Horse-drawn carriages must have caused a Megadrought in Europe in 1540, right?

View of the Hunger Stone on the Elbe in Děčín. The stone marks the low water levels of the Elbe with different dates.

By Jo Nova

Using United Nations Science ^TM — who can deny that the megadrought of 1540 was a man-made creation? Freakish weather was the new norm. The 1530s was described as one of the driest decades of the last 500 years. Bushfires raged, cattle starved, rivers dried up, and people died of dysentery. The hunger stones appeared on the bottom of the Elbe River (again). The Rhine dried up in parts so people could walk across.

In 1535 one drought caused a famine so bad that in Transylvania dead bodies “littered the roads” and men and women wandered the streets, mad with hunger, eating cats, dogs and supposedly even other people.

Religious leaders called it “end times” — other leaders searched for scapegoats. Those in charge started looking for secret symbols of organized arsonists they could blame for the fires. Water was so scare that some towns banned laundering of clothes. Apparently “everything stank”. And all this was in the midst of the Little Ice Age and with no coal plants in sight for another 300 years.

The 1540 event is famous with climate scientists, not that they mention it much, possibly because it was so awful and they can’t blame CO2. At least one expert in The Smithsonian suggests that people may have forgotten the worst drought in 500 years because the weather in the next fifty years got even more horrid as things got colder.

On the plus side, they invented a new Spätlese style of sweet wine in 1540 because the fruit dried on the vine and they waited for more rain before harvesting it. Apparently it was so delicious people drank “like pigs” and lay in the gutters.

The 1540 megadrought brought mass suffering to the continent

The Smithsonian

Occurring during a stretch of unusually warm summers in the midst of Europe’s “Little Ice Age,” a period of global cooling and extreme weather that affected the continent between the 14th and 19th centuries, the 1540 drought’s heat was so extreme that even state-of-the-art climate models could not predict it when fed nearly 1,200 years of climate data.

n a 2014 paper that calls the drought a “worst case,” Pfister and his colleagues showed that rainfall was down by as much as 80 percent in some regions. Rivers like the Rhine, Elbe and Seine dried up to the point that people could wade across them on foot. The Thames was so low that the sea flowed inland and reversed the river’s direction.

Like today, receding waters revealed lost treasures from previous generations. Chroniclers marveled when, on the shores of the shrinking Lake Constance, a woman named Anna Schmid came across 900 silver coins from the time of Emperor Augustus.

Away from the water, there was little silver lining. Farmers’ fields became so dry that giant cracks deep enough to swallow people’s legs appeared in the soil. That dried-up earth reflected even more heat into the atmosphere, feeding an unbearable heatwave that the Protestant reformer Martin Luther interpreted as a sign of the end times. Officials ordered clergy in Germany, Italy and England to beg God for forgiveness and pray for the deliverance of rain.

The extreme heat meant that by the usual harvest time, grapes in Germany and France had dried almost to raisins. The resulting “late harvest,” or Spätlese, wine was deliciously sweet.

Food was in similarly short supply. With nowhere to pasture, cattle died of heat stroke and hunger, decimating Europe’s dairy supply.

As if famine wasn’t enough, Europeans were also chased from their homes by forest and structural fires—the most in any peacetime year since at least 1000 C.E. One blaze reduced the entire German town of Einbeck “to ashes in a matter of hours,” causing as many as 500 deaths, wrote Pfister in 2017.

With tens of thousands left unhoused, unemployed and often diseased, local leaders quickly gave in to paranoia to explain the calamities. Authorities searched for the alleged secret symbols of mordbrenner, or organized arsonists, whom they blamed for setting fires.

 Read it all 

Lest we forget…  Europe has always had extreme weather.

Related posts:

• Megadroughts were longer and deeper in the last 2000 years.
• The 1540 Megadrought in Europe: Rhine ran dry, fires burned, and no one blamed coal or beef steak

Photo caption: The oldest legible inscription dates from 1616. Older inscriptions (1417, 1473) were rubbed off over time by ships at anchor. The stone is also inscribed with the saying “Girl, do not cry and do not complain, when it is dry, spray the field”. This saying was probably made in 1938 by the pump manufacturer Frantisek Sigmund. The saying was based on the older saying “If you see me, then cry”. The Deciner Hungerstein is one of the oldest hydrological monuments on the Elbe. The Tyrš Bridge and Shepherd’s Wall can be seen in the background.