When The Cold Comes, The World Changes

A rather fascinating and potentially illuminating look at what happened AFTER 536 A.D.

There’s bits in here that I’ve never heard before, and that do seem to explain a fair amount. Such as at about 12 minutes when they describe the way blood clots in fleas.

Seems that it only does that at 25 C / 77 F and below. Above that temperature, the flea just digests the blood and poops out the plague bacteria. Below that temperature, the blood with plague bacteria tends to form a clot that plugs up the digestion, leading to the flea repeatedly biting anything it can to try and eat, but to no benefit. So you get a hoard of ravenous fleas biting anything that moves and spreading plague. Thus it comes in outbreaks during cold times.

The plague started in a normally hot part of Africa, showing that that area must have gotten colder than normal. No real surprise, as the volcano that darkened the skies would bring lots of cold. The implication here is that any big ol’ volcano can cause a new plague to spread across the world. Hopefully we have enough antibiotics in inventory…

I’d also point out (though the video doesn’t) that the population will be more vulnerable to infections not just from poor diet due to crop failures, but also dramatically reduced Vitamin D levels under a few years of blocked sky full of volcanic dust and sulphur dioxide.

At about 19 minutes, they move to Mexico. Here there is a claimed re-dating of the demise of Teotihuacan to 150 years earlier than prior guesses, into just that same volcanic disruption. The wiki corroborates that date, but with an equivocating ‘may have’:

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

The city is thought to have been established around 100 BC, with major monuments continuously under construction until about 250 AD. The city may have lasted until sometime between the 7th and 8th centuries AD, but its major monuments were sacked and systematically burned around 550 AD.

It does look like the colder oceans resulted in dramatic drought conditions all over Mexico and into California (at a minimum). Part of why I’m heading to where rain is more frequent… As we cool, California gets longer and longer drought periods. During the major drought in the ’70s cold dip, skiing was terrible. I remember walking my skis over hay covered dirt 1/2 way down Mountain Run at Squaw Valley then.

There’s also an interesting connection to British history at about 36 minutes. It is asserted that due to trade patterns, the British Celts were likely having plague problems along with crop failures, which made it easier for the Angles and Saxons to move in.

In general, it looks like a cold plunge tends to destabilize Empires, depose Leaders, and collapse established civilizations. Hunger, disease, and war take over. (Note To Self: Have a good store of food, vitamins, necessary medicines, and means to defend them… Gee, sounds like “prepping”…)

There is also a constant theme of migrations from marginal cold areas, south and west, into warmer areas in Europe. And from marginal dry areas into wetter ones in the American West. I note in passing that during “1800 and froze to death” or “the year without a summer” farmers abandoned farms in the North East and moved to Oklahoma in the land rush. Again a migration from north east to south west.

So it looks to me like the best place to be is America’s Heartland and down in the southern half of it at that. Europeans likely will want to consider being closer to the Mediterranean if possible.

North Africa will likely be a big winner, provided they get enough rain for crops. Unfortunately, it looks like another volcano caused a major drought / famine in Egypt, so it might be a place in trouble if things get cold enough for African drought.

https://creationwiki.org/Famine_in_Egypt

In 1783, Mount Laki, a volcano in Iceland, erupted and caused 9,000 casualties. Scientists at Rutgers University suggested that this eruption caused a drought in northern Africa. This drought diminished the flow of the Nile, so that its annual inundations were insufficient to irrigate the land of Egypt. This event suggests that famines in the Near East could have happened more than once. The Bible, of course, records a similar famine that affected Canaan in Abraham’s time. (Genesis 12 )

We also know that the 4200 kiloyear event was a very cold turn:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17323271-800-how-egypt-was-felled-by-famine-in-2180-bc/

How Egypt was felled by famine – in 2180 BC
EARTH 26 January 2002
By Betsy Mason

EVEN ancient Egypt’s mighty pyramid builders were powerless in the face of the famine that helped bring down their civilisation around 2180 BC. Now evidence gleaned from mud deposited by the River Nile suggests that a shift in climate thousands of kilometres to the south was ultimately to blame – and the same or worse could happen today.

The ancient Egyptians depended on the Nile’s annual floods to irrigate their crops. But any change in climate that pushed the African monsoons southwards out of Ethiopia would have been diminished these floods.

Dwindling rains in the Ethiopian highlands would have meant fewer plants to stabilise the soil. When rain did fall it would have washed large amounts of soil into the Blue Nile and into Egypt, along with sediment from the White Nile.

Blue Nile mud has a different isotope signature from that of the White Nile. So by analysing isotope differences in mud deposited in the Nile Delta, Michael Krom of Leeds University worked out what proportion of sediment came from each branch of the river.

Krom reasons that during periods of drought, the amount of Blue Nile mud in the river would be relatively high. He found that one of these periods, from 4500 to 4200 years ago, immediately predates the fall of the Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

The weakened waters would have been catastrophic for the Egyptians. “Changes that affect food supply don’t have to be very large to have a ripple effect in societies,” says Bill Ryan of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.

So you might have to deal with the huge Egyptian population looking for somewhere to live that has water…

This would have dramatic nearly instant onset in a large volcanic event, or slower decade or so onset in a gradual solar driven cooling as the sun goes quiet.

Then they speculate that the failure of Yemen due to water stress caused Mohammed’s family to move to the Mecca / Medina area, and in the chaos and disruption following the disasters started by the cold shift, set the stage for the rise of Islam.

They then do the usual “tour of horribles” ticking off various volcanoes that might blow any day now (or in reality, any million years now…)

I note in passing that most likely a massive eruption here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlegraean_Fields

that happened about 40,000 years ago is the most likely proximal cause of the demise of Neanderthals. A thick layer of volcanic ash is just above the layer where their skeletons were found in one of the major cave finds. They were thriving prior, nearly extinct after, and the ash covered from near Spain all the way into near Asia. Exactly their range. No real surprise then that the newest remains are found on the coast of Hispania. They survived in a few isolated pockets remote from the volcanic ash field. Eventually to mingle their genes with the newer arriving “modern” humans both in Europe and in Asia (both Europeans and Asians have some admixture of Neanderthal genes) and the final extinction coming from genetic swamping.

That is still an active volcanic area, and it is still able to cover most of Europe in ash. One hopes it just does more little eruptions and skips The Big One for a few thousand more years…

What is quite clear to me, is that THE two big climate issues are simply this:

1) Major volcanic eruptions. Overnight the world is chaos.
2) Slow drift into the next Ice Age Glacial. As it can have onset in just a decade or two. Slow enough for some adaptation, but fast enough to be devastating to whole regions.

There’s also a third equally catastrophic possibility, but the probability in any one century is low. It is almost certain that a large impact into the ice sheet in Canada caused the Younger Dryas and extinction of the megafauna of North America (along with most of the Clovis People). We could easily have another one of those. But they are fairly rare with 10s of thousands of years between them. There’s also no way to know what part of the planet will get whacked until it is too late to move anywhere.

ALL of these cause collapse and destruction via cold and drought. What is of zero risk is warmth. It brings lush growth and a tropical paradise.

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