  the year 1816 is known as the year without a summer (also the poverty year, the summer that never was, year there was no summer, and eighteen hundred and froze to death), because of severe summer climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4â0.7&nbsp;Â°c (0.7â1.3&nbsp;Â°f). this resulted in major food shortages across the northern hemisphere. evidence suggests 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 by the 1815 eruption of mount tambora, in the dutch east indies (indonesia), the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years. ==description== the year without a summer was an agricultural disaster. historian john d. post has called this, "the last great subsistence crisis in the western world".evans, robert blast from the past, smithsonian magazine. july 2002, p. 2 the unusual climatic aberrations of 1816 had the greatest effect on most of new england, atlantic canada, and parts of western europe. typically, the late spring and summer of central and northern new england and southeastern canada are relatively stable: temperatures (average of both day and night) average between about 68 and 77&nbsp;Â°f (2
19th-century_volcanic_events Anomalous_weather Climate_history Famines Summer Weather_events_in_the_United_States