"Yet, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, the average person back then may only have realised slowly just how grim conditions in their world were getting..."
I just have to point out that scientists have in fact tried this, and the frog in the water, as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm, jumps out. There is no evidence that it is possible to raise the temperature slowly enough that it does not do this, and it's not for lack of trying.
Then there's all the social science research or pop-business/pop-psychology crap that's been disproven or failed to replicate, but nonetheless will seemingly be treated as fact by most people... I dunno, forever, at this rate. And don't you dare question it.
Yeah, I would not tango with an ostrich. About fifteen years ago I had just moved to the country and had taken a quick trip by myself to the local store. Shortly after leaving my house I came upon a turkey in the road. I stopped, got out of the car and started walking up to it. It just sat there waiting. It had perched on the guard rail and as I got closer to it I noticed it's huge razor sharp talons. I said to myself "dude, your family is expecting you home safe in a few minutes...get back in the car".
"Amphibians, particularly anurans (frogs and toads), are increasingly used as
bioindicators of contaminant accumulation in pollution studies.[18] Anurans
absorb toxic chemicals through their skin and their larval gill membranes and
are sensitive to alterations in their environment.[19] They have a poor
ability to detoxify pesticides that are absorbed, inhaled, or ingested by
eating contaminated food.[19] This allows residues, especially of
organochlorine pesticides, to accumulate in their systems."
I feel like this has been a well known thing for all my life, and one of the references in the article is from 1981.
I doubt you could slow-boil any frog, or any other ectotherm. Frogs, and the rest of them, produce relatively little body heat of their own and rely on the environment to regulate their temperature. They do this by moving to cool places when they're too hot, or moving to hot places when they're too cool.
Climate change is perhaps one of the many reasons both the Roman and Byzantine empires fell or lost ability to project power. The Byzantine conquest of Italy was finishing up when these plagues hit and they never recovered their original strength again.
One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.
I wonder if a large body passed through the solar system around that time? Enough to disturb gravitational forces to trigger massive volcanic activity like that.
It's a legitimate point, you only knew about the bad things happening right where you were, for the most part. Also, instead of obsessively refreshing your screen, you probably were out there trying to fix whatever the problem was, and regardless of whether or not it worked that would be psychologically healthier.
2020/2021 are only candidates for the worst year in the last ~50 years or so, in my opinion. WW1/WW2 were probably much, much worse to live through. They impacted basically everyone negatively (one of the reasons being most men in most countries were drafted). The pandemic had more of a K-curved graph, were a decent proportion of the population wasn't as negatively impacted, and might have actually had improved.
1918-1919 were most definitely worse. The flupandemic had about 3x the per-capita death rate in the US, and we weren't even the worst hit, and the flupandemic wasn't even the thing people were most worried about in 1918. Immediately after the end of WW1, civil wars broke out in multiple parts of central Europe. Much worse about a century ago.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadThe globe may not be such a system:
https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2021/03/24/weve-known-f...
I just have to point out that scientists have in fact tried this, and the frog in the water, as soon as it gets uncomfortably warm, jumps out. There is no evidence that it is possible to raise the temperature slowly enough that it does not do this, and it's not for lack of trying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=163
- https://youtu.be/F9-iSl_eg5U?t=50
Which is neat, because I'm now also frustrated by both of these "fun facts"
Anyone parroting this crap ever seen what 5 years of hard labour do a human body?
A tad bit more seriously, a slightly larger piece of me wonders if this true a long time ago for a certain species of frog.
Sort of the opposite of not noticing important but subtle changes around them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioindicator
I feel like this has been a well known thing for all my life, and one of the references in the article is from 1981.One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.
2011 Arab Spring <- bread/wheat prices <- 2010 wildfires in Russia destroying significant share of wheat harvest
>or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.
Ukraine wheat production most probably will be significantly less this year.
If Wikipedia is correct, he wasn't a senator. His full name was Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator.
Makes me wonder, would society today fare better than society then to the same hardship?