A number of years ago, Mt. Pinatubo erupted, throwing a lot of ash into the air and causing some of its own climate change. If I’m not totally off, average global temperatures dropped, maybe a couple of degrees, for a few months, maybe more, as a result of that event. I imagine such an event today would put some brakes on some of the heating that people are so upset about. I also understand that some discussions of climate change suggest that once it gets going, it is harder and harder to stop. So, if that event were to recur, how many years back would it put our timetable for global climate change?
Edited title, just in case Mr. Pinatubo is actually reading this.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
:smack:
Discussions of climate change these days tend to contain more BS than a cow farm.
Rather than discuss any of the sillyness, let me just say that volcanic eruptions have caused drastic effects on the global temperature in the past, and will likely do so again in the future. One of the most notable cases was the “year without a summer” that occurred in 1816. This was triggered by a volcano eruption in what is now Indonesia in late 1815.
Some guy named Cecil that you may have heard of wrote an interesting article on “global dimming” that you may want to take a look at. He mentions Pinatubo as well as the 1816 event, plus some other interesting stuff.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070420.html
Worth adding to this, too, is that completely independently of and preceding any ACC debate, the two era-ending mass extinction events are contemporaneous with, and in some hypotheses the result of, widespread fissure vulcanism across a substantial area: the so-called Siberian and Deccan Traps.