Theres been a lot of discussion about climate change, population growth etc. The following is part of an article written by Gillen D'Arcy Wood. If something like this were to happen today, I don't believe our civilization would survive it intact.
To be alive in the years 1816-18, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. Across the globe during the so-called “Year Without a Summer”—which was, in fact, a three-year climate crisis—harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on hedgehogs and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march. One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the long, cold, crop-killing days by the fire writing ghost stories. Despite the fame of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein—the signature literary production of the “Year Without a Summer”—the global scope of the climate emergency in the immediate post-Waterloo period remains little known.
1816 was a time when the overwhelming majority of the world’s population depended on subsistence agriculture, living precariously from harvest to harvest. When the crops failed that year, and again the next, starving rural legions from China to Ireland swarmed out of the countryside to market towns to beg for alms or sell their children in exchange for food. Famine-friendly diseases cholera and typhus stalked the globe from India to Italy, while the price of bread and rice, the world’s staple foods, skyrocketed with no relief in sight. Across a European continent devastated by the Napoleonic wars, tens of thousands of unemployed veterans found themselves unable to feed their families. They gave vent to their desperation in town square riots and military-style campaigns of arson, while governments everywhere feared revolution. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death,” while Germans called 1817 “The Year of the Beggar.” In terms of its enduring presence in folklore, as well as its status in the scientific literature, 1816’s cold summer was the most significant meteorological event of the nineteenth century. The global climate emergency period of 1816-18, as a whole, offers us a clear window onto a world convulsed by weather anomalies, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden, radical shifts in weather patterns, and to a consequent tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation and unrest.
For the rest of the article- http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=gillen-darcy-wood-1816-the-year-without-a-summer