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Year Without a Summer
- jvm___ 7y agoThe 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.
- thombat 7y agoAlmanzo was born over 40 years after this "year without a summer" - does "Farmer Boy" actually mention it, or is it another bad summer?
- BelleOfTheBall 7y agoOkay, I'm sorry, I know this is a serious issue and people died but the year's alternative name 'Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death' cracked me up. But the most amusing part is how it affected culture. You can guess that agricultural shortages would lead to hunger and economic problems but it's kind of insane that it lead to the creation of "Frankenstein". Cause and effect is so interesting to follow.
- kbutler 7y agoMy favorite unexpected consequence: 9. THE ERUPTION MAY HAVE LED TO MORMONISM. One of the more unusual effects of the temporary climate change brought about by Mount Tambora’s eruption is that it may have indirectly led to the creation of the Mormon religion. Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s family was one of thousands that left Vermont during the freakishly cold summer of 1816. The Smith family subsequently settled in New York, where a teenage Joseph would go on to experience the events that led to his publication of the Book of Mormon. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/73585/15-facts-about-year-without-summer https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/73585/15-facts-about-yea...
- zenmaster10665 7y agoHello!
- consultutah 7y agoMo or exmo? I only learned of this while becoming an exmo..
- kasey_junk 7y agoIt’s in the linked Wikipedia page.
- heneryville 7y agoReally? I thought this is where many church histories start.
- blueantenna 7y agoMy stake president mentioned the year without summer in his stake conference talk about Joseph Smith today. I'd never heard of it before, and then I check hacker news tonight and here it is again. Weird.
- supportlocal4h 7y ago"Saints" is a palatable book about the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is published by that church and members are encouraged to read it. It starts with an explanation of the year without a summer. I am an active lifelong member, so take that into account when evaluating my opinion. But I think that this book would be a worthwhile read to anybody who is curious about the origins of Mormonism but not necessarily interested in joining. Yes, it's written by proponents. But I think it is objective enough to be worthwhile. Oh, and Volume 2 was just released. Oh, and they are available for free. Even from Amazon.
- darkarmani 7y agoWhich also means The Book of Mormon musical is also a consequence! ;)
- mohn 7y agoIf you're interested in some other cause and effect surrounding Frankenstein, the phrasing of your comment made me think of this "History of Science Fiction" large art piece by Ward Shelley [0] (full sized 4400x2305 JPG here [1]). Frankenstein is near the center of the lower left quadrant. [0] http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/HistoryofScienceFiction.html http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/HistoryofScienceF... [1] http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/fullpics/HistSciFi2.jpg http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/fullpics/HistSciF...
- soared 7y agoGoing through the similar events sections shows that massive volcanic eruption -> famine -> political unrest has happened multiple times throughout history!
- smacktoward 7y agoYes. 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.
- postingawayonhn 7y agoIsn't the issue more that they had limited means of long-term food storage so there was little point in growing more food than you could eat in a year?
- ip26 7y agoCanning, dehydrating, pickling, curing, making alcohol...
- VBprogrammer 7y agoAlso, smoking. Worth bearing in mind that salt, one of the primary means of storage was a precious commodity often shipped to the north of Europe from salt pans in the med.
- JackFr 7y agoAnother issue is that when labor is cheap and plentiful one is less likely to invest in technology. There is a thesis that the Black Plague broke Europe out of a 'Matlthusian Deadlock' that size of the population made labor cheap enough that investing in agricultural technology had low returns, at the same time that same size led to everyone constantly being on the razors edge of famine.
- EndXA 7y agoSummary quote (trimmed for brevity): "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..."
- cryptoz 7y agoRelated question: Are there places recently that have gone a year without winter, due to climate change?
- jellicle 7y agoNo, 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. https://mashable.com/2018/01/30/wild-arctic-weather-siberia-temperatures-warm-100-degrees/ https://mashable.com/2018/01/30/wild-arctic-weather-siberia-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russias-warm-winter-has-deprived-moscow-of-snow-caused-plants-to-prematurely-bloom-and-woken-bears-out-of-hibernation/2019/12/23/6ecf726c-2590-11ea-9cc9-e19cfbc87e51_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russias-warm-winter-has... https://www.newsweek.com/russian-lawmaker-blames-climate-weapon-warm-winter-1482371 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.
- Reelin 7y agoAh yes, the 1990s Hummer - America's secret climate weapon. /s FFS, the fact that a significant number of people are probably ignorant enough to fall for such propaganda during an age in which Wikipedia and SciHub exist is a travesty.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoZhuravlyov's particular beliefs may be bullshit, but the geopolitical consequences of climate change are real. For all history, we've been used to treating the land as fixed, and borders as flexible. But the changing climate is about to make a lot of previously habitable land unlivable, and open up some previously uninhabitable areas. The countries of the world have drawn their borders on a map, but now it's the map itself that's about to change under them. Don't you think there will be pressure to readjust those borders?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dugditches 7y agoInteresting to see how it impacted sunsets. To the point they theorize The Scream may have been influenced by it. Painting of the phenomenon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Houghton_71-1250_-_Krakatoa%2C_twilight_and_afterglow.jpg/1024px-Houghton_71-1250_-_Krakatoa%2C_twilight_and_afterglow.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Ho... Photo of 'recent' eruption: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/CSIRO_ScienceImage_605_Sunset_After_Mt_Pinatubo_Eruption_in_1991.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/CSIRO_Sc...
- jletts 7y agoHa I learned about this watching a recent episode of Doctor Who
- rye-neat 7y agoDrunk history (Frankenstein episode) for me.
- chrisco255 7y agoThomas 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." https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/eruption-mount-tambora https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/eru...
- robohoe 7y agoIt amazes me how many Founding Fathers were part-time scientists back in the day.
- mosselman 7y agoThis is probably what many of us would do if we weren't so easily distracted by digital apparatuses.
- Dumblydorr 7y agoMany of us could not be brilliant polymaths. Also, they did have wealth via slavery plantations that allowed them fancy tutors, expensive libraries, and top class educations.
- selectodude 7y agoAnd there was just simply a lot less to know.
- thrower123 7y agoIt's a little weird how this came right on the heels of the long slog of the Napoleonic wars. Similarly, that 1919 was the year of the Spanish Flu, and 1946-47 was an exceptionally harsh winter.
- lgeorget 7y agoAnd 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.
- NikkiA 7y ago1955 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)
- mjs33 7y agoFinally a real, cheap solution for climate change!!!
- thedrbrian 7y agoYou know I was thinking about that. Is there anyway we could use this phenomena to lower temps? Like have a large parasol like cloud moving over the globe reflecting sunlight.
- Jaruzel 7y agoHere you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160425-how-a-giant-space-umbrella-could-stop-global-warming https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160425-how-a-giant-spac...
- lm28469 7y agoI'm always amazed when people come up with these ideas, somehow thinking that colonising Mars or deploying something half the size of earth in space to shade us from the sun would be easier than just not fucking up the planet in the first place. Technology really is a new deity, it seems like if you believe in it hard enough you don't need to care about real life, logic or even common sense. It's "we'll have flying cars by 2000" level bullshit.
- dividedbyzero 7y agoIt 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.
- kaybe 7y agoSome problems with that: - 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.)
- kccqzy 7y agoWhile 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-56d222aeeee1b 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.
- elygre 7y agoThe Wikipedia article describes the link to Frankenstein et al, and how it came to be.
- exhilaration 7y agoThank you for the link to the Darkness poem, it's the first time I read it. And reading it now, it appears to be a direct inspiration for Asimov's Nightfall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_an...
- Thorentis 7y ago> 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- justin66 7y agoAnimals 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...)
- bonoboTP 7y agoThe butterfly effect in this case is that a small change (volcano not erupting) would cause a huge change in the future (no mass mechanized personal transport). Whether the insight is true is debatable, but it definitely is a butterfly effect compared to the standard popular view that technological development is somehow this inevitable thing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Retric 7y agoButterfly effect refers to a drastically smaller change than a massive volcanic eruption significantly impacting global weather. The point is differences that are hard to notice making a difference. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.[2] Wind speed of 2.56789281 MPH vs 2.567892811 MPH is hard to accurately detect, but it’s important. That’s the butterfly effect.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoThese kind of weather anomalies can’t happen anymore, since any change from the norm is immediately politicized and blamed on global warming, etc.
- magicroot75 7y agoCalling it a "Year without a Summer" is pretty hyperbolic. The temperature changes we're talking about here are 2-3C changes.
- dividedbyzero 7y agoLiving in central Europe, if we got actual f-ing snow in August over here, which they did back then, I'd definitely call that a year without summer.
- hwillis 7y agoThe places that called it that saw 10-20 F changes. You also have an inaccurate conception of how much temperature changes over the seasons; Summer in the northern hemisphere is only 6 C warmer than average. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season#/media/File%3ASurface_air_temperature_global.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season#/media/File%3ASurface...
- justlexi93 7y agoI love summer, it will always be my favorite season.
- droidist2 7y agoI like summer too, but I think because time has sped up so much I've adapted to preferring spring because it's an anticipation of summer.
- rabidrat 7y agoObligatory link to Rasputina's haunting song "1816, The Year Without a Summer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0zWSg9gHv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0zWSg9gHv8
- jiofih 7y agoThat’s... interesting. Singing from a history book interspersed by pop “heeey-yeah”s
- drenginian 7y agoWell we are in a future where there will be no more winters. Already where I live it’s getting crazy hot in the middle of winter.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- manojlds 7y agoRelated local account - When Madras froze over - https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/when-madras-froze-over/article7112961.ece https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/when-madras-froz...
- zelly 7y agoI 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.
- jiofih 7y agoFEMA probably has an underground potato farm half the size of the US being farmed at this very moment.
- nkrisc 7y agoAll potatoes grow underground.
- numtel 7y agoThis 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. https://www.rethinkx.com/press-release/2019/9/16/new-report-major-disruption-in-food-and-agriculture-in-next-decade https://www.rethinkx.com/press-release/2019/9/16/new-report-...
- finnjohnsen2 7y ago"Man made elimate change?! Weather was behaving erratic even back then"
- jgrantme 7y agoThere's a teriffic episode of 'The Memory Place' podcast about this, that's well worth a listen (10 mins): https://thememorypalace.us/2018/06/no-summer/ https://thememorypalace.us/2018/06/no-summer/
- V-2 7y agoIt 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/104871-lecture-english/ 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)
- mothsonasloth 7y agoWhen the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, then we will have a decade without Summer
- lkbm 7y agoIf 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. [0] https://allfed.info/ https://allfed.info/
- slynn12 7y agoIt's wild that sunsets would be impacted. This didn't totally make sense to me...
- doubleunplussed 7y agoSunsets look how they look because of light scattering off small particles in the air. The volcano presumably added more particulates, so it modified this.
- JeremyNT 7y agoThis 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Lake_Geneva_and_Frankenstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Lake_Geneva_and_F...