E11  Summary 
Draft 05 April 2011

The European winter 1941/42 is a win-win case for climate researcher. Since September 1941 to March 1942 the war was in the months 24 to 30. With more front lines, with newly developed and more weaponry, with more men in arm, and many industries entirely reorganised to serve the war machinery of the many countries at war world wide, man not only challenged their enemy, mankind challenged nature. Any objective observer viewing the earth as a whole, would not have hesitated to conclude that mankind was running a grand experiment on the weather and the climate with great success. The third war winter offers ample proof for that. 

A summary for the winter 1941/42 could also go this way. The year 1941 was a year of the climate, in the worst  possible sense. After bombing the winter 1939/40 into arctic conditions, man proved during the winter 1941/42 once again that human kind is able to influence the weather. That happened although the overall physical conditions of the atmosphere, the seas and the oceans had not necessarily be longer in the same ‘natural’ condition as they had been before WWII commenced respectively during the first few months. Insofar the first war winter was special. The second and third war winter not less. Two years into the war, many thousand warfare activities in Europe and elsewhere generated not only a murderous environment for man, but a situation, which in an abstract sense, was a huge experiment with climate.  Man interfered heavily in the atmosphere, and in the marine environment. Many millions soldiers with sophisticated means, changed the ‘natural’ hydrological status in the ocean and the atmosphere. No human being could ever have planed and run such huge practical experiment. But persons with ruthless and criminal potential, and completely unaware, and too stupid to know what they are doing, just did it.  During 1941 the world run a third experiment in row. The means were not mere theory and modelling, but practical.  The European got another though arctic winter. The experiment proved  a thorough success.

The year 1941 had been full of events. Many of the thousands may, if they are categorised and accumulated, have had an effect in the oceans and hydrological status and dynamics. In the waters off Western Europe coasts, and in the North and Baltic Sea, the  events appeared in such a masse in a fairly confined region, that it did not proved too difficult to link the activities and the result. The result is so obvuois that it is possible that it was handed to climatology on a plate. A cold region stretched from the United Kingdom eastward  via the Baltic Sea to the Caucasus throughout the year 1941. The conditions went worst during the winter season 1941/42. In some locations it became the coldest on record, with the worst sea ice conditions in the Baltic Sea ever observed.  While the lowest temperature region can be precisely located as stretching from Copenhagen to Moscow, it was possible to identify the physical source that ultimately brought the most excessive temperature conditions of this winter about, the Baltic Sea. Together with the support of the North Sea and sea areas further westwards, Northern Europe temperature deviated strongly negative against the general global position, which was well above the average. 

This all to happen was anthropogenic. What is meant by human activities was exemplified by giving an overview of the naval warfare situation together with observed and analysed meteorological condition. However, the relevance of the naval war thesis can be evidentially demonstrated by the prevailing condition in the eastern part of the Baltic Sea during the second half of the year 1941. After extensive naval activities during the first few months in WWII, were heavily surpassed by the  military operation in the marine environment of the Baltic since the war between Germany and Russia had started in June 1941. For more than six months innumerable drama happened in the eastern Baltic with unaccounted sea mine, depth change, and bomb explosion, and a destruction of about 400 military and merchant ships. That was pressure on the marine environment of unprecedented scale, with significant changes of the common status, particularly the heat capacity.  Since early January 1941 arctic air could flow in freely. The Baltic had lost completely its usual mean to transfer heat in the atmosphere. It became the coldest winter in those location which had been close to the naval war scenery, for example, Tallin, Helsinki, and Stockholm. It was only the second winter with full ice cover since 1883, but produced an ice thickness never observed before. Each of the named facts is a  strong evidential point of the contributing effect of the naval activities to the severe winter conditions. 

Historical papers about the military advances and failures of the German Army in their Blitzkrieg (‘Lightning War’) usually recognise the weather as one cause that prevented the invaders to reach Moscow before the severe winter conditions establish. That had been the plan, but the weather prevented it to happen. The interesting question why it happen is not asked, but this investigation explains it with the naval war activities in the Baltic Sea. That caused the winter not only to came early, but also with extreme and unusual harsh conditions. From a climatically point of view, that might rectify the thesis, that the German Army and their ‘Fuehrer’ (leader)  Adolf Hitler shot themselves in the foot by not preventing to make the Baltic Sea to a naval battle ground.  

The winter 1941/42 was the last in the row of three extreme cold war winters. The reason that the series did not continue during the next three war winters in WWII is presumably quite simple. The naval war went global, when the United States  entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In Europe the naval war activities went westwards into the Atlantic up to the U.S.A., and in the Pacific westwards from the Aleutian and Hawaii to Indochina and  the Coral Sea. Now the entire ocean space of the Northern Hemisphere had become an experimental laboratory for climate change matter. The dimension involved grew many hundred fold  bigger than the North and Baltic Sea, which were too small entity to play a significant role in this scenario.