Tuesday January 14th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: When The Volcano Blows…What The Eruption Of Taal May Do To The Climate With Ramifications For The Climate Crisis
Dear Diary: I’m been seeing a lot of reports of large volcanic eruptions around the globe lately. The “Ring of Fire” has been lighting up:
When Mount Pinatubo blew in June 1991 it had already been three years since I jumped on board believing that carbon pollution was warming the climate. At the time I was beginning the long process of trying to convince my friends and colleagues at The Weather Channel that global warming was a real thing and not just from natural sources. Then Pinatubo erupted just when it appeared that a global warming trend was beginning in earnest. Over the next few years we saw global cooling, masking any change due to added carbon in the atmosphere. As we know, volcanic activity is the only natural factor that can temporarily cool the climate substantially, even more than the lack of sunspot activity.
Check out what happened during the 1990s using my “Record Scoreboard:”
Shortly after June 1991 Pinatubo eruption we start seeing a lot of blue, cold markers during the early 1990s after a rather toasty year of 1990. A recovery, or return to a warming trend, did not occur until 1994.
I’m convinced that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo lulled a lot of frogs in our global pot of water into sleeping, delaying action on the climate. The Kyoto treaty was not embraced by the United States during the 1990s. So, if another large eruption from the Philippines, Taal, is similar in nature to Pinatubo, have we learned any lessons from the 1990s? Dr. Michael Mann is already thinking about this:
In the short term hundreds of thousands of people are just trying to get away from the effects of Taal:
Should the planet cool climatologists, I’m sure this time around, will point to the warming trend that commenced in earnest after the effects from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo wore off. We certainly don’t have time for more complacency in 2020 compared with 1991.
Here are a couple of more open ended questions that we need to ask. How big of an eruption is needed now that carbon amounts to 410+ parts per million in the atmosphere to level off or decrease global temperature averages and by how much? If volcanic activity is substantial enough to give us a reprieve from ever warming temperatures, will we squander that time, further delaying necessary change?
I’ll be posting more on the climate ramifications of Taal and other current volcanic activity going through the next few months, getting some specifics on how much blocking radiation debris has gotten into the atmosphere.
Here is more climate and weather news from Tuesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
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Guy Walton…”The Climate Guy”