Well, we all know smoky skies have been huge in the news in the past few years, but what if the smoke was so intense that crops failed, animals died, and more than a hundred thousand people were lost to starvation and illness.

I'm Patty Steele.

The year without a summer is next on the backstory.

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Ah, love those clear blues. podcasts.

Ah, love those clear blue-sceyed summer days.

Haven't had a lot of that lately, have we?

We've had record wildfires out west, also in Canada, which have been blanketing us with smoke and ash recently.

But now, try to imagine so much smoke in the skies that it leads to an entire year or more without a summer and on top of that

you have absolutely no way of even knowing why it's happening. Okay it's 1816 and folks in much of North America and most of Europe saw the skies darken,

...