09.29 | pirates of the climate collapse

The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.
   – Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

✉️ letter #42

Last month, I briefly mentioned a factoid that’d I’d come across about how the “golden age of piracy” largely happened because a drop in sunspot activity lowered the amount of radiation getting to the earth, which then led to a lull in hurricanes.

It blew my mind then, but I didn’t realize how much I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it.

A little background: In a paper back in 2016, marine archeologists and arborists got together to use data from both recorded shipwrecks and tree rings to identify hurricane activity throughout the years.

The researchers of the seas used historical logs and carbon dating of found shipwrecks around the Caribbean. The researchers of the trees knew that hurricanes impacted growth (namely, it staunched it), which allowed them to determine hurricane event years by traumatically tiny rings.

By utilizing overlaps across the last 200 years, the two groups were able to expand the knowledge of hurricane activity centuries before such records were kept, and lo and behold, the Maunder Minimum was found.

Between 1645 and 1715, temperatures dipped slightly in the Northern Hemisphere, ushering in a “little ice age” and basically calming the waters of the Atlantic. That then allowed for international sailing to become vastly less dangerous, which allowed raggedy bands of privateers to afford the previously financially iffy and death courting act of roaming around the waters, plundering things off of other ships.

Calm waters also helped the transatlantic slave route explode. Not only did higher crop yields make supplying slaves more cost-effective in Africa, the safer waterways made it exponentially more lucrative to transport humans tightly packed in the bowels of a cargo ship.

In East Asia, where the little ice age had hit 200 years earlier, the inner Asian desert belt saw more precipitation, which migrated the grasslands downwards and aided the ambitions of a guy named Genghis Khan to conquer the largest land mass any guy has ruled over.

All of these major Anthropocene-shifting events happened with a cooling of “as much as 2-degrees.”

We are now somewhat desperately, hoping we don’t warm by that. Hurricanes have already gotten stronger. Droughts have gotten worse. And here we are basically all aware that no matter what we do now, we are going to hit 1.5-degrees in 7 years. Sad.

But actually, the reason this idea of massive change from a slight tweak in temperature has been living rent free in my head is less from the doom and gloom of the IPCC report, and more that I was just startled. I didn't realize I needed a reminder of how tied human civilization is to nature, but considering how it shook me, I suppose I did!

With air conditioning and aquifers and automated safety protocols, it’s really easy to forget that we still are, at our core, creatures at the whims of a greater ecosystem. Finding out how much courses of history changed due to what essentially was a slight chill is both humbling and fascinating.

Most climate change talk is about the environmental collapse that global heating will trigger. But now I’m wondering what kind of people, what kind of stories, what kind of social change will spring from it too.

If we can do horrible things because of the benefits reaped from much more pleasant weather, I suddenly feel like there’s a possibility something nice could come from everyone suffering a little bit more in tandem.

If cooling gave us pirates, what wild “golden age” might warming give us?

🌱 news that made me go "huh."

• I often get this something called a “nervous stomach,” where when I feel mentally awful, a black hole feels like it opens up in my gut and tries to suck the rest of my body in. And I guess now scientists are discovering why. [Live Science]
• I’ve become a little addicted to Thredup, basically Goodwill if Goodwill was online (note that Goodwill IS online but I have yet to ever manage to complete a shipment with them). It’s good to hear that besides being a banger source of secondhand clothing, they’re also one of the first-movers in implementing a four-day work week. [Insider]
• This song apparently reduced anxiety by 65 percent in pre-op patients, rivaling sedatives. To me, it sounds like what you hear at one of those dark room light shows in a modern art museum. Ironically, usually those rooms made me wish I was on drugs. [LadBible]
• Whenever I think about billionaires in space, I think about the horrible toll prolonged zero-gravity has on the human body. Just this week, astronaut Frank Rubio spent 371 days up in the ISS and had to be carried out of his capsule by recovery teams. And oh boy does that make me want to shoot some billionaires into space. [BBC]

🎵 song of my week

Breath - Dinner Party (feat. Arin Ray)

Oftentimes I'll hear a sound I like somewhere, look it up on Spotify, save the album and then completely forget about it until a year later, when I'm cleaning up my playlists. Terrace Martin, a modern jazz-hip hop fusionist, was one of those late rediscoveries. Through him, I found Dinner Party, a "supergroup" formed by him, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, and Kamasi Washington.

I've realized recently that I need to chill out a lot more, and this song kind of embodies what I ought to keep on telling myself:

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I’ll admit that I wasn’t a huge One Piece fan going into the new Netflix live action series. I had read past the Dressarosa Saga in a random manga binge, but possibly because it was all at once (yes, all nearly 1000 chapters at once), I didn’t really sit with the story or characters enough to recognize how much detail was put into the world. I mostly remember finding Usopp & Tony Chopper annoying, how every chapter had someone sobbing wetly, and that the little one panel side stories for ancillary characters were cute.

And so, it was a bit of a surprise to me how entertaining the live action was, which then opened me up to watching an insane amount of One Piece media think piece videos. I don’t think I recommend going down that rabbit hole - while I do have a newfound appreciation for Eiichiro Oda’s storytelling skills, I’m not sure I needed to know that much about each character he’s created. You tell me:

Regardless, I do think the live action was fun! Spunky, genuine, and with well-crafted fighting choreography and a very detailed world. I really appreciate the creative control that was able to keep everything entertainingly cartoonish, yet not waffle into insulting parody. And since I started this newsletter out talking about something vaguely pirates-related, I might as well end it with them too.

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