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

[maelipstick.livejournal.com]

I think natural phenomena often get written out of the script.

Maybe so, but unsustainable social phenomena are still unsustainable.

Say, for example after the skies clear companies re-evaluate, governments re-think and there is a massive shift away from just-in-time airfrieght deliveries. Then in two hundred years time a peice in the Guardian claims the Eyjafjallajökull volcano was the cause of this massive change in Europe's eating habits, I'd say it was a massive oversimplification, factoring out peak oil, the rise of the Green lobby as an organised political force, anti-poverty campaigns by mainstream and Church based charities, riots by migrant workers paid starvation wages to pre-package fruit salad. The volcano might have blown the lid off, but the can of worms was there all along.

there's still debate about the temperature and rainstorm on 9 Thermidor

There is ... but does anybody truly believe that if the weather had been a bit milder France would still be on its First Republic? Does it account for the Robespierrist's political isolation? The difficulty in sparking an insurrection when government policy for the last year or so had been to promote stability and prevent insurrection? I'm not sure - to me it seems at the most drier weather might have bought them a few more hours. They had just made too many powerful enemies. But that's my take.

I'm certainly not saying we should discount natural phenomena and other wildcard events, I just get increasingly cheesed off when they are used to write off all human social and political impacts, the sort of "geez we're so little and puny how can we have any effect on this big ol' world," statements that are currently passing for wisdom.

[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.