Randall Carlson

Well, I mean, you speak facetiously, but in a way, you know, I'm the believer that, you know, we could do very well at 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

And there's so much we could talk about here, Aubrey.

But, you know, we just came out of in the middle of the 1800s was the end of a 600 year period called the Little Ice Age.

I don't know if you've heard of the term the Little Ice Age.

The medieval warm period was when the Vikings were farming the west coast of Greenland where it's now permafrost.

This was between like 900, I think they settled there between 900 and 1000 AD.

And during that period of time,

If we look at some of the smaller cycles within cycles, there was a called the late antiquity ice age that began around 536 AD.

It lasted for about three to 400 years.

This is what we normally think of as the dark ages.

Well, what happens during a planetary cooling?

What happens is, is that growing season contracts, the viable elevation at which farming can be conducted goes down.

The growing season is constricted considerably, and you'll typically have repeated episodes where you have agricultural failures on a large scale.

This is what happened in the 500s, right?

And when this occurred in 536 AD, which is now estimated by some researchers to have been the coldest year of the last 2,000 years.

probably triggered by a combination of several impact events and a spasm of volcanism working together, creating a perfect storm.

It basically launched the Dark Ages.

So for the next 300 to 400 years, particularly in Northern Europe, where most of the records we have come from, there was a broad-scale social collapse.

The Dark Ages...

After a period of about six to seven years, there was repeated agricultural failures.