We have reached that time of the year when some among us will grumble about the heat and humidity, but this year, out of respect for what our forebears suffered through 200 years ago, we ought not be quite so quick to do so.

The year was 1816, known in meteorological circles as “The year without a summer.”

The world was already in what scientists now regard as a “mini ice age” when Mt. Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, exploded in April 1815 and spewed millions of tons of ash, gas and dust into the atmosphere.

It may have been the biggest eruption of the last 60,000 years and is estimated to have been 100 times stronger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state in 1980.

The ash from Tambora remained suspended for months in a giant aerosol cloud of sulfuric acid and, as clouds are wont to do, it traveled. The result was havoc.

It didn’t start out that way. According to the Middlebury (Vt.) Register, “January was so mild that fires were allowed to go out except for cooking purposes.”

The spring was deceptively mild. Late April temperatures reached the 80s and some New Hampshire farmers planted crops, only to have them killed off by a May frost. When June came along, temperatures reached into the 90s, as they often do. But the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction, too. There was another frost in June that destroyed the crops of those seemingly prudent farmers who had waited.

Sarah Anna Emery recalled years after the June 6 inauguration of New Hampshire Gov. William Plumer, “Our teeth chattered in our heads and our feet and hands were benumbed.”

Plumer attributed the cold to God passing judgment on the people of the Earth, and he urged his listeners to be mindful of their transgressions.

Whether they took his advice is unrecorded, but then, just for good measure and after a relatively normal July, New England got another frost in August that killed off another round of crops.

According to the website www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com, “Crop failures caused hoarding and big price increases for agricultural commodities. People went hungry. Farmers gave up trying to make a living in New England and started heading west.”

We have nothing like that today, of course, but it’s worth noting that May was the 13th consecutive month in which the world set a record for high temperatures for a month, the longest such streak since the National Weather Service began keeping records in 1880.

Maybe we should watch our transgressions.

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