As most of you know, I live in Massachusetts.  After a recent trip to California to help move my military kids from Camp Lejeune to Camp Pendleton, I developed ‘weather envy’.  San Diego is an unbelievably beautiful place with an awesome climate.  It didn’t make my return home any easier when the weather in Massachusetts didn’t seem to understand the concept of warm and sunny.  (About 78 with no humidity and lots of sunshine would be really good!)

Well, today I read in Power Line that Minnesota isn’t having summer either.  According to the article, 1816 was the “year without a summer,” and this year is following the same pattern.  The article lists the possible causes of the 1916 lack of summer:

“The year 1816 is still known to scientists and historians as “eighteen hundred and froze to death” or the “year without a summer.” It was the locus of a period of natural ecological destruction not soon to be forgotten. During that year, the Northern Hemisphere was slammed with the effects of at least two abnormal but natural phenomena. These events were mysterious at the time, and even today they are not well understood.

First, 1816 marked the midpoint of one of the Sun’s extended periods of low magnetic activity, called the Dalton Minimum. This particular minimum lasted from about 1795 to the 1820s. It resembled the earlier Maunder Minimum (about 1645-1715) that was responsible for at least 70 years of abnormally cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere. The Maunder Minimum interval is sandwiched within an even better known cool period known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about the 14th through 19th centuries.

But the event that most severely shaped 1816’s cold phenomena was the cata-strophic eruption the previous year of Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, in modern-day Indonesia. The ash clouds and sulfur aerosols spewed by this volcano were widespread, chilling the climate of the Northern Hemisphere by blocking sunlight with gases and particles.”

It seems to me that we need to admit that we do not totally understand climate cycles.  We also need to realize that although clean air is a really good idea, we do not need to cripple the worldwide economy to bring about results we are unsure of to solve a problem that may not exist.  Sometmes the idea that we as people can control everything gets in the way of clear thinking.