
Year Without a Summer - EndXA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
======
chrisco255
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."

[https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-
collections/eru...](https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-
collections/eruption-mount-tambora)

~~~
robohoe
It amazes me how many Founding Fathers were part-time scientists back in the
day.

~~~
mosselman
This is probably what many of us would do if we weren't so easily distracted
by digital apparatuses.

~~~
Dumblydorr
Many 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
And there was just simply a lot less to know.

~~~
biztos
There may be more that is knowable now than back then, but I doubt you or I
actually know more than an educated person back then. We just know different
stuff.

~~~
mosselman
> There may be more that is knowable now than back then

That is not true. I guess you mean in the sense that our horizons have
broadened because we have access to so much more information than people used
to have, but in terms of things that can be known, nothing has changed. The
facts of the universe are the same as they ever were.

~~~
kazga
That's trivially false by looking at the field of history.

------
Thorentis
> 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.

~~~
zwegner
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.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_\(TV_series\))

~~~
simonh
Connections is a fantastic series, it's a lot of fun and I loved it as a
child.

My concerns about it is that too many people seem to imagine that because
historically an outcome had a cause, that therefore that cause must have been
necessary, and that therefore the outcome could never have happened without
that specific cause. If they Fluyt, a type of Dutch cargo ship had not been
invented, would we really have never developed plastics? So the series
provides a very valuable insight into historical processes, but some people
seem to take that to implausible extremes. A case in point is the many
examples of technologies being independently developed by different people
under very different circumstances.

~~~
celticninja
Not so much necessary as it was a driving force. A bit like evolution,
whatever caused our ancestors to develop eyes wasn't s necessary precursor,it
was just something that was reacted too. There resulting solution being good
enough to survive. There were many implementations of bicycles that never made
it, those branches of development died off. However unlike evolution we can
pick those up again and improve on them if we thought we could produce a
better bicycle

------
kccqzy
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...](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness-56d222aeeee1b)
) 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
The Wikipedia article describes the link to Frankenstein et al, and how it
came to be.

------
dugditches
Interesting 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/Ho...](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)

Photo of 'recent' eruption:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/CSIRO_Sc...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/CSIRO_ScienceImage_605_Sunset_After_Mt_Pinatubo_Eruption_in_1991.jpg)

~~~
airstrike
Apparently one other eruption might have contributed to the French Revolution
(!!)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki#Consequences_in_Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki#Consequences_in_Europe)

------
soared
Going through the similar events sections shows that massive volcanic eruption
-> famine -> political unrest has happened multiple times throughout history!

~~~
smacktoward
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.

~~~
postingawayonhn
Isn'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
Canning, dehydrating, pickling, curing, making alcohol...

~~~
VBprogrammer
Also, 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.

------
EndXA
Summary 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..."

------
JeremyNT
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._

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Lake_Geneva_and_F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Lake_Geneva_and_Frankenstein)

------
mothsonasloth
When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, then we will have a decade without
Summer

~~~
lkbm
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.

[0] [https://allfed.info/](https://allfed.info/)

------
zelly
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.

~~~
jiofih
FEMA probably has an underground potato farm half the size of the US being
farmed at this very moment.

~~~
nkrisc
All potatoes grow underground.

------
jletts
Ha I learned about this watching a recent episode of Doctor Who

~~~
rye-neat
Drunk history (Frankenstein episode) for me.

------
thrower123
It'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.

~~~
NikkiA
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)

------
jgrantme
There'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/)

------
manojlds
Related local account - When Madras froze over -
[https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/when-madras-
froz...](https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/when-madras-froze-
over/article7112961.ece)

------
V-2
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/...](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/104871-lecture-
english/) \- 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)

------
jvm___
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.

~~~
thombat
Almanzo was born over 40 years after this "year without a summer" \- does
"Farmer Boy" actually mention it, or is it another bad summer?

------
cryptoz
Related question: Are there places recently that have gone a year without
winter, due to climate change?

~~~
mikkom
In Helsinki/Finland there has been no snow during this winter - snowless
winter has never happened before here.

It's like october continuing whole winter and it's raining all the time.

~~~
Gupie
Why is this and other similar comments being down voted, are they factually
incorrect?

~~~
jve
Check facts yourself.

Feb 2020, max 12, min -8, avg +3
[https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/latvia/riga/historic?mon...](https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/latvia/riga/historic?month=2&year=2020)

Feb 2019, max 12, min -10, avg +1. Yeah, was a crappy winter too but nothing
like this year. We could had snow with kids ocassionaly.

Feb 2018 max +2, min -21, avg -7...

~~~
Gupie
Was a rhetorical question.

------
slynn12
It's wild that sunsets would be impacted. This didn't totally make sense to
me...

~~~
doubleunplussed
Sunsets look how they look because of light scattering off small particles in
the air. The volcano presumably added more particulates, so it modified this.

------
rabidrat
Obligatory 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
That’s... interesting. Singing from a history book interspersed by pop “heeey-
yeah”s

------
mjs33
Finally a real, cheap solution for climate change!!!

~~~
kaybe
Some 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.)

~~~
hwillis
As always, also worth noting that this is literally acid rain. Putting it in
the stratosphere is intended to lessen the amount of acid rain per warming
averted, but it's still the exact same chemicals that caused acid rain. There
are very good reasons we removed sulfur from gasoline.

Acid rain is probably better than global warming, assuming it doesnt literally
kill the ocean. Its good that we have a potential backstop- we could
definitely halt warming in a very short time and it _might_ not kill all life.
We can even produce the necessary sulfur for a short while. Or like, we could
stop warming without dumping incredible amounts of acid in the air we breathe.

~~~
kaybe
> we could definitely halt warming in a very short time

The limit estimated (from models) here [0] is a decrease of -2 W/m^2 at most.

The IPCC scenarios are equivalent with a number of plausible energy imbalances
by the end of the century, ranging for 2.6 W/m^2 (RCP 2.6) in the best and 8.5
W/m^2 (RCP 8.5) in the worst case. [1]

So even in the best case it might very possibly not be enough to halt
everything. Maybe it can buy us some time, but I think the only viable path
forward is to stop as soon as possible and then carbon-capture it back.

(See also this graphic [2] for possible pathways to stay below 1.5°C warming,
_all_ of which include carbon capture, up to half of current emissions
starting in 10 years (in the best case by land-use changes, in all others by
actively removing the carbon).)

[0] [https://d-nb.info/1160958696/34](https://d-nb.info/1160958696/34)

[1]
[https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-1/](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-1/)

[2]
[https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3b.png)

------
BelleOfTheBall
Okay, 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
My 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-
yea...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/73585/15-facts-about-year-without-
summer)

~~~
consultutah
Mo or exmo? I only learned of this while becoming an exmo..

~~~
supportlocal4h
"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.

------
justlexi93
I love summer, it will always be my favorite season.

~~~
droidist2
I 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.

------
finnjohnsen2
"Man made elimate change?! Weather was behaving erratic even back then"

------
drenginian
Well 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.

------
magicroot75
Calling it a "Year without a Summer" is pretty hyperbolic. The temperature
changes we're talking about here are 2-3C changes.

~~~
hwillis
The 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...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season#/media/File%3ASurface_air_temperature_global.jpg)

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
These kind of weather anomalies can’t happen anymore, since any change from
the norm is immediately politicized and blamed on global warming, etc.

