What counts?
Chicken or Egg? War at sea came first!
Thesis
The butterfly effect may offer explanations in a
number of events, but not for what happened in autumn 1939, when modern
war machinery drove the Northern Hemisphere into a cold January 1940,
and North Europe into an arctic winter. A major climatic shift started
on September 1st, and no other event laid the nucleus than the war at
sea in Europe’s home waters. ‘Unusual’ occurrences indicate that the
weather reacted erratically when the new player, a modern and mighty
military machinery, arrived on the ‘weather making scene’.
Facts
The months before the war started were normal. Nothing
unusual had happened. Then, out in the North Atlantic, big battle ships
shelled enemy vessels, submarines torpedoed them. Suddenly a hurricane
rushed over the Atlantic, or a squall aroused and shifted the weather.
This is difficult to prove by single events. But it can be shown that
it rained excessively along the Western Front where two million
soldiers were amassed. It rained twice and three times as much as
usual, few weeks later the United States experienced a record drought.
Only a few hundred kilometres to the north (Helgoland
Bight, Southern Baltic Sea) the weather was different. In the regions
where the war at sea was ‘turning the sea about’, the nucleus for the
arctic winter was laid, by blocking Atlantic cyclones from passing and
exhausting the sea from summer heat.
The war under the Arctic Circle the Russian force on
Finland in December 1939 demonstrates that the weather reacted
erratically to war during the polar winter. However, the impact
remained regional, like the major earthquake in Turkey on December 27th
1939. The conditions for the winter were by then already laid in the
North and Baltic Sea, forcing Atlantic cyclones either to move north or
to the Mediterranean Sea.
Evidence
The facts are discussed in several papers (see below),
which put a number of significant events during the first four war
months in a wider, and more detailed ‘weather modification’ context.
What caused what, what was first, chicken or egg? No serious aspect
should be ignored. In weighting every ‘force’ it becomes even more
convincing clear, that nothing but ‘turning the sea up-side down’ made
the war winter 1939/40 an arctic one.
Conclusion and further reading
The atmosphere is a complex matter, but a war at sea
is a too great a force not to leave any traces on ‘winter making’, or
to separate it from possible side effects. Cyclones and shells (2_21), and Rain-Making (2_31), and USA dried out (2_32), and Russia- Finnish war, and Turkey
quake (2_51), and Violent weather (2_52).
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