
1816, the Year without a Summer - ilamont
http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=gillen-darcy-wood-1816-the-year-without-a-summer
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StClaire
As an aside, I've always wanted to read a this book on the cultural origins of
Frankenstein. The shift in climate, advances in medicine and science, the
decline in alchemy, treatment of women, etc. I've read a lot of different
works but I've never seen it all in one place.

Can anyone recommend a title?

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supertrope
On the science angle for those unfamiliar:

Luigi Galvani investigated the connection between living creatures and
electricity. Earlier scientists had observed that static electricity and
lightning were the same phenomenon. Galvani made frog legs twitch by applying
two dissimilar metals. He came to the conclusion that animals generate
electricity conducted by the metals. Alessandro Volta believed the opposite
causation: that the setup generated the electricity and the legs reacted.
Volta invented the battery after experimenting with various elements as the
metals. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini carried on his work and even
experimented on the body of a condemned prisoner.

I had always thought the rise of Frankenstein's monster was a hilariously
nonsensical application of the literary device of extending scientific
explanations of natural phenomenon into magic (e.g. endless potential of
atomic everything in the 50s, electric disturbances in ghost movies, reversing
the polarity, quantum mechanics, genetic engineering, endless applications for
graphene). We all know that lightning kills and injures. But it's not such a
random jump between hearing of a corpse flinching, making a fist, and opening
an eye (Aldini); and writing a horror story about a crazed scientist reversing
death.

Funnily enough it turns out that all living things do generate electricity
through pumping out sodium ions and pumping in potassium ions, creating a
voltage across their cell membranes. But nowhere near enough to be observable
on a macro scale.

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dang
Also [http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/15/frankenstein-the-
ba...](http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/15/frankenstein-the-baroness-and-
the-climate-refugees-of-1816/) via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11962839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11962839).

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c3534l
Only tangentially related, but "1816, the Year without a Summer" is one of my
favorite Rasputina songs. It's legitimately just an explanation of 1816.

~~~
fishcake
I've never heard that before. i will have to search for it!

~~~
stevekemp
You can hear it here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxeXHMHOcqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxeXHMHOcqQ)

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AncoraImparo
If we faced this crisis again, what would be different?

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xenadu02
1\. Far fewer people subsistence farm so they're not one bad harvest away from
famine 2\. Not all areas would have complete crop failure; IIRC in 1816
"America's Breadbasket" (such as it was at that time) had a relatively easier
time of it 3\. We have a much better system of distributing information now
and easy ways to transport seeds/cuttings. We could probably replace some of
the lost crops with alternatives that were cold-tolerant or needed less
sunlight if we knew what was coming. In 1816 even if you had a cold-tolerant
grain variety there were fewer avenues to inform farmers and get them the
seeds. 4\. We also understand how to grow mushrooms at scale and farm fish at
scale. 5\. We have industrial processes. The capability to synthesize food
here is probably far less than people assume (a lot of feedstock comes from
the food industry) but it would help some. 6\. We have TBMs capable of
creating a vast network of underground tunnels where it would stay warmer and
avoid freezing; doing this by hand would take many years. 7\. In a worst-case
scenario where billions would be expected to die: we can say "fuck it" and
build a vast array of nuclear power plants to provide artificial light in
tunnel or vertical farm operations. This would normally be a huge waste of
resources when sunlight is plentiful. 8\. We have satellites and much better
weather forecasting abilities, plus a reasonable understanding of vulcanism.
Unlike 1815 if we saw an eruption like this today we would know that the next
few summers were going to be cold and crops would be at risk. We could
immediately begin canning and preserving the huge quantities of food that
normally get thrown out, used as cattle feed, processed into ethanol, etc.

There wouldn't be a silver bullet. We'd need a combination of techniques and
less developed countries would probably bear the brunt of the suffering.

It is also possible the huge and growing moron class would buy food and throw
it away just to thumb their nose at "da gubbmit fer tryin' to tell meh what
tado", and politicians would claim the jury is still out on this "climate"
stuff, then we end up with a global catastrophe despite possessing the
resources to prevent it. After all: we are perfectly capable of feeding
everyone alive right now but we don't, not even in a first-world country like
the USA.

~~~
extrapickles
We also have a staggering amount of food already canned/frozen or grown in
greenhouses just to make sure staple foods are available year-round.

Thanks to plastic, greenhouses are cheap and easy to make, so even poorer
countries would fare reasonably well. What is harder to predict is how well
greenhouses already in colder climates would fare.

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sgt101
Great pod cast on this :
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b077j4yv](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b077j4yv)

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greenmango333
Wow c3534l, This is also one of my favorite Rasputina songs.

