As noted - most recently in November 8's "What Comes After Post-Political?" -
Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Have I ever mentioned the year 536?*
From Vice, November 10:
Stressed over the economy, the election, and the general state of the world, Americans are shelling out cash and doom spending.
Americans are self-soothing by shelling out cash. A recent study by Intuit Credit Karma found that 27 percent of Americans doom spend to cope with stress. Forty percent of people doom spend more now than they did a year ago. The numbers are even higher for millennials and Gen Zers, with 39 and 37 percent, respectively, admitting to doom spending.
“Doom spending describes the impulse to spend money on things to self-soothe against anxiety and stress,” Kimberly Palmer, a personal finance expert at NerdWallet, told HuffPost. “For example, if we are really stressed out about the election, we might splurge on takeout, new clothes and a plane ticket for vacation just to help boost our mood.”
According to Intuit Credit Karma, doom spending is largely due to the fact that many people are “chronically online.” That phenomenon applies to 70 percent of Gen Zers, 53 percent of whom said that seeing bad news online drives them to stress spend....
*Why yes, yes I have.
"Why 536 was ‘the worst year' to be alive"
You think you've got it tough? Ha!
(BTW, this is why we watch volcano reports)
From the journal Science, November 13, 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.
To Kyle Harper, provost and a medieval and Roman historian at The University of Oklahoma in Norman, the detailed log of natural disasters and human pollution frozen into the ice "give us a new kind of record for understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire—and the earliest stirrings of this new medieval economy."Ever since tree ring studies in the 1990s suggested the summers around the year 540 were unusually cold, researchers have hunted for the cause. Three years ago polar ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica yielded a clue. When a volcano erupts, it spews sulfur, bismuth, and other substances high into the atmosphere, where they form an aerosol veil that reflects the sun's light back into space, cooling the planet. By matching the ice record of these chemical traces with tree ring records of climate, a team led by Michael Sigl, now of the University of Bern, found that nearly every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption. A massive eruption—perhaps in North America, the team suggested—stood out in late 535 or early 536; another followed in 540. Sigl's team concluded that the double blow explained the prolonged dark and cold.......MORE
This was a very tough time for homo sapiens.
From the journal Global Security: Health, Science and Policy:
ABSTRACT
The threat of nuclear winter from a regional nuclear war is an existential hazard that must be actively addressed by policy makers to ensure the shared future of humanity. Here a cross-cultural analysis of 20 societies that experienced the Late Antique Little Ice Age (ca. 536–556CE) is performed in the hope of providing security policy makers with an empirical example of social resilience mechanisms. The climatic conditions of the Late Antique Little Ice Age are strikingly similar to those modelled as resulting from a regional nuclear war employing low-yield nuclear weapons, and thus provides a context in which mechanisms of resilience to nuclear winter might be empirically identified. It is argued that broad political participation fostering bridging ties between communities, agencies, and organisations was a key element of social resilience to the Late Antique Little Ice Age, and may indicate a means to foster resilience to nuclear winter today....
....MUCH MORE
And the Moche people of South America:
The Correlation of Rainfall And Assassination In Ancient Rome (plus the Moche people go bust)Rain/no rain, very important to people:
World's Oldest Weather Report Found in Egypt: It Was Raining, People Were Crabby
Something similar happened with the northern Peruvian coastal Moche civilization during 535-595, the weather related agricultural stress leads to the complete overturning of the social order, revulsion with and rebellion against the political class and the disappearance of an entire society.
Here are the Moche in our April 2008 post "Food Riot Watch: Haiti. Just Wait for the Moche Climate*":
*From Wikipedia:
...There are several theories as to what caused the demise of the Moche political structure. Some scholars have emphasised the role of environmental change. Studies of ice cores drilled from glaciers in the Andes reveal climatic events between 536 to 594 AD, possibly a super El Niño, that resulted in 30 years of intense rain and flooding followed by 30 years of drought, part of the aftermath of the climate changes of 535–536.[3] These weather events could have disrupted the Moche way of life and shattered their faith in their religion, which had promised stable weather through sacrifices.
The BBC had a show on the Moche a while back. Here's what they say happened:
...If the weather on the coast was the opposite, then it suggested a 30-year El Nino - what climatologists call a mega El Nino – starting at around 560 AD, which was followed by a mega drought lasting another 30 years. Such a huge series of climatic extremes would have been enough to kill off an civilization – even a modern one. Here, at last, was a plausible theory for the disappearance of the Moche. But could it be proved?...It turns out that the Moche adapted to the 30 years of floods and the 30 years of drought which followed.
They ended up killing themselves after surviving all that:
...Dillehay now put together a new theory. The Moche had struggled through the climatic disasters but had been fatally weakened. The leadership - which at least in part claimed authority on the basis of being able to determine the weather – had lost its authority and control over its people. Moche villages and and/or clan groups turned on each other in a battle for scare resources like food and land. The Moche replaced ritual battles and human sacrifices with civil war. Gradually they fought themselves into the grave....
Also:
Weather Events In Great Britain and Ireland In the Years 500 to 750 (the Martin Rowley, booty.org.uk files)
