There was an upside to some of that stuff!,
The piece starts out with an error ~ imagining that the Dark Ages started in some sort of association with the Fall of Rome, the arrival of barbarians, etc. Actually, there was a climate anomaly that followed what may have been a serious comet strike somewhere in the North Atlantic ~ in 535 AD! Tree rings show something really bad happened that left Europe without summer weather for maybe as long as 7 years ~ just enough to depopulate and economically destroy all of Western and Northern Europe ~ took them back to a level even lower than found in Eastern Europe.
After that everything that went on in Western Europe was a step up!~
The Krakatoa volcano erupted in 535ad and might have been responsible for the climate shifts at that time.
http://customers.hbci.com/~wenonah/history/535ad.htm