
Volcanoes Helped Violent Revolts Erupt in Ancient Egypt - kimsk112
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/science/volcanoes-ancient-egypt-revolts.html
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jcranmer
The problem with the concept of volcanic climate change is that it tends to be
one of the strongest instances of confirmation bias. You can see this in the
phrasing: "They found that eight of ten large uprisings happened within two
years of a volcanic eruption." You can make a game of it: pick a climatic
change and find the volcanic eruption that causes it. But that ignores the
flip side; volcanic eruptions are so frequent that you can usually find
sufficiently close, especially if you're willing to be very open with
proximity and scale.

When you start by picking large-scale volcanic eruptions and then try to find
the climatic fallout, the link seems far less clear. Of the four largest
eruptions in modern times, only the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora is clearly
linked with severe fallout (the Year Without a Summer). The eruptions of
Novarupta, Krakatoa, Pinatubo, and Santa Maria don't show anywhere near that
level of disruption, dispute being only somewhat less powerful.

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autokad
a win for me is I learned about the nilometer. following up on it on
wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilometer)

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trhway
2000+ years later same place - Arab Spring as a result of the drought caused
higher bread prices. For all the tech and society development we are still so
much dependent on the climate. I remember living in the USSR in 80-ies, end of
the 80 year cycle, cold and wet, lower harvests coupled with lower oil prices
- resulted in lower ability to import grain and this is what did the Empire
from inside.

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jostmey
It is just me or does it seem like people who study the past like to ascribe
major events to a volcanic eruption?

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curtis
I think it's more that people who study the past ascribe violence (such as
revolutions) to people going hungry, and they also associate hunger with short
term (on the scale of a few years) climate.

Then on top of that, the largest volcanic eruptions (e.g. Tambora [1]) are
known to impact the global climate in ways that are measurable, and indeed
even observable to the layperson, over the scale of a few years.

It seems like it might be a legitimate line of scientific inquiry.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora)

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pocketsquare2
Link to the article, published in Nature, so we can judge it on its merits
rather than via the NYT summary:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00957-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00957-y)

Either way awesome NYT article title.

