Nice two-fer.
Posted on 12/22/2025 1:02:57 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The infamous Black Death -- a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years -- may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption.
That's the hypothesis presented in research published December 4 in Communications Earth & Environment, which argues that the eruption triggered several seasons of climate instability and crop failures. That instability, in turn, forced several Italian states to import grain stores from new sources -- specifically, from regions surrounding the Black Sea. Riding along on those grain stores, the researchers posit, were fleas infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague.
Martin Bauch, a medieval and environmental historian... noticed a particularly serious crop failure beginning in northwestern Italy in late 1345 after serious rainstorms. Within just two years, the Black Death had begun, so he was curious whether there might be a connection.
Analyzing records about the grain trade suggested some Italian cities exhausted their typical food supplies, forcing them to import grain from the Black Sea region. Although the measure kept people fed, it may have introduced the Black Death to Europe as a nightmare ride-along, the Bauch and his co-author suggest...
Here a powerful eruption in 1345 stood out.
The eruption itself remains mysterious. The researchers suspect it occurred relatively close to the equator because its debris is visible in ice caps from both poles. But it will take significant additional work to identify the culprit. "Nobody considers this eruption particularly interesting," Bauch says. "We hope that changes."
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
from the 'lombok' keyword sorted:
“May have”...scientific weasel words. Followed by “give us grants so we can prove it”.
I have always found study of Plague to be far, far too Euro centric.
It was wiping out the Orient, too. And the chicken may have come before the egg.
Note Japan and South America and Polynesia were unaffected. Tack them on and you start to wander up the % of humans numbers towards extinction territory.
Uh, no, not weasel words, it’s a habit people who work in the sciences pick up rather than the absolutist ex cathedra statements of the likes of Al Gore or Michael Moore.
How sad for you.
Rather glaring error in the writing of the “scientific” article. The grain shipments supposedly from the Black Sea, did not have “fleas” with the grain. It had to have rats already infested with fleas, rats eating the grain to live and survive the voyage, and “feeding” in turn the many fleas they carried. These rats were infested with the fleas infected with Yersinia pestis bacteria.
The bacterium which causes Black Plague comes from flea bites regurgitating the bite blood back into the wound and infecting people. Rats were the major vector for the spread of the infected fleas who lived on them-— to then have fleas jump onto humans. Half of Europe died from this-— huge number.
Interestingly, the epidemic was not called the Black Death when it was taking place—it was called the Pestilence. Like “Insdustrial Revolution” and “Roaring Twenties,” the term “Black Death” was coined later.
from the Yersinia Pestis keyword, sorted:
This is not a new theory.
Oh, no!
[snip] In 2022, it was discovered that there was a sudden surge of deaths in what is today Kyrgyzstan from the Black Death in the late 1330s; when combined with genetic evidence, this implies that the initial spread may have pre-dated, by nearly two decades, the 14th-century Mongol conquests previously postulated as the cause. [/snip]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death , citing:
The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia
Nature. 2022 Jun 15;606(7915):718–724. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9217749/
Hantavirus 1993
Hantavirus got GH’s wife 2025
That 1250s eruption made Tambora look like an ice cream social.
Thee largest eruption in recent recorded history and.
In our present time, we are near the climatic peak of the results of the Tonga volcanic eruption.
We aint s××t. Mother nature rules. And when she burps, we get a lesson.
These two graphs show data from NASA GISTEMP, which is most often cited global temperature anomaly graph from the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) for the entire globe, but done two ways. The top graph shows the magnified temperature anomaly, and the bottom graph shows the actual temperature as measured on the scale of normal human weather experience, typically 0° to 120° Fahrenheit.
The point of this display is to illustrate that if there were not statistical techniques such as anomaly analysis and scale amplification, humans would not likely be able to detect the mild rise in temperature since 1880. The bottom graph of absolute temperature shows this clearly and is essentially flat.
The top graph shows what is commonly displayed in the media, which is highly magnified. More details are here: New WUWT Global Temperature Feature: Anomaly vs. Real-World Temperature
https://wattsupwiththat.com/global-surface-temperature-comparison/
Because of the cyclic nature of the climate... we are much more likely to be nearing or already in a cooling phase that is going to be hidden for as long as the lefties who have taken over the narrative are capable of.
Oh, and speaking long term (thousands of years) CO2 has almost zero relationship to average temperatures.
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