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

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

Is this a meteorological problem?
No, this is a sociopolitical mess ahead.

[maelipstick.livejournal.com]

Just over 200 years ago an Icelandic volcano erupted with catastrophic consequences for weather, agriculture and transport across the northern hemisphere – and helped trigger the French revolution.

See there I was thinking it was the unfair division of taxation and political representation coupled with runaway royal expenditure and an governing system that was unable to implement change in a controlled and structured manner.

But you know, it could just have been a volcano. Everything seems to be their fault (http://climaterealists.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=490) these days.

Now how do I explain the concept of "carbon footprint on an orange" to a Robespierre muse?

[maelipstick.livejournal.com]

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.

I think I might just be a little too paranoid for that. I agree up to a point, and I certainly think its interesting to know about random factors that have influenced things and curious coincidences. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old school Marxist who needs to get with the times, but I do think the Chaos Theory approach to history taken to its logical extreme leads to total apathy, the idea that it's all random, so nothing really makes a difference, as man's actions are at best atoms colliding in the void.

Are you American?

Not especially, no. I can understand how my phrasing might have made you jump to that conclusion. But the "aw shucks, what can we do?" attitude, which I'm not sure why I can't put in a British accent, is a common enough response to any large issue - poverty, HIV pandemics, what have you. So we just go on with laissez-faire and chalk it up to freak events when things go wrong.

I think generally climate change is accepted as a man-made or at any rate human-influenced phenomenon

I think that's quite an optimistic assessment of the state of things in the UK. There's a good chunk of the right wing press like The Spectator (http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/3755623/meet-the-man-who-has-exposed-the-great-climate-change-con-trick.thtml), The Daily Express (http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/146138/Climate-change-Reasons-listed) a fair few staff writers at The Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html), Britain's biggest broadsheet, and a good percentage of the hacks at Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260191/Science-Museum-change-new-climate-change-museum.html), Britain's biggest midrange. That's a fair amount of climate skepticism. And things haven't really got to crunch time yet.

in all the hours of TV discussion on the volcano has anyone said anything about it proving/disproving climate change

No, not as hard evidence I can't see it being used either way. But I'm fairly sure a Daily Express/Daily Mail "The wiles of nature, who are we to intervene" header is in the post. Motes in the wind of providence, I tell you.

Anyhow, going back to the French Revolution, yes, poor harvests were a flashpoint, but France was still a semi-subsistence agrarian economy so poor harvests were going to be a fairly regular occurrence, volcanos or no. And if failed harvests and food riots were fairly common throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, what made 1789 different? I still think the answer was a sequence of man-made events.

[sneerbite.livejournal.com]

I would like to point out - though I am not sure what purpose this information serves - that volcanoes and volcano references much preoccupied the 'French revolutionary mind' (if such a thing existed). For example, members of the Convention often alleged that 'la sainte Montagne' had a force similar to that of Mount Vesuvius. Meaning: that it could, and would, erupt at any point in the direction of moderates and counter-revolutionaries. Still during the Restoration Montagnards such as M.-A. Baudot stressed the the Mountain-volcano had the potential to erupt once more!