Two hundred years ago, on the evening of April 5, 1815, a volcano known as Mount Tambora on an island in Indonesia began erupting. The explosion was heard 1,600 miles away. Even 800 miles away on Java, Stamford Raffles thought it was cannon fire. It kept erupting until April 10 when it exploded. William Klingaman and his son, Nicholas Klingaman, write in “The Year Without Summer”:
The cloud spread around the world and caused global temperatures to drop 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn’t sound like much of a change, but in fact, it’s a massive change, and it caused the Year Without Summer in 1816, and it stayed abnormally cool for almost a decade. Crops failed, people starved and rioted, diseases ran rampant, rivers froze. April was cruel; A snowstorm started on April 12 that buried Quebec City in four feet of snow. That was just the start. In August, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We have had the most extraordinary year of drought and cold ever known in the history of America.”Three degrees. That’s all it took to starve thousands, cause migrations that moved tens of thousands from New England to the Midwest and cause riots and revolution in Europe. Drought dried out the forests and fires raged across the Northeast. Three degrees. Think about that the next time someone says that climate change isn’t a big deal.
At least one good thing came out of this climate disaster: The bicycle. A commenter on TreeHugger tells us:
It’s amazing how an event from 200 years ago can still resonate.
