Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE

Abstract

Records of past societies confronted with natural climate change can illuminate social responses to environmental stress and environment-disease connections, especially when locally constrained high–temporal resolution paleoclimate reconstructions are available. We present a temperature and precipitation reconstruction for ~200 BCE to ~600 CE, from a southern Italian marine sedimentary archive—the first high-resolution (~3 years) climate record from the heartland of the Roman Empire, stretching from the so-called Roman Climate Optimum to the Late Antique Little Ice Age. We document phases of instability and cooling from ~100 CE onward but more notably after ~130 CE. Pronounced cold phases between ~160 to 180 CE, ~245 to 275 CE, and after ~530 CE associate with pandemic disease, suggesting that climate stress interacted with social and biological variables. The importance of environment-disease dynamics in past civilizations underscores the need to incorporate health in risk assessments of climate change.

Analysis of the Interaction Effects of Electromagnetic Fields with Major Living Tissues—One Health Concept Numerical Evaluation Strategy

“…The main cause of these difficulties is the nonlinearity of biological tissues reflecting complex constitutive laws representing the deformation and displacement behaviors of elastic tissues. Complexity often occurs in a set of compound processes [89] and could be encountered in various areas, e.g., neuroscience [90], Earth climate [91], evolutionary biology [92], space vehicles [93], economics of fair division [94], game theory of strategic interactions [95], political science [96] and history [97]. These compound processes interact in complex actions according to nonlinear interdependent spatiotemporal behaviors.…”