COVID and the Year With No Summer

Bet you thought this was going to be about 2020. But it’s not, at least not directly. It’s about 1816.

1816 sucked. Really sucked. After years of war in Europe and North America, the world needed a break. It didn’t catch one, but instead caught nearly two years of misery, 1816 being the worst.

As winter was supposed to be turning to spring, the appearance of brown or purple snow was the first omen of something amiss. Winter just wouldn’t go away. Snow and crop-killing frosts extended into June, then July, and even August. Lakes froze over in mid-summer, livestock shivered and died. Crops failed. The population faced privation and starvation, livestock and horses were put down for lack of fodder.

We now know that the one-in-ten-thousand-years eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 had sent millions of tonnes of soot and volatiles into the atmosphere, which, added to the accumulation of the 1814 eruption of Mount Mayon and at least four more major volcanic eruptions over the preceding four year period, turned our atmosphere dark and opaque. As if that weren’t enough, the sun was in the middle of the Dalton Minimum, a thirteen year period of low solar activity. And the world was not quite yet out of the Little Ice Age.

So, there you have it– a global “perfect storm” where the northern hemisphere went hungry for a year and more. If you were living in 1816, unless you were wealthy and privileged, you were at actual risk of starving to death, and by dint of so many horses having been put down, you become much less mobile.

But, as always, there were silver linings. Given the lack of horses, Karl Drais invented the velocipede, the forerunner of the modern bicycle. And because in North America the worst seemed to be in the east, a great surge of pioneers pushed into the midwest, opening up the fertile plains which would later feed the world.

There are lessons to be had. First, having to wear masks and social distancing are not in the same league as mass crop failure and starvation. Second, many scientific and social advances arise from bad times.

So, if you’re feeling pretty sorry for yourself and don’t think you can social distance one more day, give a thought to our ancestors in 1816, the year of no summer.

See my article about making lemonade in these times. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-soon-enough-pass-opportunities-norman-bowley-jd-llm)