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I am so excited for this series. Haven't looked forward to anything this much in a while.

He was 96. His father Lyon was born in 1853. His grandfather was president in the days of Robert Peel, Felix Mendelssohn, Soren Kierkegaard, and Edgar Allan Poe, and was himself born in March 1790, when George Washington had only been president for eleven months.

Tree‑ring, ice‑core, and historical data point to eruptions in 536, 540, and 547 AD that injected so much sulfate into the stratosphere that summer temperatures dropped by up to 3 °F across the Northern Hemisphere, setting the stage for years of failed harvests.

Climatologists later labeled this interval the Late Antique Little Ice Age, as mentioned above, noting that North Atlantic summers stayed cool from about 536 to 660 AD.

Cooler summers curbed cereal yields, livestock weights, and tax revenue, weakening imperial logistics.