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The creeping terror inspired by Tambora's unnatural weather regime was due to its un-
relenting delivery of extreme conditions. Entering the second winter after Tambora's explo-
sion, Howard continued to gather reports of storm systems of “a severity almost beyond ex-
ample.” In December, he listed hailstorms, gales of “an excessive degree of violence,” and
earth tremors caused by lightning—just in Tottenham. Like the painter Turner, he also noted
what was, unbeknown to him, the startling effect of Tambora's aerosol cloud on the atmo-
spheric spectrum. On December 27th, in the midst of storm clouds, the setting sun appeared
before him like an angry giant, “fiery red, and much enlarged.”
With the cold, wild year of 1816 at last at an end, Howard was able to assess its severity
on a hard statistical basis. The results must have shocked even this mild-mannered Quaker
and put him in mind of the vengeance of the Lord. In his previous nine years of temperature
observations, 1807-15—an already below-average sample owing to the impact of the 1809
Unknown eruption—the average daily temperature in London had been 50°F. In 1816, the
scription for the meteorological annus horribilis that was 1816. More like the “Year without
a Sun.”
In the pre-Tambora sections of his
Climate of London
, Howard's interests are distinctly pa-
rochial, limited to weather observations in the British Isles and greater London in particu-
lar. Following his firsthand experience of volcanic weather conditions in continental Europe,
however, Howard takes care to keep track of reports from abroad. His 1817 almanac lists
“hurricanes” in Hamburg and Amsterdam, hailstorms across France, “excessive cold” in Lis-
bon, and continued “inundations” in Switzerland. In the widened horizons of an amateur
weather enthusiast in 1816-17, then, we see the origins of modern synoptic meteorology,
which understands weather as a cross-continental phenomenon and not simply the variation
of local conditions.
In Germany, another budding meteorologist—the polymath Heinrich Brandes—had ar-
rived at the same conclusion about the broader geographical scales of weather. Out of the
trauma of middle Europe's “Year of the Beggar”—and no doubt humiliated at the destruc-
tion by flood of dykes he himself designed on the River Weser in Lower Saxony—Brandes
promoted a continental overview of weather patterns. Looking back over the disastrous year,
Brandes argued in a letter dated December 1816 that “more precise reports of the weather,
even if only for the whole of Europe, would surely yield very instructive results. If one could
draw maps of Europe according to the weather for all 365 days of the years, then it would
of course show, for instance, where the boundary of the great rain-bearing clouds, which in
to design and compile the world's first weather maps, published in 1820, the same year as
tion was a mother to global suffering on an epochal scale; but it must count, likewise, as a
major birth event in modern meteorology. Catastrophic climate change generates world-chan-
ging ideas as well as global-scale trauma.
Howard's observations of wild weather continue through 1817. Hailstones “large as hazel-
nuts” and “pigeon's eggs” rained down through the summer while, for the third straight year,
winter storms descended upon the British Isles with millennial ferocity, concluding with an
epic tempest on March 4, 1818, that cut a violent swath across the south of England. Included
in the destruction was a famous tree in Plymouth, the newspaper account of which reads very
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