This week France’s hated weather forecasters, who have consistently predicted all the awful weather that has hit France over the recent months have announced that we could be facing one of the coldest summers in 200 years all across Western Europe. So if you were about to put away your winter clothes, hold on! Their weather channel announced that there is a 70% chance of not even having a real summer this year across Spain, France, Portugal, Germany and Austria. Not quite sure what relation Austria has but hey, I’m not a weatherman. The frightening figure is that there is only an 8% chance that we will have a hot one! How they work this out defeats me but they have managed to stir up the French hospitality industry, fearing the French may holiday outside France. Now that is worrying
After a long, cold winter and a spring that has shown temperatures of up to 6ºC below average there are talks that this summer could be as cold as the fabled summer of 1816: The Year Without a Summer. The climatologist Jean-Pierre Ceron mentions that all hope is not lost just yet and that just because we have had a cold winter and spring doesn’t mean that we will automatically have a cold summer and that we shouldn’t worry just yet. None the less their predictions are based on the cold sea temperatures and weak solar activity during the winter which has noticeably had an affect on Spain’s winter and spring this year and most of Western Europe, so these unusually low temperatures will more than likely bring poor weather for June and July and heavy storms in August. Consequently September and October will be much hotter than usual.
The long forgotten summer of 1816 is not just a fable however it was later attributed to a volcanic eruption on the other side of the earth, but the historians may look back on 2013 and refer to it as a year without a spring. This spring has been the coldest in over 50 years across much of the UK and Europe, and the bitterest ever recorded in places like Sheffield. From Kiev, Moscow and Berlin in the east of Europe to Dublin, Edinburgh and Copenhagen, temperatures for the fourth or fifth week in March barely rose above freezing and an Arctic wind made it seem even chillier. In Germany they called it the "100-year winter". In Bonn, people were said to be desperate to get out. Some would say that human habits and characteristics are shaped by geographical conditions. In 1816, the miserable weather encouraged people to emigrate. In Germany, the shortage of oats to feed horses is said to have spawned ideas that led to the development of the bicycle. In Switzerland, the Shelleys and their chums were kept indoors by the "wet, ungenial summer" and so wrote stories such as Frankenstein.
However the “Year Without a Summer” brought a long far more destruction than creation. It was an agricultural disaster. The unusual climatic aberrations of 1816 had the greatest effect on the northeastern United States, Atlantic Canada, and parts of western Europe. Typically, the late spring and summer of the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada are relatively stable: temperatures (average of both day and night) average between about 68 °F (20 °C) and 77 °F (25 °C) and rarely fall below 41 °F (5 °C). Summer snow is an extreme rarity.
In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.
At higher elevations where farming was touch and go in the good years, the cooler climate did not quite support agriculture. In May 1816, frost killed off most of the crops that had been planted, and on 4 June 1816, frosts were reported in Connecticut, and by the following day, most of New England was gripped by the cold front. On 6 June 1816, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine. A Massachusetts historian summed up the disaster: "Severe frosts occurred every month; June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots .... In the early Autumn when corn was in the milk it was so thoroughly frozen that it never ripened and was scarcely worth harvesting. Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food. It must be remembered that the granaries of the great west had not then been opened to us by railroad communication, and people were obliged to rely upon their own resources or upon others in their immediate locality." Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in Britain and Ireland as well. Families in Wales travelled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oats, and potato harvests. The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply. Due to the unknown cause of the problems, demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson, and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.
It is believed that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years, which occurred during the concluding decades of the Little Ice Age, potentially adding to the existing cooling that had been periodically ongoing since 1350 AD.
Although things don’t look that bad, let’s hope there isn’t a volcanic eruption anywhere on Earth as the accumulation of events may lead to epic consequences. Even without this crops in Spain may well be affected, last year there was hardly any rain and the olive harvest was one of the lowest in recent history, this year however rain has been abundant and it appears that there won’t be any shortage this summer either but the serious drops in temperature may affect the olive tree’s ability to generate oil, as it needs heat and a lot of it. However that said I quite fancy a cooler summer, not sure about the rest of you but I find the stifling heat of Spain in July and August just unbearable.