Volcano: Could this be another year without a summer?
NOW a major volcano has blown its top the threat caused by global cooling, rather than warming, should be a concern to us all.
SO YOU think it’s a disaster when 200,000 British holidaymakers get stranded abroad, flights are suspended, airline shares plummet, food and medical imports suffer and asthmatics wheeze at clouds of volcanic dust?
Well you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine how much worse things could be if we get a proper volcanic eruption, not from a mere pimple like Eyjafjallajökull but from its much more dangerous and powerful neighbour Katla.
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Imagine if those volcanic clouds were full of acrid, choking, poisonous gas which blotted out the sun for months on end causing summer to vanish, crops to fail and people to starve, if all that “global warming” we’ve been urged to panic about was wiped out in a trice, replaced by year on year of freezing misery.
Imagine no more. The conditions now are nigh on perfect for a modern-day repeat of one of the worst climate disasters in global history. It was known as the Year Without A Summer because for most of 1816 almost the entire planet was suffused in Stygian gloom, leading to unrest, starvation and mayhem.
There were food riots in Britain, Ireland and France, famine from Germany and Switzerland to China and the US. In Hungary it snowed brown and in Italy it snowed red.
It began with a succession of volcanic eruptions culminating in that of the massive Mount Tambora in Indonesia. It was four times bigger than the famous one at Krakatoa, so loud its explosion was heard 1,600 miles away and at least 70,000 people were killed.
This in turn caused massive plumes of sulphurous gas and ash to spread over the world, covering such places as north-eastern America with a reddish fog which almost blotted out the sun and lingered for the entire spring and summer.
T here were admittedly one or two beneficial side effects. The “incessant rainfall” during the “wet, ungenial summer” of 1816 inspired Mary Shelley and her friend John William Polidori to have a competition as to who could write the scariest story: the results were Frankenstein and The Vampyre.
The red haze of volcanic ash, as we’re also seeing with the Icelandic eruption, led to spectacular sunsets, recorded by JMW Turner. Supposedly a lack of oats to feed his horses in that year led German inventor Karl Drais to devise the velocipede, a precursor to the bicycle.
It also caused the chain of events which eventually led Joseph Smith to found Mormonism after his family were driven from their home in America in 1816 in search of more promising land.
None of this, however, was much consolation to the millions who lost their homes or starved or succumbed to the subsequent typhus epidemic in the year also known as Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death.
These events are more common than you might suppose. Three decades before the Year Without A Summer the world fell victim to what would prove an even deadlier disaster, again caused by a volcano: Laki in Iceland.
This led to the failed harvest of 1783, which triggered the food riots in France (and Marie Antoinette’s supposed “Let them eat cake”) and led to thousands dying. Later millions were to become enslaved by the Napoleonic tyranny as a result of the French Revolution.
In 1695 a volcanic eruption caused northern Europe to be blanketed in sulphurous fog, which exacerbated the series of famines that were already raging thanks to a long run of dismally cold weather. In Scotland 15 per cent of the population died, in France the number was two million and in Finland almost a third of the population perished.
But are such disasters really likely to be repeated in the modern world? Unfortunately yes. As we saw with the Mt Pinatubo volcano in 1991 in the Philippines all it takes is one volcano to cause global cooling by as much as 0.7C. (That’s the same amount as the global warming that took place in the entire 20th century). And Pinatubo wasn’t even a particularly large eruption.
This cooling effect is caused by millions of tons of sulphur dioxide gas (which turns to sulphuric acid) belching into the atmosphere and reflecting solar radiation. It’s one of the numerous natural checks and balances that tend to get ignored by all those climate scientists who want to prove humans are responsible for “climate change”.
One tiny, random volcanic eruption creates more global cooling than all the wind farms ever built and makes a nonsense of all those computer models predicting inexorably rising temperatures.
Where volcano-induced cooling gets really problematic is when it combines with a period of low sunspot activity. And unfortunately it’s just such a period we seem to be entering now. According to a paper by Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at Reading University, solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985, falling to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century.
The worst case scenario, he predicted, could be that we’re heading for a new Maunder minimum.
The first Maunder minimum lasted roughly from 1645 to 1715 and was a period of unrelieved cold and misery. This was the era when the Thames froze so thick they could build bonfires and hold frost fairs on it. Another strange side benefit, it has been suggested, is that it’s the reason Stradivarius’s violins sound so perfect: the cold slowed the tree growth, causing the wood to become more dense.
On the whole though solar minimums are not a great time to be alive. After the Maunder minimum came the Dalton minimum (1790 to 1830), again a period of relentlessly grim weather reaching its nadir in the Year Without A Summer.
You may have noticed two things which seem to have eluded all those clever climate scientists. The first as sceptics have been saying for some time is a remarkably strong connection between solar activity and global warming/cooling – a much stronger connection than there is between climate and man-made CO2 levels.
And the second thing is the utter absurdity of the predicament in which we find ourselves. For 20 years we have been urged with increasing hysteria to act on global warming. In Britain alone under the Climate Act we are committed to spending £18billion a year trying to avert it.
Yet here is Mother Nature making a nonsense of our puny computer models and our ridiculous claims that we can control climate and also teaching us a lesson we forget at our peril: global cooling is a much more dangerous threat.
