1816, the Year without a Summer

On the science angle for those unfamiliar:

Luigi Galvani investigated the connection between living creatures and electricity. Earlier scientists had observed that static electricity and lightning were the same phenomenon. Galvani made frog legs twitch by applying two dissimilar metals. He came to the conclusion that animals generate electricity conducted by the metals. Alessandro Volta believed the opposite causation: that the setup generated the electricity and the legs reacted. Volta invented the battery after experimenting with various elements as the metals. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini carried on his work and even experimented on the body of a condemned prisoner.

I had always thought the rise of Frankenstein's monster was a hilariously nonsensical application of the literary device of extending scientific explanations of natural phenomenon into magic (e.g. endless potential of atomic everything in the 50s, electric disturbances in ghost movies, reversing the polarity, quantum mechanics, genetic engineering, endless applications for graphene). We all know that lightning kills and injures. But it's not such a random jump between hearing of a corpse flinching, making a fist, and opening an eye (Aldini); and writing a horror story about a crazed scientist reversing death.

Funnily enough it turns out that all living things do generate electricity through pumping out sodium ions and pumping in potassium ions, creating a voltage across their cell membranes. But nowhere near enough to be observable on a macro scale.

I've never heard that before. i will have to search for it!

1. Far fewer people subsistence farm so they're not one bad harvest away from famine 2. Not all areas would have complete crop failure; IIRC in 1816 "America's Breadbasket" (such as it was at that time) had a relatively easier time of it 3. We have a much better system of distributing information now and easy ways to transport seeds/cuttings. We could probably replace some of the lost crops with alternatives that were cold-tolerant or needed less sunlight if we knew what was coming. In 1816 even if you had a cold-tolerant grain variety there were fewer avenues to inform farmers and get them the seeds. 4. We also understand how to grow mushrooms at scale and farm fish at scale. 5. We have industrial processes. The capability to synthesize food here is probably far less than people assume (a lot of feedstock comes from the food industry) but it would help some. 6. We have TBMs capable of creating a vast network of underground tunnels where it would stay warmer and avoid freezing; doing this by hand would take many years. 7. In a worst-case scenario where billions would be expected to die: we can say "fuck it" and build a vast array of nuclear power plants to provide artificial light in tunnel or vertical farm operations. This would normally be a huge waste of resources when sunlight is plentiful. 8. We have satellites and much better weather forecasting abilities, plus a reasonable understanding of vulcanism. Unlike 1815 if we saw an eruption like this today we would know that the next few summers were going to be cold and crops would be at risk. We could immediately begin canning and preserving the huge quantities of food that normally get thrown out, used as cattle feed, processed into ethanol, etc.

There wouldn't be a silver bullet. We'd need a combination of techniques and less developed countries would probably bear the brunt of the suffering.

It is also possible the huge and growing moron class would buy food and throw it away just to thumb their nose at "da gubbmit fer tryin' to tell meh what tado", and politicians would claim the jury is still out on this "climate" stuff, then we end up with a global catastrophe despite possessing the resources to prevent it. After all: we are perfectly capable of feeding everyone alive right now but we don't, not even in a first-world country like the USA.

The world is much richer overall and food production per capita is probably much higher. The world is much better connected, both in information (winter is coming!) and flow of goods. There would be far less hunger, although in a capitalist world people on the margin would still get squeezed.

Also, a few years of cooling might counteract global warming a little, although this would probably end up just giving more fuel to the "keep calm and burn coal" camp. Not much point in installing solar panels when the sky is dark.