Climate Change is a motherfucker – and not in a good way.
Eighteen sixteen was the Year Without a Summer,
which featured Europe’s coldest summer on record
for a two hundred and thirty four year period.
It was rough.
It was not man-made climate change, though
– unless humans somehow developed volcanoes,
which we’ve so far failed to claim credit for.

Evidence suggests that Mount Tambora’s eruption
in Indonesia was the likeliest culprit in causing the coldness,
generating the environmental change.
There were many likely rollout effects:
The US Midwest was probably settled
because the Northeast settlements suffered so much
in the Year Without a Summer.
The Church of Latter Day Saints was likely developed as it was
thanks to the cold snap.
A dearth of oats to feed horses probably produced an interest
in creating new forms of transportation,
such as the draisine and the velocipede.
Being forced to stay in darker days led to the writing of
Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the poem “Darkness.”

Do we thank Climate Change for all this?
Of course not.
But maybe we hope that human ingenuity continues
to roll out effects from traumatic Climate Change
as we experience it going forward.
Something to hope for, at least.