During the plague years, airborne lead levels in Europe fell to 0.<p><i>When the sickness came, it caused massive social upheaval in the populations it infected, shutting down entire human industries as ravaged communities went into damage control.<p>One of these affected industries, according to historian Alexander More from Harvard University, was lead mining and smelting by medieval workers – and thanks to his team's new study, we've got more than historical records to show that.</i><p><a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-ice-dating-from-the-black-death-challenges-the-idea-of-natural-lead-levels" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-ice-dating-from-the-bla...</a>
I have been saying for a while that the world is going to start getting shortages for many items we use as China is somewhere in the value chain for most of the world's production. China can't go back to full production anytime soon as it has just now got some control of the virus spread and it would need to stay in this mode for another 1-2 months if it wants to stop the spread.
This reminds me of when all the planes in the USA (and several other countries) were grounded after 9/11 and there was some evidence that it affected our temperature variation because there weren't any contrails in the sky.<p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate...</a>
It's crazy to think, if human civilization were to shut down the earth would fairly rapidly become much better off. Other species would flourish again, plants would slowly take over our cities. There'd be less bickering. Hm.
I have read that lung diseases are common in China and that in big cities the smog shortens the average lifespan by 5years. Could better air quality for one year significantly improve people’s health, or is one year too short?