By P Gosselin
1911 in Germany saw a hot, dry summer that lasted from spring until well into September
German blog site lokalgeschichte here looks at the German summer of 1911, which was exceptionally hot, dry and sunny. It disproves the previously widespread idea that Central Europe’s heat waves are something new and due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Germany saw extreme heat from spring until September in 1911. Symbol image, produced by Grok
Although temperatures in the summer of 1911 were very high in places (up to 40 C in Chemnitz), no new records were broken. The year 1892 had similar or even higher values (41.5C in Reichenhall). The most remarkable feature of the summer of 1911 was not the absolute maximum temperature, but the duration of the hot spell and the persistent tendency towards dry and warm high-pressure weather, which lasted from spring until well into September.
In 1911, Germany saw extreme drought, particularly in western and central Germany. In Berlin, for example, only about half of the normal precipitation fell between April and July, and only a seventh in August. Such an event occurring today would have climates alarmists blaming CO2. But, as 1911 shows, weather extremes are nothing new.
According to the article, the cause of such weather is a persistent shift of high-pressure areas over continental Europe. However, the fundamental forces that control these atmospheric currents are not yet fully understood. Although the outflow of heated air from the tropics to the poles influences the climate of the temperate zones and the conditions in higher atmospheric layers could play a role, there are still no reliable laws for accurate forecasting.
Meteorological observations over almost two centuries show that cool and warm summers occur in bunches. Examples of this are eight consecutive cool summers from 1881 to 1888 and 18 cool summers from 1730 to 1747, as well as 15 warm summers from 1756 to 1770. The climate balances itself out over longer periods of time. It’s naturally occurring.
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191 was quite warm in the UK as well – as this report shows, including a bit on a cross Channel swim:
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/long-hot-summer-the-great-british-heatwave-of-1911-5329910.html
By early September, summer was not quite ready to release its long hold on the year.
There was a feeling that month of a youthful boldness, a feeling which stretched beyond the school walls. On 6 September Thomas W Burgess, aged 37, covered in lard and stark naked except for a pair of thick motorist’s goggles and a black rubber bathing cap, stepped into the sea at Folkestone to make his 16th attempt to reach France by swimming across the Channel.
Despite numerous attempts over the last 36 years, no one had succeeded in this since Matthew Webb reached Calais in August 1875. Webb was not there to wave Burgess into the water; he had been killed in 1883 trying to swim the Niagara Falls in Canada.
Averaging a mile and three-quarters an hour and accompanied by a boat whose crew fed him a grape from time to time and 11 drops of champagne every 30 minutes, Burgess followed the irregular course dictated by the tide, a route he described as “a figure of a badly written capital M with a loop on first down stroke”.
After 37 miles and with only two and a half left to swim he sensed himself entering foreign waters, and was promptly stung badly by a cluster of poisonous pink French jellyfish. To show he was in no way offended, he asked the boat crew to start singing “La Marseillaise”, and to their accompaniment he landed on the beautiful deserted beach at Le Chatelet near Sangatte.
Ah, champagne. The preferred performance enhancement drug of 1911!
It is fortunate that sharks don’t have an affinity for the taste of lard.
Good story.
I often wondered about the claim Lord Byron made about swimming the Dardanelles. He names his witnesses and guy accompanied him as well. The four mile swim would have been quite a feat, as the Dardanelles funnels water out of the Black Sea above it, which is choked with ice well into spring. He swam in in May 1, 1810 using the breaststroke.
AI, informs us with its own droll sense of humor:
I’d forgotten since reading the poem years ago about Byron’s self-mockery. His five stanza poem alludes to the Greek channel swimmer Leander (who swims the Hellespont nightly to be with Hero on the European side). It ends:
Air heats during the day, and cools at night. Not a lot of time to move polewards. If anything, a gentle westerly motion might occur in the tropics. The hot air would also face difficulties pushing across very hot arid deserts, many of which are situated well away from the equator, and are hot enough that the air from these areas is equally likely to flow towards the equator as the poles.
Another problem might be that surface winds like the “trade winds” push air towards the Equator, rather than away from it.
It seems that “climate scientists” try to overcome these difficulties by inventing more “cells” like the Hadley cell. Rather like cycles, then epicycles, and yet more epicycles in centuries gone by.
No “heat” flowing from the equator to the poles. Otherwise, the equatorial regions would be cooler, and the poles hotter.
No hot water flowing polewards, either. Just normal physical processes at work, in a chaotic atmosphere, aquasphere, and lithosphere. Unpredictable, in any useful way.
Dang son, you are as wrong as wrong can be with this comment.
All of weather is a result of a net poleward movement of energy, principally thermal energy but also plenty of latent heat and gravitational potential energy and some kinetic energy, from the equator to the poles.
There are very well and long known patterns and principals at work.
Yes there is chaos, and some degree of unpredictability.
But there are also patterns that have held for as long as we have been observing, with plenty of randomness, but also something called organized criticality.
If I pour sand from a giant funnel onto the ground, I do not know where any particular sand grain will go, but I do know the exact angle of repose the pile will have when it gets to a certain size. I know exactly how wide it will be when it gets to 20, 30, or 50 feet tall.
I can even alter the angle of repose very predictably by choosing different grades of sand or different mineral compositions, or by changing the amount of moisture in the sand.
Sand will then fall seemingly randomly in any direction and in any amount, with occasional landslides, but overall, the shape will stay exactly the same even as individual grains go any which way.
Mainstream “climate science” is not science at all, it is quackery and jackassery, but climatology and meteorology are actual sciences, and anyone who has studied those subjects knows why what you just wrote it mostly false.
By the way, if some air in the belts of desert that encircle the globe centered on 30 degrees north and south latitude, like say, the Sahara desert, is “equally likely” to flow towards the equator as toward the pole, how does that refute what the author of the OP said?
Seems to me that is exactly the point, sometimes it flows one way, and they have one or a bunch of cool years, or a cool month, or a season, and when it instead goes the other way, well then they have the opposite, and warmer that average temps are on tap.
In fact, what may be most unlikely is exactly average conditions of temp and precip.
IN many, perhaps most places, there are wet years, and dry years. Some years the dry season is far warmer than average, and other years the dry season is far colder than average.
We could talk about the multidecadal trends in winter freezes in Florida going back to before the civil war, and how many times grower planted citrus farther and farther north year by year after decades without a hard freeze, only for disaster to strike when a decade or two comes along with devastating freezes year after year, bankrupting rich men who replanted after a killing freeze only to have there be another one, and then another, on and on for sometimes 20 years, before the next 30 years with no freezes started.
1894-1895, called to this day, simply the Great Freeze, wiped out entire towns, and caused banks to fail. The temperature in Tampico, Mexico, during that event stands to this day as the lowest latitude to ever see snow at sea level.
Great Freeze – Wikipedia
Tampico is notable for actually being within the zone of the Tropics, that is, below 23.4399 degrees of latitude….the Tropic of Cancer. That is where the sun turns around on the solstice and heads back south.
1977 had the most southerly occurrence of snow ever recorded in the US, all the way into and beyond Miami. That freeze killed avocado trees in Homestead and Florida City that were planted around the turn of the century. Oh, the Humanity! Oh, the Guacamole!
Cold wave of January 1977 – Wikipedia
But it just kept getting worse for Florida after 1977, culminating in absolutely awful freezes for most of the next 15 years or so. 1985 freeze was the end of citrus in Florida north of I-4.
That one I remember for the smell.
We had just bought the land where I built our plant nursery, north of Tampa. Hundreds of square miles of rotting oranges stunk up large swaths of the whole state for over a month.
When that freeze occurred, it was my turn to record the data at the USF weather station that month.
But what I recall most vividly was walking out of a P. Chem class in January of the next year, and seeing this crazy Y-shaped contrail off to the East. Everyone was staring at it in silence.
It was 16 degrees at our farm in Pasco county that morning, exactly due west of Cape Canaveral. I remember thinking, “The sky does not get any bluer, and clouds do not get any whiter”.
Thank you for your strange comment. Can you quote the parts you think were wrong, and provide facts to support your opinion?
No?
Yes, I could do those things.
However, I do not feel like it.
Besides, facts are not required to refute mindless noise.
How is mindless noise “refuted”?
Of course you “could”. Just like you “could” provide a consistent and unambiguous description of the “Greenhouse effect”, but you don’t feel like it.
No, you couldn’t. <g>
I suggest you take a course in fluid dynamics. It will help you understand where you get things wrong.
Than you for your unsolicited and irrelevant advice
I have assigned it a value of zero. Am I wrong?
Fluid Dynamics and a course in Heat Transfer.
Here in the UK the most recent 5 month summer happened in 1959.
Where the summer like conditions started in May where the temperatures got into the 80s, and lasted all the way through the summer where the temps got into the 90s on August 5th. Then extended into the Autumn up until the second week of October.
The usual rubbish summer in the UK – 2025
That’s the real catastrophe.
The summer is 3 days old. We have just had the sunniest and warmest Spring on record.
The only constant is the British will always be moaning about the weather.
Same for New England. Maybe Brits came here ’cause they love crappy weather. 🙂
Actually, we can expect a surge in immigration from UK in near term for the same reasons they came hundreds of years ago. Bad political leaders.
OK as long as they’re not Puritans. (I consider green energy fanatics as Puritans).
Summer doesn’t begin for about 3 weeks.
Your thinking of midsummers day. Metrology usually defines the summer as starting June 1st.
Metrology? The Summer Solstice is June 20th this year. “Your” should be “you’re.”
I think he is talking about something the climate liars on The Weather Channel made up called “meteorological Summer.”
Not sure why, since it is based on our calendar, nothing meteorological.
And things made up informally do not, strictly speaking have “definitions”.
No idea why anyone thinks we needed to a new way to define seasons, layered onto the method used for thousands of years, which is based on when the Sun crosses the Equator, or when it reaches one of the Tropic latitudes and turns around.
It should be called calendar Summer if anything.
Of course, we have long has the unofficial start and end of Summer be Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day Weekend.
So now we have a third which is called something it has nothing to do with.
They need crap to talk about on 24/7 weather channels.
“Metrology”
Well done on spotting my typos, I put a lot of effort into them.
Of course I meant meteorological summer, given we are talking about the weather, rather than astronomy.
But if you want to insist that summer doesn’t start until the solstice. you really have to ask how strativarius can be claiming that 2025 has been a rubbish summer.
“the climate liars on The Weather Channel made up”
It’s a simple definition that’s been around since the 18th century. It’s no more arbitrary than designating the solstice as the start of summer. It fits in with the practice of giving monthly figures, and it agrees with the actual seasonal changers better.
“No idea why anyone thinks we needed to a new way to define seasons, layered onto the method used for thousands of years”
For most of that time the seasons were based on the mid points between solstices and equinoxes. Summer started early May, and mid summer’s day is the 24th June.
As I commented at NoTricksZone, the USA also had a deadly heatwave in 1911.
As France had too, also linked in the comments there.
But it seems to have been Europe wide, as in 2003.
Remarkable graphic creation by Grok. It would attract attention in a gallery. It seems to be a scene of some significant moment or episode, but there is only a hint of it and there’s no real clue what it might be. The way its positioned the figures, and their clothing.
Remarkable also for showing that in historical times, the actual original populations of Europe and the UK was not these johnny come lately white boyz n gurlz, but persons of color.
Rewriting history has to start somewhere, and a picture truly is worth about a million words.
We gonna need some reparations up in this here jawn!
Maybe the AI bots should stick to making photographs of a racially diverse Nazi SS.
I’m surprised it didn’t show this one
🤣🤣🤣
It was pretty bad on the UK as well
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_United_Kingdom_heatwave
And in NE America.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_Eastern_North_America_heat_wave
Interesting, one cause of weather variation is air flows from the Arctic which tend to tongue, often eastern NA and western Europe have same variation whereas centre of NA will be opposite.
Thankyou.
Funny how the temperature trends are based in the 1850 to 1880 time frame that was the coldest spell in the 19th century.
Now they move the trend into the 1700s, which was even colder.
Anything during “The Little Ice Age” which “conveniently” is “pre industrial” is the ultimate cherry-pick, and provides the “suggestion” to the uninformed and misinformed that the Industrial Revolution is the “cause” of the warming from the depths of The Little Ice Age.
Meanwhile, The Little Ice Age was the coldest period during The Holocene, and IT is the “anomalous” climate, NOT today’s thankfully warmer climate (which we should be thankful for instead of panicked about).
Oh and the inconvenient truth is that the warming STARTED NEARLY A CENTURY BEFORE the Industrial Revolution, which exposes the truth about it being natural, not man-made.
Maybe Mother Nature is prescient. 🙂
They once blamed bad weather on witches. “Climate change” is the 21st Century equivalent of witches, with the “activists masquerading as scientists” taking the places of the religious “authorities” of the past.
“Climate Scientists” are still religious authorities.
Major heatwaves regularly occur at heliocentric T-squares of the Jovian planets. The greatest known European heatwave in 1540 was the same type as in 1757 (Paris), 1936 (US), and 2006 (UK+Euro). 1934, 1949, 1976, 2003, and 2018 were another type.
2011 was a slightly oblique cross of all four gas giants. The mechanisms involve stronger solar wind states driving positive NAO/AO conditions.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQemMt_PNwwBKNOS7GSP7gbWDmcDBJ80UJzkqDIQ75_Sctjn89VoM5MIYHQWHkpn88cMQXkKjXznM-u/pub
1911:
No doubt the alarmists will soon be assuring us that this type of summer helped trigger World War One, the rise of the Nazi party during the 1920s and ’30s, World War 2 and you name it. Why pass up the opportunity to attribute something totally unrelated to a widespread catastrophe.
This is not unlike an improbable ‘run’ of heads or tails in coin flipping. It happens!