You always take the weather with you.
I have been wanting to post about how climate change affected human evolution, progress, etc. Forgive me, but I will have to put that off for a while, as I am under the weather at the moment, aka spiked seltzer.
But I do want to say a little bit, this Hallowed Eve...
There was an eruption of a volcano which resulted in the 1816, "Year without a summer." It caused a lot of floods, crop failures, deaths - 100,000 Irish people died. Accelerated westward migrations in America. During this summer, the outside was so cold, wet and dark, that Lord Byron, and his personal physician, and Percy Shelley, and Percy Shelley's wife, and others, all remained inside, and challenged each other to a writing contest. Byron's physician began, "The Vampyre, " which was the first conventionalisation of the vampire legends. Mary Shelley, of course, wrote, "Frankenstein." The latter was inspired by a dream, but assumed to reflect impressionsof Byron's protean, or morosely polyglot, personality. Byron, himself, wrote the poem, "Darkness." All because of a change of weather, history - and our culture - was changed forever.
The year without a summer also effected many other human changes, as all wide climate changes do. A great example is that an inventor noticed how the weather was causing such difficulty in other travel, especially in that it was killing so many horses. So, he invented a few new personal travel vehicles. One of them was soon to evolve into what we know today as the bicycle. Subsequently, (1859, 1876), the combustion engines were invented, which largely put the kibosh on the bicycle, and brought us global warming. I call that overkill.
But I do want to say a little bit, this Hallowed Eve...
There was an eruption of a volcano which resulted in the 1816, "Year without a summer." It caused a lot of floods, crop failures, deaths - 100,000 Irish people died. Accelerated westward migrations in America. During this summer, the outside was so cold, wet and dark, that Lord Byron, and his personal physician, and Percy Shelley, and Percy Shelley's wife, and others, all remained inside, and challenged each other to a writing contest. Byron's physician began, "The Vampyre, " which was the first conventionalisation of the vampire legends. Mary Shelley, of course, wrote, "Frankenstein." The latter was inspired by a dream, but assumed to reflect impressionsof Byron's protean, or morosely polyglot, personality. Byron, himself, wrote the poem, "Darkness." All because of a change of weather, history - and our culture - was changed forever.
The year without a summer also effected many other human changes, as all wide climate changes do. A great example is that an inventor noticed how the weather was causing such difficulty in other travel, especially in that it was killing so many horses. So, he invented a few new personal travel vehicles. One of them was soon to evolve into what we know today as the bicycle. Subsequently, (1859, 1876), the combustion engines were invented, which largely put the kibosh on the bicycle, and brought us global warming. I call that overkill.