It was an anniversary nobody noticed. After all, not all that much happened in 1817. Napoleon was on his way to exile on a tiny rock in the South Atlantic, James Monroe was inaugurated President of the United States, and there was trouble in what would become Latin America.
Aside from that last bit, 1817 was one of those nothing years that doesn’t make the history books. So why note this as the bicentennial of something? What is it the 200th anniversary of?
Climate Change.
Two years earlier, in 1815, Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia erupted. It was the biggest bang the world had seen since the reign of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurellius in 180. This caused the notorious “Year Without a Summer” that killed or otherwise ruined the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The winter lasted over a year, and there wasn’t another spring until 1817.
The year without a summer is the bottom of climate change, yes, it’s an anomaly, but the so-called “Little Ice Age” had been going on for centuries and it had been damn cold for most of the year all that time. There was another big bang, where an island somewhere in the eastern Pacific was totally obliterated, that might have cooled the temperature a bit just before 1810, but that wasn’t the primary cause of Old Boney’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. The French imperial army froze to death in polar conditions in early October. They had already started retreating from Russia some months before. Technically summer had only ended a few weeks earlier, think about that.
Winters were long and the other three seasons were short. Summer snows happened from time to time, but they weren’t anywhere near as bad as 1816. The Rest of the 19th century was still rather cold, but with a few exceptions such as Killer winter of 1886, the trend was warmer and warmer. They still argue when the Little Ice Age ended, sometime between 1840 and 1850 is the most common date.
People go around saying that this year, or the year before were the warmest on record. That’s because except for a few amateurs, nobody was keeping records, and those amateurs’ show how COLD it was.
Indirect observations such as tree rings, Ice cores and the like, show that it was just as warm as it is today a thousand years ago, when the Vikings were rampaging throughout Europe and west Asia. The National Park Service brochure states that there were no glaciers in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National park.
Now before you say that I’m a “climate denier” let me disabuse you of that. While climate is never all that stable, adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere doesn’t help anything.
But what exactly are we supposed to do about it? What kind of climate do we want? Do we really want it have eight-month-long winters where one can walk across the Mississippi river at it’s widest point because it’s ten below zero? No. Do we want it as it was on the day World War I started? Probably. The records show that weather-wise, 1914 was a beautiful year.
While continuing to try to stop the increase of carbon emissions, or better yet lower them, it’s time we started planning what we’re going to do if we can’t.
Should governments start building artificial reefs further north and south and begin figuring out how to stock them? Should we think about seeding parts of Canada with wildlife that’s native to the southern US and Mexico?
I dunno. But I do know that something should be done along those lines.
Happy Bicentennial.