Was 2021 the worst year on record? With Covid-19, lockdowns and economic and environmental turmoil, a lot of people have been saying they thought it was a real annus horribilis.
Latif Nasser Photo: Screenshot
But is it the worst we've seen as a species? It got co-host of the Radiolab podcast Latif Nasser thinking, and he went on a mission to find out.
He came up with a few candidates for the worst year of all time.
“In a way it was sort of me yearning to find some kind of solace or perspective,” he told Emile Donovan.
He got his PhD in the history of science, giving him a head start in his search for humanity’s darkest moments in history.
“I did a lot of real historical thinking and digging in my life and career and those were the ones that came to my mind – Black Death, Spanish Flu. I was also thinking Great Depression,” he says.
One year that particularly stood out was from an American perspective 1492 – the year Christopher Columbus sighted a Bahamian island and discovered the Americas, which would eventually lead to the genocide of indigenous cultures.
“There’s no shortage of contenders,” he says.
One thing that struck him when looking at the multitude of tragic and deadly events throughout history was how one event could lead to a cascading series of equally bad events.
A prime example would be War World I, leading into Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
The earliest documented case was in Kansas in the US in March 1918. Two years later an estimated 500 million people had been infected, with estimated deaths ranging from 17 million to 50 million.
“It’s like one disaster sets the conditions for the other,” he says.
However, 536AD was with truly catastrophic, with terrifying parallels with the climate crisis we face today.
Nasser says he’d never heard of 536AD at all before he started digging.
Events in that year lead to much of the world plunging into darkness for a full 18 months, as a mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia.
The fog blocked the sun during the day, causing temperatures to drop, crops to fail and people to die of starvation.
You can only imagine the dread and uncertainty of that period.
The disaster started with large volcanoes erupting, material reaching "all the way to the stratosphere,” he says.
“The reason we know is scientists have basically found evidence of that volcano ‘barf’ in ice cores of that time, in both Greenland and Antarctica, the top and bottom of the planet.”
Serious dust kicked up and potentially mingled with cosmic dust from Haley’s Comet creating what’s known as a “dust vale” around much of the planet, especially the northern hemisphere,” he says.
It dims the sun, so it’s colder and darker from February 536 to June 537, a year-and-a-half of dark cold winter, triggering mass crop failures.
“There’s one writer in Mesopotamia says the fruits did not ripen and the wine all tasted like sour grapes. You basically couldn’t rely on a lot of staple crops. They just didn’t materialise and, all of a sudden, everyone was hungry.”
The evidence from observing tree rings from various parts of the world, from Ireland to Mongolia, suggested something terrible happened during that period, Nasser says.
He says scientists believed global temperatures fell on average 1-to 2.5C.
There is famine, in China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of the world.
By 541 the plague of Justinian had arrived. The plague pandemic, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, was named for the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I.
He sees unnerving comparisons with climate breakdown and the world’s inability to respond quickly enough to the threat.
“There were many other effects that were not foreseeable, including societies moving too slow in order to address things…
Other comparisons are obvious.
“Climate refugees for example. In Scandinavia around 536AD there were, from archaeological evidence, something like 75 percent of the villages that they excavated in a certain part of Sweden, something like 75 percent of the people just abandoned their villages. It was really quite bad at the time…
“Climate refugees is already a thing that’s very much in store for us… and then refugees leads to all kind of political turmoil in democracies and kinds of social tension.”
Learning about these events coloured his perception of contemporary events. He stands in awe at the work academics and scientists have completed to marshal information to account for historical events.
“None of this is my own original research. I’ve just been cobbling it together from the amazing work other scientists have done. It does make you feel, it’s bad, we’re in a bleak place on planet Earth right now.
“I guess it just takes remembering a story like to let you know, there are more sub-basements to fall here. We’re not at the very ground floor. However horrible it is and it has been horrible it still can get worse.”
He says it’s up to us to see the historical dominos lined up and prevent it from getting worse and to try to anticipate what’s to come.
“You can see these things coming and how are we going to make sure that Covid-19 is not going to become justianian’s plague and wipe out half the city of Constantinople? How do you make sure that climate change, the emissions that we’re putting into the atmosphere, how do you make sure that’s not going to do the same thing?”
