An attempt to stimulate discussion about the causes of an unexpected event which occurred after the huge eruption of Tambora Volcano in 1815
Guest Essay by Caleb Shaw
Volcanoes cause cooling, right? No.
Having got your attention, I would like to bring up three historical incidents, hoping I may generate some interesting explanations for something I myself have no definite answer to.
On April 10, 1815 the Tambora Volcano exploded. It is estimated it blew 39 cubic miles of ash skywards. (A three-mile by three-mile by three-mile cube is only 27 cubic miles.) (I have no idea how many Manhattans that is.)
The noise was so loud it was heard 1200 miles away. Ships over the horizon assumed it was the cannon of a ship in distress and sailed around looking for another ship, and on one island troops were marched off to reinforce other troops because it was assumed an outpost was under attack. Then the great cloud of ash began to spread across the sky.
It is estimated 10,000 people were killed immediately by the blast, as many as 70,000 more by starvation or diarrhea brought on by the heavy ash fall, and another 4600 by tsunamis ranging from six to thirteen feet. The blast, as large as four Krakataus, penetrated the tropopause, roughly 11 miles up near the equator, and reached 16 miles further into the Stratosphere, to a total height of 27 miles. There, high above the circulations of Haley and Ferrel Cells, it began to spread out around the Globe.
By June 28, 1815 the inhabitants of London were noting amazing, brilliant and long-lasting sunsets.
The following summer, 1816, was remarkably cold over many northern lands, marked by frosts and ruined crops. It is remembered as “The Year Without A Summer” and, in my neck of the woods, as, “The Year Of Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death.” Here in New Hampshire, where hay was an export that fueled the horse-drawn transport big cities, not even enough grass could be grown to feel local livestock. While the wealthy could import hay from Pennsylvania, the poor knew hunger, and many simply had to slaughter their livestock. In the following years populations of many towns in New England shrank, as people never wanted to see such a summer again, and the rock-free lands of Ohio sounded warmer, and actually were further south.
The link between Tambora and that cold summer seems plain, but here comes the third and, to me, intreauging item from 1817. It involves a quote from John Daly’s site which many know well, that begins,
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated….”
This statement by the President of the Royal Society in London is dated November 20, 1817, and is not what I would have expected. I would have expected Tambora to increase the ice at the pole by making the entire earth colder. The fact the ice apparently decreased is a polar puzzle.
The question then becomes, “Do volcanoes reduce the amount of ice at the poles?”
In the comments at WUWT the commenter Philip Bradley suggested that Tambora’s ash may have fallen on the polar ice, reducing the albedo and increasing the melting. I’m not sure enough ash would fall, that far north, and remain uncovered by snow long enough, to have such a dramatic effect.
I’d be interested to hear the ideas of others. My personal guess is that, even though the climate was colder back then, the AMO still went through warm and cold phases, and just happened to be moving into a warm phase, involving a slosh of warmth moving north, and Tambora accentuated this slosh.
As I have explained elsewhere, “I call this my Slosh Theory, and it is based upon a highly scientific experiment I did at age three in the bath tub. Timing was everything. If you got the timing down, you could generate such a tremendous wave that half the water left the bathtub and wound up on the floor.
My mother did not appreciate my research and stunted my scientific growth, which explains why I became a writer.”
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If you look at the ice core record it is hard to spot any significant problem after the 3 largest volcanoes in history. Toba (72,000 BC), Taupo (22,000 BC), Yellowstone (640,000 BC). Those were all 8 on the VEI and recent enough to have ice cores recording the temp.
Is there a connection at all is a valid question.
Here’s a link to one of the lengthier accounts of the Summer of 1816. http://www.hewitts.com/Hewitts_Home/The_Summer_that_Never_Was.html
A couple of points. Even today, Northern New England isn’t that far from the Northern limit of agriculture. Snow in May isn’t uncommon. Even this year there were significant snowfalls in Vermont and the Adirondacks as late as May 26 (30 inches at Whiteface Mountain). Things were colder in the 18th and 19th centuries. Also 1816 was one in a string of half a dozen cold winters. e.g. the last Frost Fair on the frozen Thames River at London was held in 1814. Also, people were farming higher up on the Northern New England hills/mountains in the early 19th century than they attempt today. Finally if you look at record low temperatures at Mt Mansfield (Northwest Vermont) modern temperatures near or below freezing aren’t all that uncommon. So a bit of snow in Summer in an especially cold Summer isn’t a dramatic as it might be further South.
It does appear that in 1816, there was probably a reservoir of cold air someplace in Northern North America and that it appears to have broken out into normally warmer areas several times — with devastating affects of crops.
TRM says:
July 8, 2013 at 9:10 am
To answer your question, the time resolution of ice cores for the times of those eruptions is a matter of centuries. You shouldn’t expect to see an annual temperature signal in such data. Some ice cores are time adjusted by measuring the ash and sulfate concentrations that result from volcanic eruptions.
I urge people to read the volume we produced of a conference on the eruption of Tambora and its impact in Ottawa in 1992 titled, “The Year without a summer?: world climate in 1816.” It is available here;
http://www.worldcat.org/title/year-without-a-summer-world-climate-in-1816/oclc/27429039
Chief instigator of the event was C.R. Harington head of the paleobiology division of the Museum as part of an ongoing study of climate change in Canada over the last 20,000 years. The keynote speaker was John Eddy. We also tried to get Hubert Lamb, but he was unable to attend and his assistant John Kington appeared in his place. Participants and contributors were from every continent and in a multitude of disciplines.
Eddy was invited because, in meetings prior to the conference we were aware that global temperatures were declining in response to the Dalton Minimum, and he was writing about the temperature implications of changing solar activity.
A major part of the conference was a workshop I organized with Cynthia Wilson in which people from all over the world were asked to bring measures of the impact on temperature and precipitation for their region. The map we produced is an insert in a pocket of the book and provides a good illustration of the changed circulation patterns, part of which were the wind and ice conditions in the Arctic as reflected in the Admiralty comments. The pattern is one of extreme Meridional flow.
Good thread, lots of great input from RGB@Duke, Leif, Bob Tisdale, Caleb, Don Easterbrook, and the usual suspects.
“CO2,” Bill_W said cryptically.
“Yes, indeed,” I added elliptically.
“A historical account can give you an interesting question to ask,” said Mosh-man, skeptically.
“So can wiggle matching,” I replied tangentially.
Good review of 1816..The Year without Summer in wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Some consequences were Turner’s paintings and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
i’d suggest one of the consequences of the Lake Toba eruption, which wouldn’t show up in ice core records, was the wiping out of our homo erectus cousins in east and south Asia. This opened up the area for settlement by modern humans. Before Toba the place was full, and had been for over a million years. After Toba it was first come, first served.
mosh said
‘historical accounts are words on a page. they are not data. you can’t take the standard deviation of words on a page. you cant go back and repeat the experiment.’
So numbers seem to be valuable historical scientific data but sadly words always appear to you to be anecdotal.
Can you go back to Albania on a specified day in 1895 and check that the single record they took was correct? Or, as you say perhaps you can’t go back and repeat that particular experiment.
tonyb
About Toba: http://www.leif.org/EOS/cp-9-749-2013-Toba.pdf [and about wiggle matching…]
If the volcano produced an aerosol which resulted in abruptly cooling of the earth’s surface, perhaps the effect would be stronger over the land masses. The oceans would not cool as quickly because they are cooled by convective currents. But if additional water remained frozen on land instead of melting, could the change in flow from the Saint Lawrence Seaway change the salinity in the thermohaline? And would more salinity result in increased ice melt? Ice melt results in increasing the flow rate in the St Lawrence Seaway my something like a million gallons per second, a not inconsiderable flow rate. What if that were substantially diminished? If I get time I’ll try to quantify the effect.
so, we have seen that natural forces are in play and the volcanoes do nothing or not much, except delay the cycles a little bit, maybe, CO2 does nothing at all. In fact, everybody here should know that most of the energy from the sun goes straight into the (SH) oceans and this is our energy “store”.
Now for the real disaster:
The Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world. Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml
I find that as we are moving into the deep end of the sine wave, there will be a standstill in the speed of warming, i.e. no acceleration and no deceleration, around the bottom, and therefore naturally, there will also be a lull in pressure difference at certain [latitudes], especially where the Dust Bowl drought took place: meaning: no wind and no weather (read: rain). However, one would apparently note this from an earlier change in direction of wind, as was the case in Joseph’s time (Gen. 41:23, 27). According to my various calculations, this disaster will start around 2019…..
Danger from global cooling is documented and provable. It looks we have only ca. 6 “fat” years left after which there will be 7 meager years.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
Don’t worry, we totally understand the climate well enough to forecast temperatures within a degree or two for the next 100 years.
Having dug a little deeper into the topic, a interesting fact has turned up.
While europe was having a “year with no summer” over in Russia they were having a hot and dry one. This been the case l think help’s to explain the cold weather in both europe and China. What seems to have happen was that they was two large blocking highs. One sat over the North Atlantic and the other over Russia. The blocking high over the North Atlantic would have forced the Polar jet up over Greenland and to come back down south again very close to Western europe. Bringing with it cold and wet weather rather like what happen in the summer of 2012. Now with there also been a blocking high over Russia then the jet would have had to push up to the north again and into the Arctic so as to flow over the top of this blocking high. Once clear of this blocking high, what seems to have happened it that the jet took a deep dive to the south over China. Bringing with it bitter winds from the north.
I love farout, somewhat reasonable ideas.
What if, volcanoes take the lower atmosphere up with the ash and such and some of it’s heat gets lost to space? The ash comes down much cooler, seeding clouds, creating low pressure systems in the tropics forcing high pressure at the poles. At the same time, a lot of heat gets lost to outer-space in one area and eventually cools the rest of the planet.
Almost as logical as CO2 forcings governing shtuff.
Maybe, in a thousand years or so, people will figure it out.
It seems perfectly possible that ash could cause the melting of the ice sheet by increasing the albedo. Even if some of the ash was covered by snowfall, it would be exposed again once the initial snow cover melted. If the melting of arctic ice can be caused by ash from a volcanic eruption could it not also be caused by soot from coal fired power stations or diesel engines? It is well known that airborne pollutants e.g. PCBs from the northern hemisphere accumalate in the polar regions. This would mean that the decrease in summer arctic sea ice has less to do with climate change and is instead correlated with the rapid industrialisation of China and India over the past 2 decades, most of which has been feulled with coal and dirty technology. Unfortunately this could mean that the ice will continue to melt faster than 20 years ago whatever happens to the temperature (and give the alarmists something to bang on about even if global temperatures continue to decline).
The above is pure speculation, does anyone have any data to try and prove or disprove it?
Adding to my first post in this thread, I have performed experiments with water vapor and high potential electrostatic fields. The high potential electrostatic fields definitely have an effect on water vapor through the force of diamagnetism.
As for electrical discharges of the ionosphere to ground, we see these from time to time when dusty asteroids and comets enter the atmosphere and release a tremendous amount of energy. This energy appears to be misinterpreted by the mainstream as frictional heating. Although frictional heating does occur, it is likely not the entire physical explanation for large explosions such as occurred over Russia in 1906 and earlier this year.
Lightning is frequently observed in volcanic eruptions. This is due to potential differences in the volcanic dust, however, the dust does show conductivity as observed by the behavior of the electrical discharges. It is not unlikely that a dust plume of super heated dust reaching high into the ionosphere could cause a major electrical discharge of the ionosphere.
Recently, the Earth’s ionosphere has been observed to be 200 km lower than usual. This corresponds with the weaker solar activity and it also corresponds to a weaker electric field around the Earth. The weaker lower electric field of the Earth will no longer hold the cold air within the Polar Jet Stream, and the other Jet Streams of the planet will also find different paths.
When the Polar Jet Stream loses its boundary, the centripetal force carries it south. When the air is displaced to the south, something has to fill the vacuum and it comes up from the Eastern North Pacific and Asia and thus melts the Bering Sea while bringing warmer than usual temperatures to Alaska.
In the polar regions atmospheric ash absorption would introduce heating at the surface since that light would have been reflected back to space.
In non polar regions which have a lower albedo , the increased atmospheric absorption is less efficient than absorption at the surface, and increased reflection causes cooling.
A couple of points.
It’s not generally appreciated that around the summer solstice, large areas north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle get more solar radiation (ignoring clouds) on a daily basis than anywhere else on Earth. Small albedo changes will have large effects on the amount of solar energy ‘captured’ at the surface.
Despite what you may hear, polar sea ice melts predominately at the surface from solar radiation. Thus, even if the Tambora dust was buried beneath snow (and likely mostly embedded in the snow), as the surface melt progresses, the embedded dust will accumulate at the surface, decreasing albedo, and causing a larger than normal melt.
FWIW, Manhattan has a land area of 33.77 sq. miles. The ash from the 1815 Tambora eruption would cover Manhattan to a depth of a mile.
A bit O/T but worth keeping handy for the September minimum in Arctic sea ice extent.
The last paper is from Michael E. Mann et. al.
This would mean that the decrease in summer arctic sea ice has less to do with climate change and is instead correlated with the rapid industrialisation of China and India over the past 2 decades, most of which has been feulled with coal and dirty technology.
I attribute it mostly to the shutting down of Soviet era heavily aerosol and black carbon polluting industries around the time of the Russian financial crisis in 1988.
There are multiple pieces of evidence that point to this, particularly most of new ice free areas in summer are on the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean.
Briefly, the aerosols seeded clouds, and the black carbon was deposited on and became embedded in multi-year sea ice. After 1988, as aerosol seeded clouds decreased, solar insolation increased and surface melt of the ice increased. Resulting in embedded black carbon accumulating at the surface, and causing the progressively increasing summer melt we see after 1988.
If I am right, we have seen the peak of the summer ice melt as most the ice with embedded black carbon has already melted out. Although the decreased in aerosol seeded clouds continues.
Should we believe Mann on this? Where actual data is available his reconstructions don’t even correlate as well to the actual data as random numbers do.
What I understood from postings by Piers Corbyn is this: The Arctic waters are connected to the great oceans. The entrance on the Atlantic side is wide, but on the other side, the Bering Sea, it is narrow. When the earth is cooling, the Bering Sea is full of ice, like it is now in recent years. Water coming from the Atlantic can not flow further to the Pacific side, because the frozen Bering Sea blocks that current. Instead, the warmer water from the Atlantic makes circles in the Arctic Sea and it all flows back into the Atlantic Ocean, while in warmer years a part of that water would flow into the Bering Sea. This also explains why in colder years the ice on the Atlantic side of the Arctic Sea, specially in the so-called Gore-zone, is getting thinner. So the mistake the scientists of those days made was that they saw less ice in the Atlantic side of the Arctic Sea, but they didn’t know what the condition was of the ice on the side of the Bering Sea, which probably was frozen.
A few comments have alluded to the possibility of the 1998 super-El-Nino being a rebound to the 1991 Pinatubo volcano event. Take a look at the Google spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnTohu4oFUbcdEgzTkpEYTAwN1BiXzJXMXZ5RVJiOUE#gid=17 The graph on tab “12mo1850# shows 12-month running means. HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4 show a super-El-Nino spike in the late 1870#s.
Look at tab “temp_data”. Column B is HadCRUT3 monthly anomaly (versus 1961-1990 normals), and column C is HadCRUT4. HadCRUT3 shows a positive anomaly from 1877.667 (August 1877) through 1878.333 (April 1878). HadCRUT4 is positive July 1877 through April 1878. HadCRUT (3 and 4) were averaging around -0.3 in the preceding 15 years, so that was a major jump. Any ideas about what this could’ve been a rebound from?
fhhaynie says: July 8, 2013 at 10:21 am
> TRM says: July 8, 2013 at 9:10 am
To answer your question, the time resolution of ice cores for the times of those eruptions is a matter of centuries. You shouldn’t expect to see an annual temperature signal in such data. Some ice cores are time adjusted by measuring the ash and sulfate concentrations that result from volcanic eruptions.
Ah that is interesting. Thanks. I learn so much from this site.