Free Cold by Bill Streever

England in June. And there were beautiful sunsets through the veil of stratospheric
     dust.
    Mary Shelley was holed up in Lord Byron’s lakeside retreat near Geneva in the summer of 1816. The weather kept Byron’s guests
     indoors, and he challenged them to come up with ghost stories. Shelley came up with
Frankenstein,
which was published two years later. The popular impression of the novel today is based on movies that share only the name
     and a monster with the book, but the novel starts with letters from an Arctic explorer. The explorer spots a dogsled pulling
     a strange creature, the living thing mysteriously created by Dr. Frankenstein. Writing from an icebound boat, the explorer
     soon saves Frankenstein himself from the ice. Frankenstein tells the story of his creation, of how it murdered his wife, and
     of his obsession with tracking and killing the creature. Frankenstein dies on the boat. The creature boards the boat and looks
     over its dead creator. A conversation ensues between the explorer and the creature, running a few pages. The creature, saying
     farewell not only to the explorer but to all mankind, leaps through a cabin window, landing on an ice floe, and drifts off
     into the Arctic night.
    While Shelley dreamt this up in the comfort of Byron’s home, the people outside suffered increasing hardships. Grain and potato
     prices tripled. More than thirty thousand Swiss were without jobs. They ate sorrel, a weedy vegetable then considered most
     fit for horses. They also dined on a form of lichen and, when they could get them, cats. The following year became known as
     the Year of the Beggars. In the United States, New England farms were wiped out. Thousands migrated westward toward richer
     soil. Among the migrants was Joseph Smith, who would later found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Britain
     and France, the cold weather led to food riots. Whereas wealthier individuals may have been able to feed themselves, the scarcity
     of oats made it increasingly expensive to feed horses. This made alternative forms of transportation attractive, leading Baron
     Karl Drais to invent the Draisine, also called the velocipede or
Laufmaschine
(running machine), but best described as a steerable wooden scooter. The Draisine would eventually evolve into the bicycle.
    The Year Without Summer was a harsh year during a harsh set of centuries. Centuries earlier, ending sometime around the fourteenth
     century, Europe had enjoyed temperate weather. England and France came of age during what has since been called the Medieval
     Warm Period, stretching from about 800 to around 1300. Vineyards thrived in a warmer England. Although most people depended
     on subsistence farming methods comparable to those used in the worst of today’s developing world, populations grew. With good
     weather, subsistence farming provided basic necessities as well as a surplus, and the surplus supported cathedral building,
     monks, and the development of trade. This was the period when Norse colonists settled Iceland and Greenland. During colonization,
     the shores of Iceland were often ice-free, and parts of Greenland’s coastal zone were as green as its name implies.
    But something changed. By 1300, reaching the Norse colonies meant sailing far offshore to avoid ice. The Norse settlements
     in Greenland became less green and were abandoned. In 1492, Pope Alexander VI wrote a letter about commerce to Iceland, saying
     “shipping to the country is very infrequent because of the extensive freezing of the waters — no ship having put into shore,
     it is believed, for eighty years.” Mountain glaciers expanded in Scandinavia, Alaska, China, the Andes, and New Zealand, with
     permanent mountain snow and ice occurring more than three hundred feet lower than it had just a few centuries earlier. Some
     European glaciers reportedly advanced hundreds of feet each month, even in summer. Loss of grazing land and crop failures
     from