Climate and Civilization: A Short History
Beginning in 1816, "the year without a summer," widespread crop failures
led to food riots in nearly every country of Europe, producing a revolution-
ary fervor that swept the continent for three years. In France, for example,
the existing government fell and the conservative Duc de Richelieu was asked
to form a new one. Everywhere governments struggled to maintain social order
as an unprecedented crime epidemic surged in the cities. The Swiss were stunned
by the wave of criminal activity. Even the number of suicides increased dra-
matically, along with executions of women for infanticide.
Historians describe "swarms of beggars" clogging the roads and beseeching
passersby. In a typical account, a traveler through Burgundy in 1817 reported
that "beggars, very numerous yesterday, have increased greatly; at every stage
a crowd of women and children and of old men gather round the carriage." Ano-
ther observer, who was visiting Burgundy from the British Isles, added that
the number, while large, was "by no means as many as besieged the traveller in
Ireland." In Switzerland, eyewirnesses said the numbers of beggars thronging
every highway were so huge as to resemble armies. They had desperation in their
eyes and, in the words of a local chronicler, Ruprecht Zollikofer, "the pale-
ness of death in their cheeks."
As fears of revolution mounted in several countries, military force was used
to control the growling crowds demanding food. an unprecedented wave of arson
began to strike in almost every country. Ominously, the first anti-Semitic
roots in the history of modern Germany broke out in the Bavarian town of
Wurzburg in the summer of 1819 and, after famine and revolutionary fervor had
exacerbated tensions and resentments, quickly spread throughout Germany and as
far north as Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Europe was just recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and was experiencing many
changes. But although no one realized it at the time, the proximate cause of
this suffering and social unrest was a change in the composition of the global
atmosphere following an unusually large series of eruptions of the Tambora
volcano, on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, in the spring of 1815. Scientists
estimate that 10,000 people were killed in the initial eruption and approx-
imately 82,000 more died of starvation and disease in the following months.
However, the worst effects on the rest of the world were not felt untilo a year
later, by which time the dust ejected into the sky had spread throughout the
atmosphere and had begun to dramatically reduce the amount of sunlight reaching
the surface of the earth and to force temperatures down.
-- To be continued...
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