1816, the Year without a Summer

http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=gillen-darcy-wood-1816-the-year-without-a-summer

by ilamont • 9 years ago

58 14 9 years ago

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

wmf• 9 years ago

The world is much richer overall and food production per capita is probably much higher. The world is much better connected, both in information (winter is coming!) and flow of goods. There would be far less hunger, although in a capitalist world people on the margin would still get squeezed.

Also, a few years of cooling might counteract global warming a little, although this would probably end up just giving more fuel to the "keep calm and burn coal" camp. Not much point in installing solar panels when the sky is dark.

Nomentatus• 9 years ago

Flow of goods can also spread the pain, no region is spared. Reliable agriculture with better efficiency means overproduction doesn't happen as much, so there's less cushion. Rome was better at shipping cheaply than previous societies, and better integrated, so it suffered much more widespread (although less frequent) famines that could affect nearly the whole empire.

xenadu02• 9 years ago

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.

Hextinium• 9 years ago

I completely agree with everything that you said above but doubt that people will continue to be entrenched in their ideas when people start dying from starvation locally and not in a foreign land that they can ignore.

extrapickles• 9 years ago

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.

dang• 9 years ago

Also http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/15/frankenstein-the-ba... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11962839.

c3534l• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

stevekemp• 9 years ago

You can hear it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxeXHMHOcqQ

greenmango333• 9 years ago

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

StClaire• 9 years ago

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?

supertrope• 9 years ago

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.

sgt101• 9 years ago

Great pod cast on this : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b077j4yv

1816, the Year without a Summer

Related Stories