Thomas Jefferson wrote about his experience in Virginia during this time and noted its effect on crops:
May 17, 1816
"[T]he spring has been unusually dry and cold. our average morning cold for the month of May in other years has been 63° of Farenheit. in the present month it has been to this day an average of 53° and one morning as low as 43°. repeated frosts have killed the early fruits and the crops of tobacco and wheat will be poor."
September 1816
"We have had the most extraordinary year of drought & cold ever known in the history of America. in June, instead of 3 3/4 I. our average of rain for that month, we had only 1/3 of an inch, in Aug. instead of 9 1/6 I. our average, we had only 8/10 of an inch. and it still continues. the summer too has been as cold as a moderate winter. in every state North of this there has been frost in every month of the year; in this state we had none in June & July. but those of Aug. killed much corn over the mountains. the crop of corn thro’ the Atlantic states will probably be less than 1/3 of an ordinary one, that of tob[acc]o still less, and of mean quality."
> The lack of oats to feed horses may have inspired the German inventor Karl Drais to research new ways of horseless transportation, which led to the invention of the draisine or velocipede. This was the ancestor of the modern bicycle and a step toward mechanized personal transport.
This truly captures the "butterfly effect" which I continually marvel at. How much of what has happened in human history has been because of a seemingly entirely unrelated series of events? Probably quite a lot.
I'd highly recommend the TV series Connections[0], which explores the history of science and technology through the lens of this sort of butterfly effect. There were a couple later reboots of the series that are not as good IMO, but still worth a watch.
Animals going hungry because of a global famine caused by a massive volcanic eruption, and the concomitant technological developments to replace those animals, are as far from being examples of the butterfly effect as anything could possibly be. (sorry to be that guy, but...)
While the effect of this year without a summer is obvious when it comes to agriculture, there are some lesser-known secondary effects of a year without a summer. For example, it has been speculated that the novel Frankenstein (published in 1818) was directly inspired by the cold and desolate summer of 1816. The poem Darkness (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222... ) was another direct inspiration.
I'm also interested in the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) but I doubt I could find conclusive evidence.
Going through the similar events sections shows that massive volcanic eruption -> famine -> political unrest has happened multiple times throughout history!
Yes. In the pre-industrial era, civilizations tended to balance precariously on a Malthusian knife-edge, growing right up to whatever maximum population their food supplies could support. So all it took was one freak climactic event to tip them over into famine, and famine has always been a fertile breeding ground for political unrest.
"The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer... because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease... Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora..."
This was a notable event with a broad influence. One ripple effect is Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein," which may not have even been produced were it not for the weather that summer [0]:
"It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house". Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream", her ghost story.
If this risk area is of interest to you and haven't already, you might want to look into some of the "x-risk" effective altruism stuff going on. My favored branch of EA is about solving global poverty, but it's also got a bunch of people thinking about black swan extinction-level events.
One notable organization here is ALLFED[0] -- they're specifically looking at how to avert global famine in cases of global catastrophes.
I wonder if we can store enough food to feed 10 billion people for a whole year with current tech. Probably not. (Or better yet, some (fungus?) foodstuff that doesn't need light.) If this happens less than once per lifetime, it would not be profitable in the private sector. Governments are good at preparing for military-related black swans but not natural ones.
This is a major transition we will see over the next decade, and a major hope for reducing humanity's environmental footprint: foods grown from single cells.
1955 and 1963 were also exceptionally harsh winters, but not being close to a major event they continue to remain unimportant.
ie, the 1946/47 winter is just observership bias, spanish flu's closeness to WW1, is on the other hand, part of the factor in how it spread (likely from the US to the trenches, then to everywhere else as convalescing wounded returned home from hospitals filled with the infected)
And years 1942-1945 were exceptionally hot, but with a lot of contrast. In France, minimal maximal temperature of February 1945 was 10°C but it froze mid-May.
It reminded me of Tokarczuk's (the recent prize winner in literature) Nobel lecture. She elaborated on the weather-related butterfly effect in history. See https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/... - starting from the paragraph "Let us take a close look at a particular moment in the history of the world". (Though I believe the theories she refers to are somewhat disputable)
The Alomonso book in the little house on the Prarie covers this. All the scrambling they have to do to cover crops and protect them from the cold is just part of the story, but you realize that the bigger picture is them living through this summer.
No, not the entire winter. What seems to be happening is that the normally very reliable wind patterns around the poles are breaking down as the poles heat up, and that's creating temporary warm patterns. As one of the articles notes, you might be 60 degrees F above normal for a while, then go back to "normal" winter temperatures.
> "Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of Russia's lower house of parliament, blamed a secret U.S. "climate weapon" for the temperature anomaly that has resulted in unusually warm temperatures this season.
> The Moscow Times reported that Zhuravlyov appeared on the Govorit Moskva radio station on Tuesday, where he said that the United States was purposefully using technology to warm Russia in order to create a climate catastrophe to destabilize the country. "If [Russia's permafrost] melts now, it will be a disaster.... The Americans know this, and they're testing this weapon," he said."
It's worth thinking about political instability as an inevitable follow-on to climate instability.
In Latvia, usually we had snow in December. Some last years usually after christmas/new year. It is unusual here to be without snow on Christmas - people usually expect it. February 24th, we still don't have snow (we had some days when it was snowing and the snow remained for some days - but nothing you would call a real winter). Temperatures are >0 celsium. Rarely <0 in daylight.
Talked to a 91 yr old and 79 yr old ladies - they say first time we have such a "winter".
So we'll still have to see if we manage to escape winter this year.
I live in Lithuania and this season winter here has not yet come (and probably won't now).
Typically winters here have a week or two of temperatures reaching -25c in January, with it averaging around -10c the rest of the season. This winter the coldest it reached was -10c, most of the time it has been around 0c. We haven't even had proper snow that has settled.
Nobody I've spoken to (i.e. grandparents) remembers a winter like this before.
I'm in north western Montana. Barely any snow. The inversion layer that covers us most of winter is mostly not here (which is nice). Last February was particularly cold, never going above 16°f and 3ft of snow. Loved it. This February, yesterday was nearly 50°f and we've had a total of maybe 6 to 8 inches all winter. It feels like autumn is going right into spring.
- You can only offset a certain amount of warming with it. If you put too much aerosol into the stratosphere it will merge, become larger and precipitate quite fast. The exact possible offset can only be estimated, but is below what we're already committed to.
- You have to keep doing it. As soon as you stop you run into trouble very fast.
- In the models we see drastic circulation changes. For example the jet stream collapses. Do you want to test it in real life?
- The issue of ocean acidification still remains. The additional sulphuric acid in the environment won't help either.
- Ah and of course it's not cheap. We do not have the tech to do it yet in the amount necessary.
The currently easiest, cheapest and safest way to fight climate change remains to stop burning fossil fuels.
(edit: And of course I get you're not being serious.)
It would require a very large eruption to make a worthwhile dent in the rate of warming; small-ish ones happen all the time with no strong effect. Even if such an eruption didn't have a lot of highly undesirable side effects, we simply don't have any way to trigger something like this. At any rate, the short-term consequences would be absolutely devastating and in no way cheap.
[+] [-] chrisco255|6 years ago|reply
May 17, 1816 "[T]he spring has been unusually dry and cold. our average morning cold for the month of May in other years has been 63° of Farenheit. in the present month it has been to this day an average of 53° and one morning as low as 43°. repeated frosts have killed the early fruits and the crops of tobacco and wheat will be poor."
September 1816 "We have had the most extraordinary year of drought & cold ever known in the history of America. in June, instead of 3 3/4 I. our average of rain for that month, we had only 1/3 of an inch, in Aug. instead of 9 1/6 I. our average, we had only 8/10 of an inch. and it still continues. the summer too has been as cold as a moderate winter. in every state North of this there has been frost in every month of the year; in this state we had none in June & July. but those of Aug. killed much corn over the mountains. the crop of corn thro’ the Atlantic states will probably be less than 1/3 of an ordinary one, that of tob[acc]o still less, and of mean quality."
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/eru...
[+] [-] robohoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Thorentis|6 years ago|reply
This truly captures the "butterfly effect" which I continually marvel at. How much of what has happened in human history has been because of a seemingly entirely unrelated series of events? Probably quite a lot.
[+] [-] zwegner|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
[+] [-] justin66|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kccqzy|6 years ago|reply
I'm also interested in the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) but I doubt I could find conclusive evidence.
[+] [-] elygre|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exhilaration|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugditches|6 years ago|reply
Painting of the phenomenon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Ho...
Photo of 'recent' eruption: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/CSIRO_Sc...
[+] [-] airstrike|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki#Consequences_in_Europe
[+] [-] slynn12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EndXA|6 years ago|reply
"The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer... because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease... Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora..."
[+] [-] JeremyNT|6 years ago|reply
"It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house". Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream", her ghost story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Lake_Geneva_and_F...
[+] [-] mothsonasloth|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkbm|6 years ago|reply
One notable organization here is ALLFED[0] -- they're specifically looking at how to avert global famine in cases of global catastrophes.
[0] https://allfed.info/
[+] [-] zelly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numtel|6 years ago|reply
https://www.rethinkx.com/press-release/2019/9/16/new-report-...
[+] [-] jiofih|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jletts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rye-neat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
Similarly, that 1919 was the year of the Spanish Flu, and 1946-47 was an exceptionally harsh winter.
[+] [-] NikkiA|6 years ago|reply
ie, the 1946/47 winter is just observership bias, spanish flu's closeness to WW1, is on the other hand, part of the factor in how it spread (likely from the US to the trenches, then to everywhere else as convalescing wounded returned home from hospitals filled with the infected)
[+] [-] lgeorget|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgrantme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manojlds|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] V-2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvm___|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thombat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jellicle|6 years ago|reply
https://mashable.com/2018/01/30/wild-arctic-weather-siberia-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russias-warm-winter-has...
https://www.newsweek.com/russian-lawmaker-blames-climate-wea...
> "Alexei Zhuravlyov, a member of Russia's lower house of parliament, blamed a secret U.S. "climate weapon" for the temperature anomaly that has resulted in unusually warm temperatures this season.
> The Moscow Times reported that Zhuravlyov appeared on the Govorit Moskva radio station on Tuesday, where he said that the United States was purposefully using technology to warm Russia in order to create a climate catastrophe to destabilize the country. "If [Russia's permafrost] melts now, it will be a disaster.... The Americans know this, and they're testing this weapon," he said."
It's worth thinking about political instability as an inevitable follow-on to climate instability.
[+] [-] mikkom|6 years ago|reply
It's like october continuing whole winter and it's raining all the time.
[+] [-] jve|6 years ago|reply
Talked to a 91 yr old and 79 yr old ladies - they say first time we have such a "winter".
So we'll still have to see if we manage to escape winter this year.
[+] [-] mc3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorrax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fyfy18|6 years ago|reply
Typically winters here have a week or two of temperatures reaching -25c in January, with it averaging around -10c the rest of the season. This winter the coldest it reached was -10c, most of the time it has been around 0c. We haven't even had proper snow that has settled.
Nobody I've spoken to (i.e. grandparents) remembers a winter like this before.
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worldsayshi|6 years ago|reply
As an individual season I guess it's hard to tie it directly to climate change though.
[+] [-] sethammons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slynn12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rabidrat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiofih|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjs33|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaybe|6 years ago|reply
- You can only offset a certain amount of warming with it. If you put too much aerosol into the stratosphere it will merge, become larger and precipitate quite fast. The exact possible offset can only be estimated, but is below what we're already committed to.
- You have to keep doing it. As soon as you stop you run into trouble very fast.
- In the models we see drastic circulation changes. For example the jet stream collapses. Do you want to test it in real life?
- The issue of ocean acidification still remains. The additional sulphuric acid in the environment won't help either.
- Ah and of course it's not cheap. We do not have the tech to do it yet in the amount necessary.
The currently easiest, cheapest and safest way to fight climate change remains to stop burning fossil fuels.
(edit: And of course I get you're not being serious.)
[+] [-] mrec|6 years ago|reply
It's not a fix, but might be an effective mitigation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
[+] [-] thedrbrian|6 years ago|reply
Like have a large parasol like cloud moving over the globe reflecting sunlight.
[+] [-] dividedbyzero|6 years ago|reply