Weather Eye with John Maunder

Last week most parts of New Zealand experienced extremely cold temperatures with night time temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius being recorded in inland parts of North Otago and South Canterbury – only five degrees Celsius milder than NZ's lowest air temperature recorded at Eweburn in Ranfurly in Central Otago on July 17, 1905.

With these temperatures in mind, spare a few thoughts for those who lived in parts of the Northern Hemisphere in the summer of 1815 which had 'no summer”.

It was 1816 that was the year without a summer, caused by dust from volcano Mount Tambora in Indonesia shrouding the earth after it erupted in early-April 1815.

In Switzerland, the damp and dismal summer of 1816 led to the creation of a significant literary work.

A group of writers, including Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his future wife, challenged each other to write dark tales inspired by the gloomy and chilly weather.

During the miserable weather Mary Shelley wrote her classic novel ‘Frankenstein'.

The US Albany Advertiser went on to propose some theories about why the weather was so bizarre.

The mention of sunspots is interesting, as sunspots had been seen by astronomers.

And many people, to this day, wonder about what, if any effect, sunspots may have had on the weird weather.

What's also fascinating is the newspaper article from 1816 proposes such events be studied, so people can learn what is going on.

For example: 'Many seem disposed to charge the peculiarities of the season, the present year, upon the spots on the sun”.

'If the dryness of the season has in any measure depended on the latter cause, it has not operated uniformly in different places – the spots have been visible in Europe, as well as in the United States and yet in some parts of Europe, as we have already remarked, they have been drenched with rain”.

'Without undertaking to discuss, much less to decide, on such a learned subject as this, we should be glad if proper pains were taken to ascertain, by regular journals of the weather from year to year, the state of the seasons in this country and Europe, as well as the general state of health in both quarters of the globe”.

'We think the facts might be collected, and the comparison made, without much difficulty; and when once made, that it would be of great advantage to medical men, and medical science.”

And from Wood, Gillen D'Arcy. ‘1816, The Year without a Summer'. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, we read the following:

'To be alive in the years 1816-18, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. Across the globe during the so-called ‘Year without a Summer' – which was, in fact, a three-year climate crisis – harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains.

'Villagers in Vermont survived on hedgehogs and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.”

'Famine-friendly diseases cholera and typhus stalked the globe from India to Italy, while the price of bread and rice, the world's staple foods, skyrocketed with no relief in sight. Across a European continent devastated by the Napoleonic wars, tens of thousands of unemployed veterans found themselves unable to feed their families. They gave vent to their desperation in town square riots and military-style campaigns of arson, while governments everywhere feared revolution. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed ‘Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death' while Germans called 1817 ‘The Year of the Beggar'.

'In the scientific literature, the 1816's cold summer was the most significant meteorological event of the nineteenth century. The global climate emergency period of 1816-18, as a whole, offers us a clear window onto a world convulsed by weather anomalies, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in weather patterns, and to a consequent tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation and unrest.”

For further information on a range of climate topics, see: https://sites.google.com/site/climatediceandthebutterfly/