weren't connected to certain species of dinosaurs before they were.

You'll hate Kipling's Just So Stories then.

Or "bad times create strong men, strobg nen create good times' chestnut

Anyone parroting this crap ever seen what 5 years of hard labour do a human body?

Now they are trying with a blue planet and 7.7 billion habitants.

some are already trying to jump out.

To be fair it says “like the proverbial frog” not “like a real frog”. In the proverb, the frog boils.

There is a small and sparky piece of me that says that of course it doesn't work - we've boiled all the ones it does work on.

A tad bit more seriously, a slightly larger piece of me wonders if this true a long time ago for a certain species of frog.

It made me think of how frogs or amphibians in general are considered to be sensitive indicators of toxins in the environment.

Sort of the opposite of not noticing important but subtle changes around them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioindicator

   "Amphibians, particularly anurans (frogs and toads), are increasingly used as 
   bioindicators of contaminant accumulation in pollution studies.[18] Anurans 
   absorb toxic chemicals through their skin and their larval gill membranes and 
   are sensitive to alterations in their environment.[19] They have a poor 
   ability to detoxify pesticides that are absorbed, inhaled, or ingested by 
   eating contaminated food.[19] This allows residues, especially of 
   organochlorine pesticides, to accumulate in their systems."

I feel like this has been a well known thing for all my life, and one of the references in the article is from 1981.

I've heard in the South of Chile there used to be all these "sapitos," frogs, that completely vanished when water became fluorinated.

I doubt you could slow-boil any frog, or any other ectotherm. Frogs, and the rest of them, produce relatively little body heat of their own and rely on the environment to regulate their temperature. They do this by moving to cool places when they're too hot, or moving to hot places when they're too cool.

" ... and the Roman senator Cassiodorus noted in 538 ..."

If Wikipedia is correct, he wasn't a senator. His full name was Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator.

I wonder if a large body passed through the solar system around that time? Enough to disturb gravitational forces to trigger massive volcanic activity like that.

Downvoted? Hmm. It's a legitimate question.

Impressive that to find an obviously worse year, they have to go back a millennium and half.

What about 1347? Or 1816? Or 1914 and the 40 years that followed? Worse years did exist.

2020/2021 are only candidates for the worst year in the last ~50 years or so, in my opinion. WW1/WW2 were probably much, much worse to live through. They impacted basically everyone negatively (one of the reasons being most men in most countries were drafted). The pandemic had more of a K-curved graph, were a decent proportion of the population wasn't as negatively impacted, and might have actually had improved.

1918-1919 were most definitely worse. The flupandemic had about 3x the per-capita death rate in the US, and we weren't even the worst hit, and the flupandemic wasn't even the thing people were most worried about in 1918. Immediately after the end of WW1, civil wars broke out in multiple parts of central Europe. Much worse about a century ago.

And to top it off, now you have a toothache and have to visit the dentist in the year 536.

Yeah but you could also get a shave and a haircut when you visited them back then.

And get any problematic limbs amputated if necessary.

And get some leech therapy to balance the humors.

Climate change is perhaps one of the many reasons both the Roman and Byzantine empires fell or lost ability to project power. The Byzantine conquest of Italy was finishing up when these plagues hit and they never recovered their original strength again.

One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.

>One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes

2011 Arab Spring <- bread/wheat prices <- 2010 wildfires in Russia destroying significant share of wheat harvest

>or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.

Ukraine wheat production most probably will be significantly less this year.

Well, the farmers have lots of tanks for farm work now.

But are you locked into needing a Russian military certified technician to repair them?

Farmers are a resourceful bunch. Most I've met can fix just about anything.

Well, they're not made by John Deere and the farmers can probably get spare parts in their neighbor's field.

...mostly non-functional.

On the bright side, global warming is good mediation for nuclear or volcanic winters and solar minimums.

Assuming a system with neatly predictable dynamics that responds linearly to warming / cooling inputs.

The globe may not be such a system:

https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2021/03/24/weve-known-f...

The worst year...so far

Makes me wonder, would society today fare better than society then to the same hardship?

But without internet they barely knew what was going on.

It's a legitimate point, you only knew about the bad things happening right where you were, for the most part. Also, instead of obsessively refreshing your screen, you probably were out there trying to fix whatever the problem was, and regardless of whether or not it worked that would be psychologically healthier.

imagine if the stock market existed and you bought the dip

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