Accounts from 1816 - The Year Without Summer

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This is merely a continuation of the piece below, as I promised on Twitter this will be solely based on the writings and diaries of people who lived through the Year Without a Summer, in 1816. The intention of this one, among other things, is to trace parallels between last year’s volcanic activity, and our current erratic weather.

The Year Without a Summer 2

Of course, this didn’t start merely with the volcanoes spewing ash, but the massive 2020 global lockdown. Nature is the most adaptable and best example of the non-linear dynamics of a complex system, and any cursory reading would tell you the same. Closing the entire planet and its industry for weeks would have consequences on the global climate and weather. Never let a crisis go to waste, and they didn’t and are now pushing the climate bs.

There was Thunder at intervals, and Showers of rain almost incessant through the whole day… I attempted a walk; but was twice overtaken with Showers ingoing to Ealing Church and returning.

Hannah Dawes Newcomb, who endured the freezing summer weather with her family in Keene, New Hampshire, kept a diary with short daily reports on her everyday life.

May, 1816

13 – Cold but pleasant.

14 – Cold weather.

15 – Very cold.

16 – The weather remains very cold.

17 – Very cold, have to keep a large fire in the parlor to keep comfortable.

18 – Very hard frost last night, very cold this morning.

19 – Very cold for the season.

July 6 – “Weather continues very cold – all nature appears encircled in gloom – Grass very thin.  Corn so backward it does not appear probably there will be food sufficient for man or Beast.  Our only hope arises from the promise of seed time and Harvest.  We daily keep fire in the parlor.”

Source of the captures below.

The image below from the same article is of major importance. While the dynamics are relatively different, the dynamics remain similar given the current circumstances playing around the globe. The supply chain, the loss of yield because of fertilizer prices, and erratic weather (my main argument) will influence entire populations to adopt similar behaviors.

I believe this is at play again, but not at a large scale as 1816

In the year 1816 there was a sudden change in the weather throughout Europe. On January 8, 1816, a blowing snow was recorded in Vienna, accompanied by thunder and lightning83. Another phenomenon was the sudden change in temperature that caused warming in some parts of Russia84. A storm on January 29/30, 1816 brought a large amount of snow to Hungary, which killed cattle and sheep sent to the grazing in pastures85. On the same two days, a snowstorm in the Hungarian town of Orosháza harmed the cattle. Many peasants partially or completely lost their flocks of sheep: one shepherd was left with 24 sheep out of 540, another one with 12 out of 600, and another lost all 400. A tenant lost 400 oxen out of 900. In the same locality three shepherds froze to death in the fields. In Arad County, 25 shepherds and 50 horses perished during the storm86. The Viennese authorities estimated the number of frozen livestock (especially sheep) to be in the thousands, and the number of people in the hundreds in Transylvania

In the village of Săcălaz [Szakálház / Sackelhausen] in the Banat, the storm began on Sunday evening, from midnight, “with cold, and snow, and held all night until Monday morning at 9 o’clock. The rain, snow, wind and frost continued until Tuesday morning, so you could not leave the house and go outside. After this, many dead cattle could be found, sitting upright in the ice, and many shepherds killed by the cold” (Source)

The source for many of the quotes below is the book The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History by William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman. Highly recommend it. Short and very good.

FROM TERAMO IN central Italy, near the Adriatic coast, came reports in late December 1815 of “the heaviest snow ever known in that country.” “over a six-hour period a greater quantity of snow fell than has been known in the memory of man.”

Among those who concurred were French historian and philosopher Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf (who renamed himself the Comte de Volney). After traveling through the United States in 1795–98, Volney attributed the perceived climate change in North America to deforestation. To support his theory, he quoted an early history of Vermont, which claimed that conditions “in the cultivated part of the country” had changed dramatically since English settlers first arrived in New England: “The seasons are different, the weather more variable, the winter become shorter, and interrupted by great and sudden thaws. Spring is a scene of continual vicissitude … Summer is not so hot, but it lasts longer. Autumn is most tardy in beginning and ending … nor does winter become settled and severe before the end of December.”

Nonsense, countered William Dunbar, a Scottish-born scientist who had emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1771. Dunbar, who frequently exchanged meteorological observations with Jefferson, claimed that deforestation actually made summers and winters more extreme. “I would enquire,” he wrote in an article published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, “whether a partial clearing extending 30 or 40 miles square, may not be expected to produce a contrary effect by admitting with full liberty, the sunbeams upon the discovered surface of the earth in summer…

I guess the misguided concept of man affecting climate to such an extent (more than nature itself) is centuries old… My point here is not that deforestation doesn’t have an impact on climate, it clearly does, but that single events can have a much broader, significant impact and cause global change, than man-made ones. It is much easier to argue that man's impact on climate is slow enough so nature adapts to it and brings the necessary changes to reach equilibrium.
The following paragraph is rather…illuminating.

Yet a high price for wheat wrought great hardship on the urban working classes. In normal times, a poor laboring family might spend half its meager income on food, primarily bread. When harvests failed or other disasters caused the price of grain to rise, workers found themselves hard-pressed to purchase enough food to survive, never mind spending on clothes or other manufactured goods. The same logic dampened the spending of middle-class consumers as well, which exacerbated the trade recession.

The New York Evening Post blamed the frigid temperatures on “the unusual long spell of cold westerly winds which have prevailed since the spring set in.… Vegetation at this season of the year was never more backward.”

On May 14, the cold wave struck crops in Virginia (the National Register reported frost in the vicinity of Richmond), and by one account reached as far south as Tennessee, ruining substantial quantities of cotton. The severe cold exacerbated the effects of a prolonged drought throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern states, a highly unusual occurrence at that time of year

“When the last of May arrived,” wrote a Maine chronicler, “everything had been killed by the cold,” although not much had been planted anyway. “The whole of the month has been so cold and wet,” complained New Hampshire farmer Adino Brackett, “that wheat could not be sown ’til late and then the ground could not be well prepared.” “Everybody complains of the present ‘strange weather; this unnatural weather; this unseasonable weather,’” noted the Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] Democratic Republican. Spring was “at least a month later than usual.”

At Bennington, a farmer named Benjamin Harwood noted in his diary that “it had rained much during the night and this morning [June 6] the wind blew exceedingly high from NE, raining copiously, chilling and sharp gusts.” It began to snow about 8 A.M., and continued desultorily until early afternoon until about an inch and a half lay on the ground. By the time it was done, “the heads of all the mountains on every side were crowned with snow,” and five of his family’s sheep had been lost in the storm. It was, Harwood concluded, “the most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen.”

Following the tumultuous “Bread or Blood” riots in East Anglia in May, protests during June and July remained remarkably wellmannered, despite the steadily rising price of grain and what William Cobbett called “the miserable state of things in England.”

As in the United States, reliable historical temperature records were scarce, and so The Times, too, resorted to comparisons through anecdotal evidence: “Such an inclement summer,” it ventured, “is scarcely remembered by the oldest inhabitant of London or its environs.” And on the Corn Exchange in London, the price of wheat continued to rise due to “the quantity of fine Wheat at market being small, and the weather continuing unsettled.” From Sweden to northern Italy, and Switzerland to Spain, great rain-bearing clouds seemed to darken the skies every day. “Melancholy accounts have been received from all parts of the Continent of the unusual wetness of the season,” mourned the Norfolk Chronicle; “property in consequence swept away by inundation, and irretrievable injuries done to the vine yards and corn crops.”

To make my point clear.

Violent Floods Sweep Away Cows in Australia, Upending Supplies

• Beef processors already face labor shortages and poor margins

• Cattle have been found in odd places after being washed away

Australian flooding kills 500,000 cattle

Brazil – Santa Catarina Floods and Rain Leave 3 Dead, 7,500 Displaced

At least 3 people have died and thousands have been displaced after days of heavy rain in southern Brazil caused flooding and landslides in parts of Santa Catarina state.

I could spend hours cataloging all the natural events erratic in nature, this isn’t solely based on X or Y, it is literally a complex system issue, but the result remains the same, given the current trends that I cover extensively on the Beyond Mathematical Odds and the unreliable nature of the weather (in my opinion partially because of volcanic activity last year and the lockdown in 2020 + other long term trends) there is a massive change in natural system happening right now.

Come hell or high water, food security is severely compromised globally, compounded by all current events, the loss of yield by drought and minimal fertilizer usage, and industrial farming removing all the minerals and resources from the soil. Very few countries will be able to handle these impending difficult times without internal strife.

The parallels are very similar to 1816 and the years after, even if we take into account different dynamics.

Deep appreciation for all the supporters!