Oh we’re doomed I tell ya! We’re gonna fry!
The 1540 ‘megadrought’ heatwave that saw vicars beg God for rain and soldiers guard water fountains
The hot weather in 2022 has a long way to go before it challenges the summer of 1540, which saw people collapsing in fields from the heat
Environment Correspondent
July 13, 2022 5:05 pm(Updated July 15, 2022 2:12 pm)
People across the UK and Europe are sweltering under a blazing heatwave that scientists are warning could be the start of a record-breaking summer of high temperatures.
The latest weather predictions are worrying, but at least in modern times there are scientists to make sense of the forecasts. For people in 1540, the year of the hottest summer ever recorded, it would have seemed like the apocalypse had arrived.
By November 1539, residents in southern Italy and Spain knew something was wrong. It was winter, but no rain had arrived. Winter in Italy was dry and warm, “like July”, according to one record from the time.
A few months later, people in Northern Europe also began to panic. Week after week, month after month, no rain fell.
It was to be the start of the worst drought in European history. Throughout Europe, from the UK to Poland, eleven months passed with hardly any rain and blistering temperatures.
Trees shed their leaves in the height of summer, grapes withered on the vine, the river Rhine in Germany shrank to 10 per cent of its normal volume.
Vicars begged for rain during Sunday sermons, soldiers were deployed to guard water fountains, and villagers in France hid in their cellars to escape the daytime heat.
Catholics and Protestants accused each other of arson as wildfires swept through villages. There were kidnappings and reprisal killings, and villagers barricaded themselves into their homes in fear of the violence. Dysentry from contaminated water killed thousands of people, and farm labourers collapsed while working in the fields.
Worst of all was the food shortages, said Dr Oliver Wetter, a research associate at the University of Bern.
“There was not enough water in most of the rivers, so people couldn’t grind their grain anymore,” he told i. “Grain and bread prices rose, and poorer people couldn’t afford the basic food.”
It is tricky for scientists to establish exactly how high temperatures climbed in 1540, because they are relying on diary accounts of rainfall and heat levels rather than recordings from thermometers, which hadn’t been invented.
What they can say is that temperatures that year were five or six degrees above the seasonal median average, Dr Wetter explained. To put that into context, the next hottest summer in 2003 saw temperatures three degrees above the median. It was “unbelievable”, Dr Wetter said. “That is really, really, really warm.”
Dr Wetter believes the freak weather of 1540 was caused by a collapse in the jet stream, causing hot, dry weather to hang stubbornly over the continent, blocking cooler Atlantic weather systems from passing. There was about a one in one thousand likelihood of such an event occurring in a pre-Industrial world.
But climate change means we have to be prepared for this to happen more frequently, Dr Wetter told i, pointing to studies suggesting that the jet stream stalled in the summers of 2003, 2015, and 2018, bringing extreme weather including heatwaves and droughts to Europe.
This week, scientists warned that Europe, including the UK, could be in for a summer as hot as 2003, with Met Office meteorologist telling i the region could be facing a “historic, even unprecedented” season of heat.
Dr Wetter, a climate scientist, believes it is only a matter of time before an apocalyptic summer like that of 1540 is upon us. Research suggests such a summer in modern society that would bring widespread and lengthy blackouts, severe water shortages, and the mass death of animals.
“To my opinion, we haven’t seen anything quite as bad as 1540 yet,” Dr Wetter said. “But we are clearly going in this direction. Unfortunately I am quite convinced that we will see similar things in the near future.”
Original article: https://inews.co.uk/news/1540-megadrought-heatwave-beg-for-rain-1739942
And today, after a few days heat in the UK (here in the borders of Scotland, we have around mid/late 20s) people are going nuts about the heat. Of course, what has made them do so? The media and the UK government proclaiming a national emergency (the first of its kind) while the criteria for declaring such was, coincidently, just introduced in July last year. Oh what a wicked web we weave!
People on twitter (including MPs like Nadia Whittome) would be wearing sandwich boards declaring “The end is nigh” if this were some decades ago before twitter or the internet.
Anyhow, back to the article: Did we have an industrial revolution in 1540? No, I don’t think we did. Did Henry VIII declare a climate emergency? No, I don’t think he did. A 1000/1 chance in a pre industrial world – but it happened.
This is 2022 and Madeleine is trying to suggest we could see 1540 again. However, what’s more concerning is that our governments, in league with the WEF and UN, are going to use this as justification for all manners of shortages.
It’s a war alright, it’s just not a climate war but a class war. Unless you wake up to that fact and we start organising, you’re as good as dead.
There is a far greater chance of this being anthropogenic geoengineering than actual anthropogenic climate change.
From the moment ‘Covid’ hit, I knew they were going to ‘turn up the heat’ big time. Few listened and few are still listening. It beats me how few people are saying “How the hell is all of this happening at once?” and that they still can’t put 2 and 2 together.
Earthling 
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