

Tambora – The Volcano That Changed the Course of History - imikushin
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/tambora_eruption_caused_the_year_without_a_summer_cholera_opium_famine_and.html

======
sveme
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)

------
arethuza
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...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Barrows-Boys-Fergus-
Fleming/dp/1862075026)

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/File:Relief_on_the_gravestone_of_Lieutenant_John_Irving,_R.N.,_Dean_Cemetery_Edinburgh.jpg)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Cemetery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Cemetery)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition)

------
thraxil
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki#1783_eruption)

