If your Dutch is rusty, the internet says he wrote:

Horrible. Due to the drought in European rivers, Hunger Stones are surfacing. Macabre warnings from our 15th century ancestors about famine.

‘When you see me, cry’

At least Koens had the sense not to write, “Due to climate change…” Because unless his 15th-century ancestors had scuba gear and a weird sense of humor, those bodacious boulders were high and dry centuries before global cooling global warming man-made climate change was ever thought of.

A group of Czech researchers relied on Hunger Stones for some of the data that went into their 2013 report, Droughts in the Czech Lands, 1090–2012 AD. They described the stones and listed the previous drought years they commemorate:

Hydrological droughts may also be commemorated by what are known as “hunger stones”. One of these is to be found at the left bank of the River Elbe (Deˇcˇ ́ın-Podmokly), chiselled with the years of hardship and the initials of authors lost to history (Fig. 2). The basic inscriptions warn of the consequences of drought: Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine [“If you see me, weep.”]. It expressed that drought had brought a bad harvest, lack of food, high prices and hunger for poor people. Before 1900, the following droughts are commemorated on the stone: 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, and 1893.

A tree-ring study printed in Science Advances, a journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, confirmed that “megadroughts” used to be more common before the evil Industrial Revolution kicked off all of that cursed First World tech:

In addition, megadroughts reconstructed over north-central Europe in the 11th and mid-15th centuries reinforce other evidence from North America and Asia that droughts were more severe, extensive, and prolonged over Northern Hemisphere land areas before the 20th century, with an inadequate understanding of their causes.