Roman Warm, Dark Age Cool, Viking Warm, and I’m taking the day off

View 704 Saturday, December 10, 2011

It’s about lunch time, and I had a number of thoughts relevant to fiction while we were on our morning walk, so this will be brief. I’ll catch up here tonight and tomorrow, but I am going to go down to lunch and then to the monk’s cell today.

Tracy Walters sends this

Subject: Mysterious object seen near Mercury debunked

http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t2#/video/bestoftv/2011/12/09/tsr-mysterious-object-near-mercury-mpg.cnn

To which we can only say, alas. Not that I really expected it to be an alien spaceship orbiting Mercury, but that would have been pretty cool. I do remind you that solar flares are real and very big, and the 1859 event caused huge electro-magnetic pulses that started fires in many telegraph offices. Telegraph lines were the only long insulated wires around in those days. A similar event could have fairly drastic consequences in this world of long transmission lines.

We have historical evidence of such solar events every century or two. They can cause such bright aurora events that night turns into day, and this as far south as the Caribbean. Alexandria, Egypt has been recording them for millennia, and it’s a supportable conclusion that really big ones happen every one or two centuries. But that’s another story for another time.

If you want something else to think about,

Evidence suggests large tropical storms trigger earthquakes

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/12/09/3387791.htm?topic=enviro

I would consider this plausible rather than definitive, but still…

Jim

If we believe that climate events can trigger earthquakes, the next question is do earthquakes trigger volcanic events? Volcanism can certainly cause climate change.

In 535 AD, Belisarius subdued the Goths, but the year was a year of world disaster. A large volcano, probably Krakatoa, erupted and spewed enough gunk into the atmosphere that the next decade was one of drastic cooling. There were also plagues. The period after is generally known as the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages officially began forty years before when the Goths deposed the last Western Emperor, but in fact Gothic rule in Italy wasn’t a lot different from what it had been under the last of the Roman Emperors.

It was also about then that the “Roman Warm” climatic period is considered to have ended and a period of global cooling began; but the beginning of the cooling isn’t so certain. What is certain is that something horrible happened in 535 which ushered in a long period of cooling, shorter growing seasons, plagues, tribal wanderings, and the real Dark Ages, if you define a Dark Age not as a time when you have forgotten how to do something, but have forgotten that anyone ever was able to do it. As with the US in education, where we have forgotten what we used to accomplish with the public schools, and now strive to achieve goals that would have been considered failure by most teachers over most of the period of the public schools. But I digress.

Fortunately the Dark Age Cooling ended, and the Earth began to warm again, producing the Viking Warm period with colonies in Greenland, grapes in Vinland (AKA Nova Scotia) and longer growing seasons across Europe and China. The Viking Warm was followed by the cooling that began in 1325 or so and led into the Little Ice Age which lasted until Earth began to warm again in 1800. There was a time when longer growing seasons, warmer winters, and farmlands in higher latitudes were considered a blessing. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I’m going to have lunch and then write fiction.