1783 Volcano fun.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Hello, long time no post (it's so slow these days on a non-Intel Mac!). Dunno if this news has travelled worldwide, but European airspace is currently unusable because of the dust cloud from an Icelandic volcano. If the eruption goes on much longer it's going to cause imported food shortages here and severe hardship for - for example - African farmers who depend on air freight to the European market. Hundreds of skeletons from a medieval mass grave were recently dug up near my friend's workplace in Spitalfields, London, dead from starvation after a volcano caused failed harvests, and I heard discussion of the 1783 eruption today, and found this in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/15/iceland-volcano-weather-french-revolution

Comments

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

The Guardian piece isn't saying it's a cause, but a contributing factor. I go for a sort of Chaos Theory approach to history - a meshing of factors and knock-on effects that every so often come together in a 'perfect storm' to create seismic (in the political sense of the word) events. Wet weather screws up a military campaign, a dry summer and the rivers run so low the mill wheels can't grind corn.

Are you American? You seem to be relating this to the way the US climate change debate has become politicised. I'm not from that cultural background (here I think generally climate change is accepted as a man-made or at any rate human-influenced phenomenon) and at no point in all the hours of TV discussion on the volcano has anyone said anything about it proving/disproving climate change, not even on the Murdoch-owned channels. The subject hasn't even been raised. I certainly wasn't relating the point in any way to that debate. If anything, though, volcanic eruptions make the case that climate change can be influenced by humans stronger: a discussion of the effect of atmospheric ash on historical famines can be related to the similar effect of human-created atmospheric pollutants.