Citation Needed - The Year Without a Summer

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year and Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death)[1] because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.72–1.3 °F).[2] Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record between the years of 1766–2000.[3] This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[4]   Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

I'm not gonna make it, I'm not gonna make it. I want you to have my sex spot, Annabelle. I want you to take care of her. Dude, that's gross. Man, it is cold out there. I'll say, Ely, what did you do? What? I didn't do anything. It's September and it's 12 degrees outside.

There's no way you're not responsible for this. I swear, guys, this is not my doing, not this one. So I say, black lung's matter is not a good anti-colt industry slogan. It's just not disagree, disagree. They're not gonna. Cecil, Tom, settle a bet for us. Is Eli pranking us with an end time slash everlasting winter prank? Because this episode is a year without a summer.

No, he didn't do that. Yeah, that's not him. Okay. Why is it so cold then? Well, it's this is Chicago guys that our studios in Chicago. It's just outside. It's, it's 12 degrees in September. Oh, pretty much the ominous.

There's a fine ash falling out of the sky. What's that? We're just right near Gary Indiana. This is across the board. I standard stuff on a sea. Yeah, Gary Indiana. I told you I had nothing to do with it. But the murder is the destruction of property, the unrest in the streets. Yeah, you guys know what you're not getting here.

We've got a map. You two map. Okay, okay. But what about the smell of sulfur and the rotting garbage? Okay. Now that I have something to do with. Hello and welcome. The citation needed. Podcast where we choose a subject, create a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Heath. It's 2020. And now is the summer of our discontent. We're going to try to talk about a worse summer. And joining me is the usual panel of, well, actuallys, first up, two men whose summer dreams were ripped, seams, Cecil and Noah. Whoever thought eating at a restaurant would be a thing on your bucket list. Oh, yeah. thought eating at a restaurant would be a thing on your bucket list.

Ripped it. This dude they've had fucking pirate riding down the shit at this point. And also joining me to men who need SPF volcano cloud for a void no no. Tom and Eli. Okay, it's it's going to be cancer no matter what.

Mayas will die drunk angry and lobster red like my Irish ancestors. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, thing, concept, phenomenon or event. Are we going to be talking about today? Today, we're going to be talking about the year without a summer. All right. And why did you choose an entire year as the subject? Well, okay. So two reasons. Heath, first of all, it's one of the few topics that's going to allow me to weave in my interest in geology, meteorology, history. And secondly, Iology, and history. And secondly,

I'm the only one. If I get Tom's blood pressure high enough, we only have to split the Patreon. I don't know. I'm not the only one. I swear to God, no, if I even accidentally learn something, I'm coming to wherever,

I'm going to live. And just, you won't. Okay. So, no, what was the year without a summer? Oh, yes. Okay. So the year is 18 to 16, which has been dubbed the year without a summer and is also known as the poverty year and 1800 and frozen.

And while the drop in global temperatures of 0.72 to 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit might not sound like much if you weren't paying attention to Captain Planet. It was enough to freeze New England in August, trigger worldwide famine, and indirectly lead to Mormonism. So like Joseph Smith was standing around and he was like, huh, it's chilly. You guys want to hear about the new gold Bible I found that you can't see. I want to marry eight children. Because it's cold. It's cold. I want to make it.

I'm going to say a gold thing again. Slightly more indirect than that. Now, there's no one single cause of this climatic anomaly, but there's definitely a predominant cause. And that would be the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. And this is the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. And since volcanic eruptions leave geological signatures that last for pretty much ever, you can go away before recorded history.

This was like very likely the most powerful eruption in the history of the human species. Yeah, I don't know. One time I couldn't jerk off for a week because my cousin was visiting right? Okay. Yes. So no, I, I knew those were coming. Okay. Just play through. No. No. Custard. They get it. Now, I doubt I can really give anybody a sense of the scale of this thing because I can't really get a sense of it myself There's a system volcanologist used to rank eruptions called the volcanic Explosivity index probably the coolest index name in the universe and it's an exponential scale based on the bulk eject of volume Because I guess volcano scientists know the ejaculation jokes are inevitable

They ultimately just decided to lean into them. No, leaning. That's a terrible idea. It's all in your beard. You got it. No, it's bad. Well, if that's not what you want, it's a terrible. On this scale, once, I mean, otherwise it's going to get ever. It's just a terrible chair. You're doing more cleanup. That's true. Like a big catcher is a man. Bigger you're beard. Exactly. So on this scale, once a volcano tosses out a tenth

of a cubic kilometer of shit, it reaches a four. Just the beard next to your bed that's kind of like stuck together. And then she's like, what's that? Really sad, triple. And once Garden Home tried to fall a fucking comb through. I'm like a comb through. Stiggy, dust bunnies average, just blowing a wound. All right, so combo weed.

That's it. All right, so on the scale, once a bulkier, it'll toss us out a tenth of a cubic kilometer of shit, it's a four on the scale. And because fuller is boring and volcanoes are awesome, that's also classified as a paddock, Klysmic eruption. That's the scale of that unpronounceable Icelandic volcano that grounded air travel for a week back in 2010. Now, if it spills out a full cubic kilometer,

that graduates it to level five for peroxysmic eruption. That would be like a mountain helens. At 10 cubic kilometers, you scale up to a six or colossal eruption. That would be a crack atowa or a pinotubo back in 91. But the one we're talking about, Tambora is the next level up from Matt with over 100

cubic kilometers of ejecta, a thousand times more powerful than AFI et geolokital. No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, It looks like it looks like I was trying to write I found a skull. That's what it looks like. What's crazy is when you pronounce it, there's teas in it and there's no fucking tea in there at all. No, no, there's not, but there's duty sounds in it. It's fucking crazy. Yeah, no, I've been practicing that all fucking. You've only found a skull and he wrote it in his diary or something. You crushed it.

Good job. What's a question? A. F. Y, Jolocato. God, it's one of the only five, the, the, the, the, Tambora now is one of five eruptions of recorded history that hit seven or super colossal. That's a world changer. For an example, the next level up on the scale,

you damn, you have to go back to dying of sword times. And by the way, eight is known as mega colossal, because the people who came up with this scale are both awesome and 11 years old. Level A volcano keeps screaming at the bathroom door. I'm still in here. I'm coming under the door. What's going on there? I'm not the mountain with up instead of down. I'm not Dave. I'm not the mountain mountain volcano. Okay. Somebody else to party. All right. So for centuries before the big eruption, Tambora had been dormant. It was the dominant feature of the island of Sombawa, about 700 miles

east of Jakarta and it's fucking huge. It's peak was over 14,000 feet. Damn, you're high enough to be permanently snow-capped. And notice I said was over 14,000 feet. That's not gonna be the case at the end of this story because in 1812, this dormant mountain started rumbling and emitting a dark cloud. And then on April 5th of 1815, a huge eruption occurred that was so fucking loud, they could hear it 870 miles away.

Since the scale, if something like that happened in New York City, you would hear that shit in St. Louis. Oh my, and if something like that had happened in St. Louis, it would be the best thing to have happened in St. Louis. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, get from more of the only way to be sure, right? So, but as huge as that eruption was, that was volcanic pre-come. The volcano would continue to erupt for five fucking days before it led to this historic climax on April 10th. When this one hit, it could be heard 1600 miles away. So again, if this happened in New York, you'd hear it in Guadal, fucking Mala. And for this, but I just actually want to quote directly from Wikipedia's description.

Quote, at about 7 p.m. on 10 April, the eruption intensified. Three plumes rose up and merged. The whole mountain was turned into a flowing mass of liquid fire. Pumas stones up to 20 centimeters, 7.9 inches in diameter started to rain down around 8 p.m. followed by ash at around 9 to 10 p.m. pyroclastic flows cascaded down the mountain to the sea on all sides of the peninsula, wiping out the village of Tambora. Loud explosions were heard until the next evening,

11 April. The ash veil spread as far as West Java and South Sulawesi. That's like 500 miles away. Jesus. A nitrous odor was noticeable in Batavia. That's almost 800 miles away. And heavy tephra tinged rain fell. That is rain filled with little rocks. Yeah. Finally receiving between 11 and 17th April. And those three umpires in the Norman Rockwell painting holding out their hands to decide what we're reading the lake. Oh, Dave's under a boulder. I don't know, that feels like kind of a calling.

So in all, an estimated 10 billion tons of rock was ejected. After the eruption, that 14,100 foot mountain was down to about 9,800 feet. God. Yeah, lost the third of its size after eruption. Mountain, it just rolls over and takes a nap. Done. Well, actually, let me know.

Did it be a little beard? So, that was the problem. That wasn't it because much of that remaining third was being tossed into the stratosphere. The eruption column stretched 141,000 feet in the air. And while most of that would come down in a rain of ash over the next few weeks, many of the finer ash particles would remain in the stratosphere for years. Beard would have saved the fucking day. If sure that would lead to a significant drop in global temperatures that would touch

off worldwide famine and kill untold numbers of people, but it also made the sun says look awesome from Okay, Mr. Brightside give me one for 2020 At least nobody went to the top of the volcano and sucked in a bunch of ash to ponder live Okay, we don't know that. So in the wake of the big April 10th explosion, everything on the island was killed, including all the vegetation. In fact, all the trees were blown off into the ocean, they end up congealing with ash and pumice and shit, informing these huge natural rafts, some of which were like three

miles wide. God damn. And those floated around the ocean for months afterwards, of which were like three miles wide. God damn. And those floated around the ocean for months afterwards, they found them thousands of miles away. When with palatros out there with a bandsaw and a goop price tag gun. You know what? This ejecta really does smell like mine, vagina. All right.

So now that was the biggest explosion, of course, but it wasn't the last one. Tambora kept erupting for another five days, and there were still flames and aftershocks from the eruption four years later. The influx of ash triggered a tsunami that hit nearby islands with 13 feet of bonus ocean and the cold day left over is like four miles across. A tsunami should just be called bonus, Oh, everything. I think it's a penalty.

For listeners who aren't a dictionary called Dera means greater. Grater. The top of a volcano. Is it? Yes. volcano just slowly close to the door to the call Dera waves a tan in there.

Do not go in there. I just don't. Give it a minute. So that's why I always use the downstairs called Barra. That's just. A party Dave seriously. At least light a match after you use it. All right. So estimates of the death toll from the eruption vary quite a bit, but it's in the range of 70 to 100,000 dead. Now, about 10% of them, that's like just getting buried

in pyroclastic flow, visuvius style. But the majority of it came from the fact that pretty much all the vegetation for miles and miles around was covered in thick layers of ash and crops were wiped out all over Indonesia. But whatever that death toll is, it would be dwarfed by the global catastrophe that that eruption would touch off for the following year.

All right. Yeah. Absolutely. That is correct, Noah. White people were eventually affected by this. That's a really good point. But before we get to that important part, according to Noah, we're going to take a quick break for some opera pove, nothing. Worders of magnitude more people.

Worders of magnitude wider. Bet. What is the magnitude of more people? What is the magnitude of Whiter? Bet. Good evening. I'm Ron Ruckerson. International volcano experts are raising quite the ruckus about the coming eruption of Tambora. But is it? Katie, RinkR Frank, has the story.

Thanks, Ron. I'm here with Dr. Scientist, Steve Tellman, whose recent report about the dangerous nature of the volcano has quite a few people worried. Dr. Tellman. Come on. Is the volcano about to explode? Yes, it is about to explode.

It's literally pouring smoke from the top, and you can see it. Just look with your eyes. It's very obviously smoke from the top. And you can see it. Just look with your eyes. It's very obviously about to erupt. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Kyle, Kyle Denimora of Kyle's volcano walks. You say that it's not about to explode

and is in fact perfectly safe to continue to walk on. Is that correct? That's correct, Katie. This fear mark, come on. The Earth releases smoke all the time. That's nothing to worry about Well, that's a relief what no no this guy has an obvious financial interest in ignoring the problem Okay, no, you know, I'm not claiming to be an expert here, but I'm I'm rubber. He's glue. Oh

I mean any replies to that doctor? The all bounce off. You do also, man. I know you. All right, well, things sure are undecided here. Ron, back to you. Thanks, Katie. Great reporting.

Next up, this year's funniest hats to where to watch the volcano noddy rub. Right after these messages. Massage. And we're back. When we left off, volcanoes are bad. What's next? Yeah. So, alright, since the dawn of Christianity, every Christian follower has always believed they were living in the end times.

Hell according to the sermon on the Mount, Jesus believed that. And that's because when you look around at the world, you're always going to see the kind of wars and suffering and plagues and strife and shit that are supposed to usher in the Christian apocalypse. But I would submit that nobody in the history of Christiandom had better reason to believe it than the Motherfuckers alive in 1816. Really? Really? 1816 was really rough?

I feel like we give those motherfuckers a run for their money. I'm like, 20 years. Some of our discontent motherfuckers. No. Yeah, it's not a contest. I want to be winning, but we are past the participation trophy. Yeah. No mass die offs at all. Yet the people in 1816 are looking at you guys. You got a panseys. All right. So consider, consider first of all that the Napoleonic Wars had ended so recently that people weren't 100% sure they weren't going to flare up again. Right? That was 12 years of on again, off again, blood shed on scales never before seen in human

history. And then in early April of 1815, this volcano erupts half a world away. And the sky turns all red and Satany and shit over the next year and a half. Europe, North America, China and India all descended a mass starvation and the plagues and shit that come from the filthy starving refugees, traips and from one end of the world to the other looking for one spot that still has any fucking food left. Even for people well outside of the brimstone radius, this had to feel like all hell had been unleashed.

Yeah, maybe. But to be fair, this was 1815. So mass starvation war in plagues, it's like par for the course at this point, isn't it? Right. Oh, yeah, but it was bad for 1815. Yeah, from the relatively low 1815, yeah. Right.

Exactly. So like I said before, the Tambora eruption wasn't the sole cause of the year without a summer. There had actually been a series of huge volcanic eruptions all over that area in the years leading up to it. And this also happened during a period of unusually low solar activity called the Dalton Minimum. So even the years leading up to this one were colder than normal.

Hell, this was actually the tail end of what's known as the little ice age. So Timberer no, 1816 would have been a really cold year, but tossing 24 cubic miles of rock and 30 million tons of sulfur into the atmosphere kicked those trends into overdrive. Middle age Jim in Hoff is on the house floor in 1850 with a snow wall. I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet, but your kids are going to love it. 1815 AOC just drops a giant igneous boulder on his head. Are we done? We're done. What's that above your head, Jim?

You don't know? Lava. He said, I don't know. So the most obvious way this fucks up humanity is the loss of solar radiation, right? Like all this shit in the air means less sunlight to making it through the atmosphere to the surface to warm shit up. And that means lower temperatures and less photosynthesis. But that's just one way that the agriculture was fucked.

Rain in the wake of this shit was more acidic. So that took out a ton of local vegetation. And then in the spring and summer of 1815, farmers in New England reported a persistent dry fog that didn't dissipate with the rain. This is what's known as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil. And needless to say sulfur veils are also bad for crops. We now interrupt this program for a message from the Trump administration EPA about delicious bragging water. The problem is too much volcanic regulation. Exactly.

It ruptured more often. Now this should is bad, but not catastrophic yet, right? Propheals were way low that year, but not starvation level low, but this is 1815. This is a year with the summer, albeit a weirdly colored and unusually cool one. But it did mean that there wasn't a hell of a lot of grain surplus to bring into the following year, which was gonna be considerably worse.

Yeah, and you have to deal with all those smug ants just rubbing it in everybody's faces. That, you know, I mean, that story because I can never get behind the ants. I'm always like, fuck those assholes. They're like holding vibranium assholes. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So mad because you can't make music. I'm saying Chad Chadwick Boseman was the bad guy. Like I was just, you know, that's what happened. Maybe not now. Maybe

black Panther not check with Boseman. All right. So the thing to keep in mind here is that atmospheric changes take a long time to have, in fact, generally, right? Like people often forget how much heat is absorbed and held by the surface of the earth, both the dirt and the oceans. That's why meteorological seasons and astronomical seasons don't generally line up. That's why hurricane season lasts into November. The air temperature has to change for quite a while before it starts to really cool off the surface. By 1816, the obstructed atmosphere had taken full effect.

But we can probably wait and see with climate change. I mean, that would have done his essay about the year things spontaneous. They got better. He could have 2021, the year where like shit was normal. All right. So in addition to the lower temperatures, the eruption also brought heavier rain than usual since there was always plenty of shit to form. Rain drops out of in the atmosphere. So even where it wasn't too cold for crops to grow, they often got washed out. In Europe, the growing season started late,

ended early, had to contend with huge storms in the flooding of all of Europe's major rivers, snow fell late into the summer as far south as Hungary and Northern Italy, and a lot of that snow was tinted brown, red, blue, and yellow with all the volcanic ash still shuffling around in the atmosphere. Some little kids like,

it's rated snowgones, I going to be on a citation needed. Quick rub it all over yourself. Right. Yeah. Now, there were also crazy localized events that stem from this shit too. Like in Western Switzerland, there was a during the winter of 18 and 16 and 17, it was so fucking cold that a natural ice dam form that started filling up with a huge lake. So engineers are definitely trying to create this lake, but they couldn't manage it before the dam collapse catastrophically and killed 40 people to dumb to move out of the way after a year plus of ice dam war.

They're just standing there watching the water rushing down with mass under their chin. One family got out and they moved to centrally a Pennsylvania. All right. So Asia got hit in a couple of ways. Obviously, that's where the fucking volcano was. So they got that hit. They also got abnormally low temperatures in the coming year to fuck with their agriculture. A snow was reported as far south as Taiwan, which is usually tropical, but the climatic effects of the volcano also fucked up the 1816 monsoon season, which led to droughts in India and massive flooding in China. And the combination of flooding and famine left the population right for diseases like

cholera as well. Man, you know, you're part of the world as fuck when missing monsoon season is a bad thing. There's just somebody standing there like, I miss drowning. But yeah, I miss drowning. That was good. So, so the US and Canada were fucked. Snowfellow, June 6th in Albany, New York, a a cape may new jersey reported overnight frost five days in a row and late june

uh... they were important frost is far south is virginia in late august and it wasn't just that it was unusually cold the temperature was also swing in like a pendulum so like just wouldn't seem like this shit was finally gonna return to normal temperatures would drop twenty degrees your crops would freeze you'd have to like replant everything the next day. In many parts of the country, the entire growing season was reduced to fewer than 80 days. Every warm day, your neighbor Dave yells over to your yard, how about that global cooling, huh?

Right. Every cool thing you have before galloping off on a horse with tin balls hanging off its tail in a no step on a snack flag flying from its south. All right. All right. And keep in mind that we're still a decade and a half from the first American railroad at this point.

Right. So like, yes, they had plenty of warning that food shortages were on the horizon, especially in the north, but it's not like they could make up for it by just growing more shit in the Midwest. Right. First of all, there was no Midwest yet in 1815. We only had 18 states, but more importantly, there was no way to transport large amounts of food over vast distances back then, unless they were connected by navigable waterways.

And with the winter ice taken so damn long to break up, even many of those were choked off for way more of the year than usual. If we tried sending the COVID vaccine down navigable waterways. Sounds quicker. Sounds quicker. Can we do it down the navigable? It's really slacking on that. Good point. Good point. Yeah. I think Bill Gates is going for a holiday release. You know, like a business man says, yeah, I'm gonna make any money.

Exactly. Exactly. That's a fucking hard. So when harvest time finally came around in 1816, a lot of places lost between a third and two thirds of their crops. In other places, everything was lost. A lot of the corn and grain was so stunted, it wasn't even good for animal feed. Corn and grain prices skyrocketed. So it said on Wikipedia that oats that were selling for 12 cents a bushel in 1815, we're selling for 92 cents a bushel in 1860. Just a giant line for those bushels. Okay, man, you're abusing the take of penny, leave

a penny tray. This is crazy. In Canada, Quebec ran out of bread and milk all together. There were reports of Porto Viscotians boiling forage herbs to stave off starvation of the effects of the tamar are ruptures. Paper quouch has died. I really didn't care. Yeah, no, they were like, I'm not fucking boiling herbs, some other fuckers. How would that stave off starvation? Like, I'm so hungry.

Maybe more tea will help. Like, we're the raw herbs not filling. It's weird. We have to be kind of boiling. So okay, so the effects of the Timberer eruption was stick around for decades afterwards. In fact, this is one of the few areas where art history isn't just a complete waste of fucking time, because this is also the front end of the realism movement. So you can actually look at

the paintings of the time and you can watch the sunset suddenly get way more red and then way less so over the next couple of decades. You can also watch as people get way more depressed in the years immediately following all the same bummer. Sure. There have been massive studies of the surviving artwork of the time that show that 1816 is a year that a artist are using a lot more ochre and b themes got a lot more ochre and B, themes got a lot more dismal. Who's walking through a museum? Yes, this is what's known as Steven Sins down a period. Hey, great painting, Steven Sins. By the way, I love the ochre, good use of ochre must have taken a whole bunch of time. So you want a forge for some fucking herbs now?

I boiled the herbs last, I guess. I feel like the artwork of 2020 is just going to be still life paintings of sad unshaven people and pajamas titled nowhere in the damn house left to hide. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's going to be mostly memes. All right, but that wasn't the only cultural change from the year without a summer. The Wikipedia page has this huge list of downstream consequences and many of them have sort of a, you know, weird butterfly effect quality to them. But I think it's worth hinting a few of them. For example, for English aristocrats, we're on a Swiss holiday during that wet cold shitty summer of 1816. And instead of going outdoors and doing fun summery shit, they were stuck fighting

ways to keep themselves entertained indoors. And while I'm sure that led to some awesome fuck stuff, it also led to horror story writing contest that gave us Frankenstein and inadvertently launched the entire science fiction genre. I mean, to be fair, Mary Shelley had other motivations too. Good evening, all. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation, these cold, cold months with me, Lord Byron, a man who has never let his pants back or his club foot stop him from indulging his deepest darkest wants and needs.

So, I've invited two young couples and myself here in this castle, all by myself. Any ideas what we should do? Hmm? Anyone, anyone got any way we should pass the time? Hmm, hmm. Uh, what if we all go in our own rooms just, you know, individually, in our own rooms only, and we tread a novel? Oh, uh, I suppose we could do that, Mary Shelley.

But no going in anyone else's room. Yeah, till the novels are done, all in our own room. Yeah, till the novels are done, right? Right, the novels have to be done first. Stop touching my arm. Okay. Okay.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. All right, so when you consider the grain prices, we're basically the equivalent of and prices were basically the equivalent of gasoline prices back in the days of course, base transit, you can see how grade shortages contributed to the 1817 German invention of the Velocipi, the forerunner to the modern bicycle.

Guys, I am super excited to drive around in the first ever virus powered car. The Nissan Mercer. Yeah, wow. That's a great trade. We got a primitive bicycle out of it. That eventually gave us bike shorts and motorcycles. So that's insult injury. That's not an upgrade. Thinking all the way through

So it was also a major contributor to Western migration in America a disillusioned farmer streamed out into England and migrated towards the promise of better harvest to the West Vermont was as many as 15,000 residents over that period and I'm sure a lot of those people were just dead But it's also worth learning that Indiana became a state in 1816 Illinois two years later. So their swelling populations were obviously coming from somewhere among the migrating families was the Smith family of Norwich Vermont.

They were too lazy to even make it to Indiana. They settled in Palmyra, New York, where their eldest son would later pretend to find golden plates that told of the time that Jesus came to America to redeem all those lost American shoes. So without the eruption of Tim Bore. It really is. You just set it out love. That's all you need to say it out. So, but, but that means that without the eruption of Tambora, Joseph Smith would have had to pretend he found him somewhere else. So that would change history, guys. And let me say, speaking as someone born in upstate New York, you really need that market for your first big break. I was not able to find an estimate on the total death toll from the worldwide crop failures. And I can't even imagine how you'd begin to tabulate something like that since

it affected most of the Northern hemisphere. and not everybody was keeping notes back in 1815, but it's a lot of motherfuckers. All right. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, Noah, what would it be? Global warming might still give us a sweet literary genre or two before it kills us. Okay. Excellent. And are you ready for the quiz? That I am.

Okay. Noah picked a very upsetting topic this week, probably to remind us of something. What, what lesson are you trying to impart maybe for 2021? Hey, there's an enormous super volcano under Yellowstone rumbling right now. There is. That's a, or a bad, be an eight, by the way, if that one goes off, that's a fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's gonna be an eight if it the way if that one goes off that's a fuck yeah Yeah, it's gonna be an eight if it goes. Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean like a 12 or something Well, we won't you using numbers anymore

It's up to date, but yeah, yeah Be a spinal taps like it's right to 11 mother fuck that doesn't matter But that's an extinction level event so you might make a nine for that one Be never forget to enjoy the sunset. Otherwise, all those wildfires are just wasting their time. Yeah, gender, the power of great art is to document the misery of the human condition. Okay, obviously, it could be worse, but only marginally. All right, all right.

Well, yeah, no, there's a lot of good answers here, but B is never forget to enjoy the sunset. Otherwise, the wildfires are just wasting their time. And if ever anything encapsulated the year 2020, I think it's that sentence right now. I'm going to go with B. You got it. You got it. All right.

Noah, the butterfly effect of the year without summer has got me thinking so what's the bright side of COVID hey Everyone realizes how fucking useless the CDC is now See ridiculous maybe someone wrote a good book in quarantine Probably see Tiger King really got the national time and attention Tiger King really got the national time and attention. Or D all the dead Trump supporters. Okay. All right. Well, this is a comedy show.

I know. Okay. Well, we're doing a comedy show. There is nothing funny about people dying, even if they're Trump supporters, except the part where they're stopped being alive. And we're applicable to part where they suffer leading up their fucking deal with the correct day. Which one?

Yeah, he's not needed. Okay. All right. No, I got one more for you. It's talked a lot about noxious smelling geology today, which mountain smells the worst? A shatterhorn, e.l. crappy 10, c. spray 2, d. mountaine hellens, or e. ass cracketowa. Oh wow. Okay, so this was a hard essay to kind of like, you know, word out to make enough length of it to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to length of it to like actually make it work. It was all worth it to get to e-ashcrackage. That's so good.

I'm gonna go with it. I'm sorry, spray-to. It was spray-to. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, well, I believe Cecil is the winner. He's stumped Noah. Awesome. Well, let's get Tom to do next week's ass setting. Hard pass, no. All right. Well, for Noah, Cecil and Eli, I guess. I guess.

Maybe Tom seems to be boycotting his own assay. We'll find out. For all those people, however many it is, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, somebody's gonna be an expert on something else. Doing now and then, you can hear Tom Cecil on cognitive dissonance,

and you can hear Eli knowing myself on God off movies, The Skating Atheist, Skeptocrat, and D&D Minus. And if you'd like to subsidize one-fifth of Eli's terrible family planning, you can make a recommendation at patreon.com slash citation pod. If you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

Yeah, you lie next time, shoot it in your own beard. Way safer. Okay, everyone. Let's see what we've all come up with. My novel is called The Very Thick The Man, who had a very sexy time with the young couple, he invited to his catholic. What about you, Mary? What's your novel called? Oh, mine. Mine is about a monster. It's just, you know, relentlessly chasing someone all over the place. And he's really gross looking and everybody hates him. Mine too. That's

yes, so is mine. Yeah, I got the same. Everyone wrote a novel about a terrible monster that everyone hates. Seems to be what I did. Sure, yeah. Sure. Chapter one, I don't think your hump is growth at all. That's Sherry Milley.

Let me put my tongue on it. Okay. you