Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death

1816 was the year the crops simultaneously failed in Western Europe, North America and China. Approximate European fatality total was 200,000 deaths with an unknown (to me) number of deaths in other places in the northern hemisphere.

Food riots broke out in the United Kingdom and France, and grain warehouses were looted. The violence was worst in landlocked Switzerland, where famine caused the government to declare a national emergency.

Rice production in Yunnan province was devastated, resulting in widespread famine. Heilongjiang province, reported fields disrupted by frost and conscripts deserting as a result. Summer snowfall was reported in various locations in Jiangxi and Anhui provinces, both in the south of the country. On Taiwan, which has a tropical climate, snow was reported in Hsinchu and Miaoli, while frost was reported in Changhua.

The New England corn crop failed and in other places very low yields were reported.

Severe summer climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F), resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.

It is believed that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.

On the plus side, the lack of oats to feed horses may have inspired the German inventor Karl Drais to research new ways of horseless transportation, which led to the invention of the draisine or velocipede. This was the ancestor of the modern bicycle and a step toward mechanised personal transport

The above is adapted from this Wikipedia page. I'd never heard of it before stumbling on it today. 

There's obvious parallels to the effects that global warming are expected to have on agriculture in the years to come. The big difference is that 1816 was clearly an act of nature and nothing we could have done would have changed the climatic outcome. Europe was hit more severely by the crop shortage than it might have otherwise been  because the economy was still recovering from the Napoleonic wars, but the shortages would still have happened.

This article is largely a reproduction of excerpts from a Wikipedia page and is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Kids Going To School Hungry in NZ

It boggles my mind that in New Zealand we can't manage to ensure that every child gets breakfast, especially given that we as individuals donate so much to support starving children overseas. Are we just ignorant about the problems or do we choose to pretend that all is for the best in this country.

Today's Herald has this:

"A children's lobby group says New Zealanders should stop blaming the parents of hungry children and allow their tax money to be used to feed children in the poorest schools."More at NZ Herald

It also has two other related reports More Schools Feeding Children with more information on the failure in childs lives and this report on how Dominos has stepped up after rival Hell Pizza backed out of a sponsorship deal for kidscan as they had doubts about exactly how much of their money actually got to kids.

There's another article on a charity that feeds children:

"Takanini mother of five Bronca Fox started feeding hungry children from a local caravan park who came to her door a decade ago. Today, her charity feeds 250 children at five local schools."

Neither corporate sponsorship nor charity, of course are the answer here. We need to set up reliable systems that will ensure the children are fed and that, unfortunately given today's reality, means it has to be a properly funded professional exercise. $14 million divided by 2 million tax payers is $7 each a small price to pay to help the most needing of our citizens.

I'm not interested at the moment in getting into the reasons why parents can't feed their children. This isn't the time to look for blame, this is the time to act.

Pasta Strainer Deemed Religious Headgear

According to the NZ Herald, pasta strainers are now considered suitable religious headgear in Austria ... at least for drivers licence photographs.

It took him 3 years but Niko Alm an Austrian Pastafarian has finally received his laminated drivers licence card showing him wearing an upturned pasta strainer on his head after the driving authorities ruled the kitchen utensil was a suitable religious accessory for a Pastafarian.

So what now?

• Will the French ban pasta strainers?
• Will the Australians enact laws to allow traffic police to demand they are removed for identification purposes?
• Will pastafarian motorcyclists demand the right to wear these instead of crash helmets?

At least I know the answer to my next question
Q: Will stupidity never end?

A: No, or at least not while I've got this blog going.

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Update:  Niko Alm has blogged about this (In German) here. There's a picture of the licence on the page.

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Another update: According to this article in German the story isn't quite as reported or claimed on the website and has grossly exaggerated:

Even the rumored three-year waiting period was, according to the Vienna Police Department is not correct. "The license is completed since October 2009. He was not only picked up" (Google Translate)