How out of touch is Obama and did he incite hate?

Although I have a lot of respect for the former President of the USA, I do feel he has lost touch with reality somewhat.

I was very annoyed after Barack Obama’s speech at the Cop 26 in Glasgow. As a man with influence he has to measure his words, because they can be taken out of context and lead to dire consequences. Also he should not assume things, there is a saying ‘When you assume you make an ass out of u and me.

In a world where people do no longer listen to or read full stories, it is dangerous when you use words which evoke emotions. Because nowadays people are only interested in headlines and sound bites.

I will not post the whole speech but I will have a link of the transcript at the bottom of the blog. Here are the things he said which annoyed me and what I believe can be seen as inciting hatred.

“So to all the young people out there, as well as those of you who consider yourselves young at heart, I want you to stay angry. I want you to stay frustrated, but channel that anger, harness that frustration, keep pushing harder and harder, for more and more because that’s what’s required to meet this challenge. Gird yourself for a marathon, not a sprint, for solving a problem this big, this complex and this important has never happened all at once. Since we’re in the Emerald Isles here, let me quote the bard, William Shakespeare, “What wound,” he writes, “did ever heal but by degrees.”

Prior to that he said “Folks in my generation have not done enough to deal with a potentially cataclysmic problem that you now stand in here.”

I know, but I sincerely hope I am wrong, there will be people who will see this as a call of channeling that anger towards what Obama calls ‘folks from his generation’ I happen to be a member of that generation.

Obama did not consider the fact there is a militant element to these climate activists. Their is a highly potential chance that they see this as a call and a blessing to take violent action to those who Obama claims to be responsible, or at least has created that narrative.

Then there are many ‘folks of his generation’ who have done more for the environment than the current eco warriors have done or will ever do. They are the people who didn’t have to be chauffeured every where , they took the bus, bicycle or walked. They didn’t fly everywhere either, they had to save for months and months to perhaps go on a flight once every few years. We did not use plastic bottles but glass and would return them for recycling.

Every time when I pass by a site where these ‘new generation of eco warriors’ protested about the climate crisis, I am astounded by the rubbish they leave behind. Folks of Obama’s generation were taught to pick up after themselves. We did not have or want all the newest gadgets or wanted to replace them every few months.

We did not leave a TV on all day, we did not leave on a light for longer then needed. Even now we only put on a heating when it is absolutely necessary. The list is endless but I hope you get what I mean

So when Obama is talking about folks of his generation who is he talking about? The same Obama who flew to Glasgow where he could have done an on line speech. Mr. Obama also seems to forget that he was the most powerful men on earth for 8 years, and aside from signing a few agreements he did very little about climate change.

When you tell one group to be angry and put the blame on another group, you open up a Pandora box ,aside from that it is a form of fascism. I am not a fan of Trump, far from it, I hate everything the man stands for, but if he would have said those same words there would be a global outrage.

One last thing, I recently saw a documentary about Cobalt mining in the Congo. It was truly awful, deformed babies being born, young men dying, deforestation, depleting minerals all so we can drive electric cars to safe the planet. I never saw any of these eco warriors in Congo.

This is your chance Ms. Thunberg, Mr. Obama, Mr. Gore have a balanced approach and go to the Congo and other places where Cobalt mining is happening just so that we can ‘safe’ the planet. Go there rather then go to luxurious resorts where they have Climate conferences.

Barack Obama COP26 Climate Speech Transcript

1920 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak

For the last few years we have heard a lot about climate change, and only a fool would deny climate change.

However climate change is nothing new. We only started collecting global climate data since 1880, but our planet has been around for about 4.5 billion years. There have been a great number of climate changes during that time.

28 March 1920 was a Palm Sunday, as it is today. The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1920 was an outbreak of at least 37 tornadoes, 31 of which were significant, across the Midwest and Deep South states on March 28, 1920. The tornadoes resulted in fatalities of at least 153 but some reports put that figure at at least 380. There were also at least 1,215 injured.

The majority of the fatalities occurred in Georgia (201+), Indiana (56), and Ohio (55), while the other states had lesser totals.

Severe thunderstorms developed in Missouri during the early morning hours. The storms moved rapidly to the northeast towards Chicago, Illinois. The first tornado injured five people southeast of Springfield, Missouri in the pre-dawn hours in Douglas County. This first twister was a precursor of things to come, as the morning went on and the atmosphere began to destabilize, due to the abundance of sunshine that preceded the cold front in the dry slot area, which covered the lower Great Lakes region, extending southward well past the Ohio River Valley.

Newspaper accounts and weather records documented over 38 storms of major significance; therefor , the number of actual tornadoes is probably much higher, especially when the U.S. Weather Bureau (National Weather Service) prior to 1916 did not conduct any aerial/damage surveys, nor was there any education or awareness campaign for the public to properly report them.

Throughout the years we have heard many predictions on how many years we have left before the damage becomes irreversible, These prediction actually go back for decades.

Here is what I fear though , there are many good willing crusaders who are active in trying to safe the planet. Greta Thunberg , for example, but they don’t always back their activism up with science, It is often driven by emotions and not actual facts. There is a danger when we give people like a teenage girl a platform to pursue an agenda, which is sometimes dictated by others.

It is also dangerous when when we have billionaires, like Gunhild Stordalen, flying scientists all over the world in order to proof a point, not realizing that by doing so they actual lose the point and give more fuel to conspiracy theorists.

Science should be backed up by scientific facts and not by emotional driven opinions, although it may be well meant it can and will cause more harm then good.

We have to look for better alternatives then fossil fuel, but this also needs to be backed up by solid scientific data. However why we still use oil to heat our homes and move our transport is beyond me. There should have been an alternative for this a long time ago and not even for the benefit for the climate. Oil is an economic commodity and has often been used as a political weapon.

sources

380 Americans killed in Palm Sunday tornado outbreak 100 years ago this hour #OnThisDay #OTD (Mar 28 1920)

https://www.wfft.com/content/news/100th-Anniversary-of-the-Destructive-Palm-Sunday-Tornado-Outbreak-569181181.html

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-03-26-0703260190-story.html

https://www.weather.gov/iwx/19200328_tornado_outbreak

The 535-536 AD climate change and the famine.

In the years 535 and 536, several remarkable aberrations in world climate took place. They were the most severe and protracted short-term episodes of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2 Millennia.

Including bizarrely low-temperatures, with snow fall during the summer months in some locations; widespread crop-failures and famine; greatly decreased levels of sunlight; and also causing geopolitical problems.

While it’s currently believed that the event was caused by an extensive atmospheric dust veil formed either, due to  a large volcanic eruption in the tropics, or the disintegration of a large amount of space-debris in the upper atmosphere, it is still unclear.Evidence does point towards the volcanic explanation though — owing to the presence of substantial sulfate deposits in glaciers around the world corresponding to the years in question.

There is some documented evidence from the time.

The Gaelic Irish Annals record the following:

“A failure of bread in the year 536 AD” – the Annals of Ulster
“A failure of bread from the years 536–539 AD” – the Annals of Inisfallen”

Further phenomena were reported by a number of independent contemporary sources:

Low temperatures, even snow during the summer (snow reportedly fell in August in China during the Northern and Southern dynasties, which caused the harvest there to be delayed) Crop failures
“A dense, dry fog” in the Middle East, China and Europe
Drought in Peru, which affected the Moche culture”

It caused famine in Ireland but also in other countries around the world.

Tree-ring analysis work done by the dendrochronologist Mike Baillie — of the Queen’s University of Belfast — has shown that there was “abnormally” low growth in Irish oaks in the 536 growing season. This was followed by a partial recovery and then another drop in growth in 542.

Tree-ring analysis of tree-stands in Sweden, Finland, California, and Chile, all confirm these findings.

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Black Monday- April 13 1360

You often hear the term ‘the coldest winter,or hottest summer on record etc’ but the oldest ongoing instrumental record of temperature in the world is the Central England Temperature record, started in 1659.

Although I am not disputing the climate change, the fact is there have been climate changes  or freak weather events ever since the world has existed.

On Easter Monday, 13th April 1360, a freak hail storm broke over English troops as they were preparing for battle with the French during the Hundred Years’ War. So brutal was the storm that over 1,000 men and 6,000 horses lost their lives that night. Convinced it was a sign from God, King Edward rushed to pursue peace with the French, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War.

In April 1360, Edward’s forces burned the Paris suburbs and began to move toward Chartres. While they were camped outside the town, a sudden storm materialized. Lightning struck, killing several people, and hailstones began pelting the soldiers, scattering the horses. One described it as “a foul day, full of myst and hayle, so that men dyed on horseback .” Two of the English leaders were killed and panic set in among the troops, who had no shelter from the storm.

French friar Jean de Venette credited the apocalyptic storm as the result of the English looting of the French countryside during the observant week of Lent.

On May 8, 1360, three weeks later, the Treaty of Brétigny was signed, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War.

The legacy was mentioned in Shakespearean work:

“It was not for nothing that my nose fell a- bleeding on Black Monday last, at six o’clock i’ the morning.” —Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, ii. 5.

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The other impact of 9/11

I was struggling to come up with an appropriate title ,this is the best I could come up with. In this blog I am not looking at the obvious impact of that awful day but to the impact it had on the entertainment industry and also how we looked at different aspects of climate change.

The entertainment industry.

There were many TV shows and movies affected by the attacks but I am only highlighting the aftermath of 9/11 on the 2 most popular shows at the time.

The Sopranos

Definitely in my top 3 of all time favourite TV shows, it really raised the bar for other shows coming after it.

I only started watching the show on box sets several years after it aired. For the first 3 season it had the World Trade Center in the opening credits. Where Tony Soprano catches a  quick glimpse of the buildings in the rear view mirror of his car.However in season 4 that sequence has been removed and changed.

Friends

Although I never really got the show and why so many people were so fascinated by it, I do realize it is the most popular sitcom to have ever aired on a global scale.

In episode 3 of season 8, titled ‘The One Where Rachel Tells Ross”  which was filmed before the attacks. The original script included scenes where Chandler made fun of airport security and Monica seemed to issue terrorist commands to Joey and Phoebe by phone. The episode was supposed to be aired 2 weeks after the attack. The subplot was changed to Monica and Chandler newlywed privileges.

Climate Change

Global Dimming

One of the definitions of Global Dimming It is a phenomenon that happens due to reduction in the solar rays falling on the earth’s surface. The residues and particulates such as sulfur dioxide, ash, soot (black carbon), that are produced after combustion of fossil fuels cause global dimming .

I am not a climate expert but the way I understand it Global Dimming is the opposite of Global Warming.

Although the term Global Dimming had been branded about since the 1950’s,it was after the attacks where a more serious look was taken at the phenomenon.

Dr David Travis of University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, was on his way to work on September 12 2001, about 800 miles west of New York. He looked at the skies and noticed they appeared to be bluer  and much clearer then before.

For 15 years Dr Travis had been doing research on this  apparently obscure topic, on the effect of  vapour trails left by aircraft  and if they were having a significant effect on the climate. Because of all flights being grounded in the US directly after the attacks, Travis finally had a chance to find out.  During the period, an increase in diurnal temperature variation of over 1 °C (1.8 °F) was observed in some parts of the U.S.The 1 degree Celsius reduction in temperature is may not mean anything for a common man, but scientific records show that this sort of abrupt reduction in temperature can have adverse effects in the future.

Ironically this opportunity to study the effects of the contrails was one of the few positives to come from the 9/11 attacks.

 

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Sources

BBC

HBO

Friends

Help Save Nature

The 27 Minutes global warming event.

To be honest the ‘global’ in the title might be a slight exaggeration but it was a freaky weather event nonetheless in fact the freakiest weather event.

Imagine bundling up to get the newspaper on an early morning at 7:30 a.m. with the temperature at a frigid -4 degrees.(−20°C).

Just two minutes later as you are letting your dog out to stretch his paws on the lawn, you notice that the frigid air you walked out the door into is not so frigid anymore. You look at your thermometer and the temperature has shot up to 45 degrees.

Spearfish holds the world record for the fastest recorded temperature change. On January 22, 1943 at about 7:30 a.m. MST, the temperature in Spearfish was −4°F(−20°C).

Which an investigator concluded was “the result of the wavering motion of a pronounced quasi-stationary front separating Continental Arctic air from Maritime Polar air”, possibly contributed to by a chinook wind. After peaking at 54 °F at 9:00 am, the temperature was back at 4 below zero by 9:27. At Rapid City, temperatures rose from 5° to 54° in twenty minutes (9:20am – 9:40am), so rapidly that buildings were experiencing winter on one side and spring around the corner.

The Chinook wind picked up speed rapidly, and two minutes later (7:32 a.m.) the temperature was +45 °F (+7 °C) above zero. The 49 °F or 27 °C rise in two minutes set a world record that still holds. By 9:00 a.m., the temperature had risen to 54 °F (12 °C). Suddenly, the Chinook died down and the temperature tumbled back to −4 °F or −20 °C. The 58 °F or 32.2 °C drop took only 27 minutes.

The sudden change in temperatures caused glass windows to crack and windshields to instantly frost over.

Extreme winter maxima in the district are remarkably warm for its latitude and on January 19, 1921 Spearfish reached a remarkable 79 °F or 26.1 °C, not only the hottest January temperature in South Dakota on record,but almost certainly the hottest temperature recorded in or near mid-winter anywhere so far from the equator.

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Oíche na Gaoithe Móire-The Night of the Big Wind

I do believe there is a climate change, but I am just not completely convinced how much of this is really man made. There have been climate changes throughout the history of the planet and some much more severe then the current one.

The Night of the Big Wind (Irish: Oíche na Gaoithe Móire) was a powerful European windstorm that swept across Ireland beginning in the afternoon of 6 January 1839, causing severe damage to property and several hundred deaths; 20% to 25% of houses in north Dublin were damaged or destroyed, and 42 ships were wrecked.^[1] The storm attained a very low barometric pressure of 918mbars and tracked eastwards to the north of Ireland, with gusts of over 100 knots (185 km/h; 115 mph), before moving across the north of England to continental Europe, where it eventually dissipated. At the time, it was the worst storm to hit Ireland for 300 years0

The storm developed in the mid-Atlantic region early on January 6, 1839, but really intensified as its associated depression moved up along the northwest coast later in the night, bringing death and destruction to the whole island.

The calm before the Big Wind struck was particularly eerie. Most of the eight million people living in Ireland at the time were preparing themselves for Little Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany.

The previous day had seen the first snowfall of the year; heavy enough for some to build snowmen. By contrast, Sunday morning was unusually warm, almost clammy, and yet the air was so still that, along the west coast, voices could be heard floating on the air between houses more than a mile apart.

At approximately 3pm, the rain began to fall and the wind picked up. Nobody could possibly have predicted that those first soft raindrops signified an advance assault from the most terrifying hurricane in human memory.

By 6pm, the winds had become strong and the raindrops were heavier, sleet-like, with occasional bursts of hail. Farmers grimaced as their hay-ricks and thatched roofs took a pounding. In the towns and villages, fires flickered and doors slammed. Church bells chimed and dogs began to whine. Fishermen turned their ears west; a distant, increasingly loud rumble could be heard upon the frothy horizon.

Some people claimed the temperature reached as high as 23°C(75°F) . and the heavy snow of January 5 totally melted.

During the daytime on January 6, however, a deep Atlantic low-pressure system began moving across Ireland where it collided with the warm front.

The first news of bad weather was reported in County Mayo when the steeple at the Church of Ireland in Castlebar was blown down.

 As the evening went on, the winds began to howl and soon reached hurricane force.

The arrival of the hurricane force winds would never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.

The Dublin Evening Post described its arrival with the following: “about half past ten it rose into a high gale, which continued to increase in fury until after midnight when it blew a most fearful and destructive tempest.”

In Dublin, crowds flocked to the old Parliament House in College Green to hide under the portico, believing it one of the few places strong enough to withstand the storm.

As the wind grew stronger, it began to rip the roofs off houses. Chimney pots, broken slates, sheets of lead and shards of glass were hurtled to the ground. Rather astonishingly, someone later produced a statistic that 4,846 chimneys were knocked off their perches during the Night of the Big Wind.

Many of those who died that night were killed by falling masonry. Norman tower houses and old churches collapsed. Factories and barracks were destroyed. Fires erupted in the streets of Castlebar, Athlone and Dublin.

The wind blew all the water out of the canal at Tuam.

The historic legacy of the storm is such that it is still referred to in the press today.

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December 18 1944-Fighting the unknown enemy.

If you’d to believe the media nowadays you would think that severe storms are a 21st century phenomena. However they have been around for quite a while.

On 18 Dec 1944, divine intervention interfered with human action again. Admiral William Halsey and his Task Force 38 were caught unaware amidst refueling when Typhoon Cobra struck them to the east of island of Luzon of the Philippines. Halsey’s weather experts misread the track of this impending storm, and the admiral sailed right into it. As the heavy swells caused by 60-knot winds tossed his ships like children’s toys, Halsey’s ships scattered over 3,000 square miles. By the time he issued a typhoon warning to his captains, he had already lost three destroyers Spence, Hull, and Monaghan.

 

Task Force 38 (TF 38) had been operating about 300 mi (260 nmi; 480 km) east of Luzon in the Philippine Sea, conducting air raids against Japanese airfields in the Philippines. The fleet was attempting to refuel its ships, especially the lighter destroyers, which had small fuel tanks. As the weather worsened it became increasingly difficult to refuel, and the attempts had to be discontinued. Despite warning signs of worsening conditions, the ships remained in their stations. Worse, the information given to Halsey about the location and direction of the typhoon was inaccurate. On December 18, Halsey unwittingly sailed Third Fleet into the centre of the typhoon.

Aboard the carrier Monterey, aircraft in the hangar deck slammed into one another “like pinballs”, Gerald Ford recalled. It was inevitable that fires broke out. Captain Stuart H. Ingersoll was ordered by Halsey to abandon ship, but Ingersoll thought that “We can fix this”, and Ford, among others were the heroes who battled the bitter fire and eventually put it out, saving the carrier.

 

Aboard the carrier Cowpens, the scene was similar.

A Hellcat fighter, despite being triple-lashed, broke loose and smashed into the catwalk, starting a fire. Even as the firefighters attempted to extinguish the fire, a bomb handling truck rolled across the hangar deck and struck the tank of another fighter. The 100-knot winds even ripped out a 20-mm gun emplacement right out of its mounts. In the end, Cowpens survived, but the Hellcat that smashed into the catwalk did not.

When the fleet emerged from the typhoon, Halsey found seven more ships seriously damaged and 146 aircraft lost or unusable (some were pushed by the wind over edges of flight decks, some were intentionally pushed overboard after running into each other, and some lost to fire and impact damage). Worst of all, 800 lives were lost from this natural disaster. Water Tender Second Class Joseph McCrane, one of only six survivors of the USS Monaghan recalled:

“The storm broke in all its fury. We started to roll, heaving to the starboard, and everyone was holding on to something and praying as hard as he could. We knew that we had lost our power and were dead in the water…. We must have taken about seven or eight rolls to the starboard before she went over on her side.”ww2dbaseAfter ship sunk, the sailors held on to whatever they could to stay afloat. McCrane continued:

“Every time we opened a can of Spam more sharks would appear…. Toward evening some of the boys began to crack under the strain…. That (second} night most of the fellows had really lost their heads; they thought they saw land and houses.”A court inquiry at Ulithi a week later placed blame squarely on the shoulders of Halsey, though finding no negligence on the part of the admiral due to “stress of war operations” and “a commendable desire to meet military requirements”. With 790 officers and sailors lost to this storm, Nimitz submitted a letter to Washington recommending the Navy to improve its weather service, which was promptly started. The Pacific Fleet established new weather stations in the Caroline Islands and, as they were secured, Manila, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In addition, new weather central offices (for coordinating data) were established at Guam and Leyte.

Halsey’s misfortune with the Divine Wind would not be over just yet. During his support roles of the Okinawa landing, a typhoon developed, and Halsey attempted to steer his ships away from it at the recommendation of his weather experts. He, again, sailed right into it. Fortunately, with this meeting with the storm, he only lost six men.

Even though the Divine Wind interfered with history again, this time, Japan would not be saved by the heavens in this human conflict.

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Great London Tornado of 1091

I am not dismissing climate change in fact I am convinced that there is a climate change. The one thing I am not convinced about is, is it really caused by man. We had several ice changes long before heavy industry and cars etc.

We also had freak storms like the Great London Tornado of 1091

On 17 October 1091 a giant tornado hit London

Not only was this the first recorded tornado in British history, it was also the most powerful. Damage included the complete levelling of the church of St Mary-le-Bow, whose giant rafters were reportedly driven more than 20 feet into the earth.

Around 600 houses were also destroyed, as well as the wooden London Bridge only just built by William the Conqueror – perhaps originating the famous nursery rhyme that declared “London Bridge is falling down”.

The tornado struck the heart of the city, causing a great deal of damage. The church of St Mary-le-Bow was completely leveled, to the extent that four huge 26 foot rafters were driven so far into the earth that only four feet remained visible above ground. Many more buildings, including around 600 mainly wooden houses, were also demolished although amazingly, only two deaths were recorded.

From accounts of the damage, meteorologists estimate that this tornado would have rated T8 on the tornado scale, which runs from T1 to T10. If so, winds of up to 240 mph would have struck the city.

After the tornado William Rufus rebuilt the bridge, but this too was short lived as a fire destroyed it only 40 years later. After this, the bridge was rebuilt in stone.

The year without summer- 19th century climate change.

I am not saying there is no climate change, I am actually saying the opposite. In fact there have been several climate changes in this planet’s history.

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year, the Summer that Never Was, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death) because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F).This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.

The year 1816 was known as the year without a summer because of the eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia. In 1815 it threw billions of cubic yards of dust over 15 miles into the atmosphere. Because the dust penetrated the stratosphere, wind currents spread it throughout the world. As a consequence of this volcanic activity, in 1816 normal weather patterns were greatly altered. Some parts of Europe and the British Isles experienced average temperatures 2.9F to 5.8F (1.6C to 3.2C) below normal. In New England heavy snow fell between June 6 and June 11 and frost occurred every month of 1816. Crop failures were experienced in Western Europe and Canada as well as in New England. In 1817, the excess dust had settled and the climate returned to more normal conditions.

High levels of tephra(fragmental material produced by a volcanic eruption)in the atmosphere led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, a feature celebrated in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner.This may have given rise to the yellow tinge predominant in his paintings such as Chichester Canal circa 1828.

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 velocipede.

This was the ancestor of the modern bicycle and a step toward mechanized personal transport.

The crop failures of the “Year without a Summer” may have helped shape the settling of the “American Heartland”, as many thousands of people (particularly farm families who were wiped out by the event) left New England for what is now western and central New York and the Midwest (then the Northwest Territory) in search of a more hospitable climate, richer soil, and better growing conditions. Indiana became a state in December 1816 and Illinois two years later.

According to historian L. D. Stillwell, Vermont alone experienced a decrease in population of between 10,000 and 15,000, erasing seven previous years of population growth. Among those who left Vermont were the family of Joseph Smith, who moved from Norwich, Vermont (though he was born in Sharon, Vermont) to Palmyra, New York.

This move precipitated the series of events that culminated in the publication of the Book of Mormon and the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

In June 1816, “incessant rainfall” during that “wet, ungenial summer” forced Mary Shelley, John William Polidori, and their friends to stay indoors at Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva for much of their Swiss holiday. They decided to have a contest to see who could write the scariest story, leading Shelley to write Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Lord Byron to write “A Fragment”, which Polidori later used as inspiration for The Vampyre a precursor to Dracula. In addition, Lord Byron was inspired to write the poem “Darkness”, by a single day when “the fowls all went to roost at noon and candles had to be lit as at midnight”.

 

 

Justus von Liebig, a chemist who had experienced the famine as a child in Darmstadt, later studied plant nutrition and introduced mineral fertilizers.

In addition to food shortages, the natural climate change caused disease outbreaks, widespread migration of people looking for a better home and religious revivals as people tried to make sense of it all.

Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in Britain and Ireland. Families in Wales travelled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oats, and potato harvests. In Germany, the crisis was severe; food prices rose sharply. With the cause of the problems unknown, people demonstrated in front of grain markets and bakeries, and later riots, arson, and looting took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of 19th-century Europe.

The effects were widespread and lasted beyond the winter. In western Switzerland, the summers of 1816 and 1817 were so cool that an ice dam formed below a tongue of the Giétro Glacier high in the Val de Bagnes.

Despite engineer Ignaz Venetz’s efforts to drain the growing lake, the ice dam collapsed catastrophically in June 1818.

In China, the cold weather killed trees, rice crops, and even water buffalo, especially in the north. Floods destroyed many remaining crops. Mount Tambora’s eruption disrupted China’s monsoon season, resulting in overwhelming floods in the Yangtze Valley. In India, the delayed summer monsoon caused late torrential rains that aggravated the spread of cholera from a region near the River Ganges in Bengal to as far as Moscow.

 

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