Tambora – The Volcano That Changed the Course of History

Interesting article, but seriously:

" The floods, droughts, starvation, and disease in the three years following the eruption stem from the volcano’s effects on weather systems, so Tambora stands today as a harrowing case study of what the human costs and global reach might be from runaway climate change."

Volcanic injection of huge amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere is very different from industrial release of CO2 into the atmosphere, both in its effect as well as its characteristic time scales. The Tambora eruption lead to the Year without a Summer [1] (1816), but the effects did not last too long as the aerosols were quite rapidly washed out of the atmosphere. CO2, on the other hand, might actually trigger some rapid nonlinear climate transitions to a very new steady-state, which might last much longer than the effects from Tambora.

I would really like to see that journalists stopped mentioning climate change whenever the atmosphere is somewhat affected by something. That's just ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Fergus Fleming wrote a brilliant book about the series of 19th century UK expeditions to try and find the North West Passage mentioned in this article:

Barrow's Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Barrows-Boys-Fergus-Fleming/dp/18620...

NB After I read this book I found that one of the men who died on the Franklin Expedition is buried close to where I live in Edinburgh, here is a close-up of his gravestone in Dean Cemetery:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Relief_on_the_gravestone_o...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Cemetery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition

Interesting. Not much earlier, in 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted[1] and its impact on Europe (failed crops, famines, etc) is often mentioned as a possible trigger for the French Revolution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki#1783_eruption