Harvard historian pinpoints the worst year ever to be alive — and it’s not 2018
An eerie 18-month darkness, regime change, unseasonably low temperatures and summer snow, rampant plague and overwhelming famine are just a few ways in which Harvard historian Michael McCormick pinpointed the worst year ever: 536 CE.
“It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” McCormick recently told Science Magazine.
Temperatures dropped between 1.5°C (2.7°F) and 2.5°C (4.5°F) in the summer of 536, which began a snowball effect of poor crop performance and famine. Snow fell that summer in China; there was drought in Peru. A few years later plague broke out at a Roman port in Egypt and quickly spread.