Ill winds blowing

While Tropical Storm / Hurricane Isaac directly disrupts the lives of millions of Americans it is also posing a challenge of the organizers of the Republican National Convention currently under way in Tampa Florida. This brings to mind the question: What weather events have had the greatest impact on human history?

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Comments

[Froborr]

Whichever one caused the lightning strike that provided the energy for the formation of the first amino acids on Earth?

To be honest, I am hard-pressed to think of any storms-that-changed-history that don't fall into the realm of "probably legendary" (e.g., the Jews under Deborah vs. the... Hittites, IIRC? under Sisera, or the kamikaze taking out the Mongol fleet about to invade Japan) or "more climate in general than specific storms" (e.g., attempts to invade Russia in winter).

Wasn't there something about mud at Waterloo? Prevented the cannons from something or other? But then, that probably didn't change history very much; Napoleon's empire was already stretched pretty thin at that point.

[Amaryllis]

Folklore says, the storms that blew back the Spanish Armada and the winter weather that met Napoleon in Russia:

He took three hundred thousand men,
And kings likewise to bear his train,
He was so well provided for,
That he could sweep the world for gain;
But when he came to Moscow,
He was overpowered by the sleet and snow,
With Moscow all a-blazing,
And he lost the Bonny Bunch of Roses, O.

But I expect that history says it's more complicated than that.

[cjmr]

The most recent Ice Age.

Krakatoa. (says cjmr's husband, who just read a book on it)

Winter in Russia during any war in which someone from the west is trying to conquer Russia.

[Amaryllis, spamflagging]

Possibly problematic spam above, 09:21

[Amaryllis]

Krakatoa, hmmm?

Well, if Vesuvius had never erupted, Bulwer-Lytton wouldn't have written The Last Days of Pompeii. But since, as Wikipedia tells me, we would still have "It was a dark and stormy night" (Paul Clifford) and "The pen is mightier than the sword" (Richelieu), I guess our heritage of purple prose wouldn't have missed it too much.

[Firedrake]

As far as the Armada goes, the wind during the battles doesn't seem to have favoured either side particularly. However, the storms after the battle turned a defeat for the Spanish into a demoralising rout.

1816 - The Year Without a Summer - seems to have been a combination of the Tambora eruption and a solar low. Food riots in the UK and France, a national emergency in Switzerland, frost in August, a typhus epidemic in Ireland that killed 100,000 over the next three years. In the longer term, Turner's yellow sunsets, the Shelley-Byron-Polidori wet summer holiday leading to Frankenstein and Dracula, Karl Drais possibly inspired by lack of horses to start developing the velocipede, and thousands of farmers from New England set out for upper New York and the Northwest Territory (Upper Midwest in modern parlance). Including the family of Joseph Smith.

[wendy, last of the Eisenhower republicans]

Weren't there a couple of storms (or fog banks) that helped George Washington's forces by a lot? Like the time the continental army was able to escape from Manhattan to Long Island (or maybe it was the other way around) because the British Navy couldn't see them?

If the American Revolution had ended up being a failed colonial uprising, the leaders hanged and most of the soldiers sent to Australia... the world would be a very different place.

[bluefrog]

There does seem to be pretty good archaeological evidence for the Mongol attempt to invade Japan, and if Japanese records say it was foiled by a "Divine Wind," why should we doubt that the storms came?

http://www.archaeology.org/0301/etc/kamikaze.html

[Lonespark]

Weather history facts are awesome! This thread is great.

In college always talked about the Little Ice Age, and how it had affected the climate of the Southwestern US and thereby European settlement and economic trends. And it had a huge impact on Greenland and Scandinavia, probably changing the course of history somehow there.

[Lonespark]

The Dust Bowl, also. Which I understand was partly human-generated, but still a climate event. (Said weather above when I meant climate, then realized the OP says weather. But I think we should discuss both because they are related and fascinating.)

[Froborr]

Huh, I was unaware that there was archeological evidence and Chinese and Mongol references--I'd somewhere picked up the impression that only Japanese sources had records of it, and been rather skeptical. I'm still highly skeptical of the claimed troop numbers involved, but I happily withdraw the "probably legendary" on the event itself.

[Froborr]

Just to clarify, the emphasis of "only Japanese sources" should be on "only." My skepticism tingles whenever a major event involves more than one record-keeping culture, but only one of them writes it down.

[Ross]

THe "Little Ice Age", IIRC, was also responsible for the invention of buttons. And, indirectly, feudalism. (Once it got too cold for "Let's all sleep on the floor in one big building with a fire pit at the center" to work, you have to start building buildings with rooms and tapestries and fireplaces and prime real estate, and you start getting things like "The chief sleeps in a private room on a padded platform in front of his personal fire, because it's warmer than sleeping on straw on the floor with the proles")

[Lonespark]

Buttons? My curiousity is piqued.

[Ross]

@Lonespark: Nothing tremendously surprising; it got very cold, so there was a sudden impetus to make shirts that were too snug to just pull over your head, and that sealed up more weather-tightly than you can do with laces, so around that time, you started seeing the first functional buttons (Ornamental buttons are *much* older)

[Dragoness Eclectic]

Y'know, while sitting tight in my house for three days watching the rain fall and the wind howl outside, wondering how far inland the storm surge was going to come, and when would we lose power, while nothing but Hurricane Isaac coverage was on TV 24/7.... I couldn't give a flying f**k about the hypothetical problems of the Republican Convention.

I'd vote the Younger Dryas, which may have forced people in the Middle East to develop agriculture. Or the Neolithic Subpluvial, which nurtured the early Nile Valley cultures that eventually became the Old Kingdom of Egypt.