A Very Bad Year

I subscribe to various news services to keep up to date with what's going on. I have to say that it is really difficult to get balanced reporting on most issues. Every media outlet has its own agenda that it is trying to put out and I suppose if you share those views then you like that. But if you don't the reporting on the other side is just as slanted. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that people then tend to read only those things they agree with. That is sad and in my view quite dangerous as in many instances (say 50%) you are most likely wrong so hearing another view can actually be pretty helpful.

Don't worry though I don't plan to preach or anything like that. It is just that I read a truly fascinating piece that suggests that the year 536 was the worst ever time to be alive.

So this is a non-controversial subject as nobody alive today would have been back then either and if you read the full piece it seems that simply managing that (i.e. staying alive) was a real big win.

So what happened, Michael? The year 536 AD was just about 100 years after the fall of the western Roman Empire when the barbarians trampled over the remnants of that once great empire... but only 200 years into the eastern Roman Empire's over 1,000 year history, most latterly as Byzantium. In Europe the barbarians were not intent on making too many friends, they were far more intent on rape, pillage and enslavement as a pastime. So simply by virtue of the fact of being in Europe in what was a pretty horrible time was made worse by something???

Now this is climate change.  I sometimes complain about the weather but...

Given that this has now been documented, how on earth did people actually verify this? And this was the bit that fascinated me and caught my attention. It was the polar ice cap. Antarctic not Arctic.

Inside this thing scientists bore into the ice cap and from studying the various levels and aging them, they can tell pretty much what happened scientifically. Given this data, historians are able to interpret it from the often weird writings of contemporary scribes and come to amazing conclusions about our world's history, both natural as well as social.

This is the full litany of woe...

I would post the full article or at least attach a link but somehow I have lost it and cannot find it at the moment. It is definitely worth reading and remembering that climate change is just as much about natural phenomena as it is about human interference. That doesn't of course mean that we should be complacent about things but it is worth remembering. A couple of days ago, for instance, I read another piece about how the global insect population is down 70%+ since the 1970's with the result that some parts of China have to employ people to pollinate their plants as there's nothing else left to do it for them. Now that was human interference.