And for a not very realistic scenario. It´s not like we ever got close to that in any pandemic.
With the Black Death you see interesting shifts in society (labor becomes more scarce so people earn more and lots of ´male jobs´ were done by women until there were enough men to push them out again) but there is no collapse.
All the extinction events were planet wide calamities so there is no island lifeboat.
There is just one planet lifeboat.
Was the Black Death caused by climate change induced famine ?
"Now, new research using a unique combination of ice-core data and written historical records indicates that the cool, wet weather blamed for the northern European famine actually affected a much wider area over a much longer period. The work, which researchers say is preliminary, paints a picture of a deep, prolonged food shortage in the years leading to the Black Death.
“The evidence indicates that the famine was a broader phenomenon, geographically and chronologically,” said Alexander More, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard History Department and a lecturer in the History of Science Department.
A widespread famine that weakened the population over decades could help explain the Black Death’s particularly high mortality. Over four or five years after arriving in Europe in 1347, the pandemic surged through the continent in waves that killed millions.
The ice-core data is part of a unique program linking traditional historical research with scientific data-collecting techniques. The program, called the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard (SoHP), is headed by Michael McCormick, the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History. SoHP’s ice-core project is being conducted in collaboration with the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute and researchers at Heidelberg University. The project’s approach puts it at the juncture of environmental science, archaeology, and history. It is supported by the Arcadia Fund of London."
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/01/did-famine-worsen-the-black-death/Climate change, not Global Warming caused the Black Death (bubonic plague) that killed an estimated 75 million people, or 1/3 of the Western Christian Civilization in Europe.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January of 2008 details the research of Anthropologists Sharon N. DeWitte and James W. Wood.
They examined the human remains of a Black Death cemetery in London and compared them with remains from cemeteries in Denmark, where the Black Death did not affect the local population.
The results were this:
Black Death killed more people who were starved of essential nutrients and already suffering from disease then it did well fed and healthy persons.
Why were they starved of essential nutrients and already suffering from disease?
Because the Medieval Warming Period, which ended around the year 1300, enabled abundant crops over much of Europe for hundreds of years. This continual abundance of food then created a population boom. The milder winters and longer growing seasons resulted in smaller amounts of environmental stress on the European peoples. As a result, by the year 1300 most of Europe’s people’s were well fed and generally healthy.
Then came the Great Famine of 1315–1322, the direct result of the cooling of the European climate, usually called the Little Ice Age. It started with three years of torrential rains beginning in 1315.The bad weather of the spring of 1315 resulted in crop failures over most of Europe and lasted until the summer of 1317.The unstable weather lasted in Europe until the 19th century and was characterized by severe winters and no or very short growing seasons.
When did the Black Death ravage Europe? From the years 1347 to 1351.
It doesn’t take a college degree to figure the natural chain of events caused by the Climate Change of 1300 to 1322.
The so called “Global Warming” of the Medieval Warming Period sparked the greatest boom in prosperity and health of the last 1,000 years in Europe. The climate change resulting in the Little Ice Age caused massive death and misery.
When people of the first half of the 1300's became starved, their immunity to common infections dropped, that combined with improper sanitation,lack of clean water and environmental stress set the stage for the Black Death.
https://earthsciencesus.blogspot.com/2008/01/black-death-and-climate-change.html
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