Global Warming? Global Cooling? Not so fast.
It’s Global Volcanism!
By way of background, or how I got here from there
There, of course, was at the dentist’s office, where I had rushed early from work on a Friday. Fortunately, the tooth I thought I had chipped or broken while eating a tenderloin steak from Pick & Save wasn’t mine. Remind me again about not buying food there ever…
While I was waiting for the doctor to step in the room, the nurse/x-ray tech struck up a polite conversation with me. She was a nice looking blond with her hair in a pony tail, a long face and somewhat buck teeth. Very pleasant person. We were talking about the nice weather we were having at the time, when one of us mentioned something about the coming winter: would it be above average temperatures as NOAA predicts, or cooler as the Farmer’s Almanac claims.
I said, “With NOAA, you have less than 50% chance of being correct, but with the Farmer’s Almanac you have more than an 85% chance of being right. Take your pick.”
Since we had a very cold and snowy winter with more than 10 feet of the white, I was going with the Farmer’s. She mentioned something about Global Warming. I responded with a resounding ‘Bunkum’ and began to explain about the historical climate cycles. She perked up and paid attention, explaining she had never heard any of this before.
Somewhere along the line, I got the Little Ice Age mixed with the Medieval Warm Period in my explanations. Kicking myself after the visit (did I mention that she was single?), I resolved to shore up my knowledge in those areas. Using my historical and geological references, which I had made for some other project, I compiled a list of what was happing when.
Since volcanism contributes to global climate change, due to the huge amounts of aerosols and rock dust thrown into the upper atmosphere, I listed all the 6 VEI (Velocity Explosive Index) eruptions in the last 2000 years, as well as the intervals between eruptions. Just to give the dates some relevance, I divided the periods by significant human events.
I chose 6 VEI as that number represents an event 10 times greater than the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. I happened to be in bed that morning with my wife at the time – we lived only a hundred miles or so away. We both wondered ‘gee that was good, but my G_d, it felt like the whole room shook also’. And continued to shake, then BOOM. What the hell? Some gal friend of hers took that instant to begin knocking on our front door. Very embarrassing.
As I looked over the list, I though there seemed to be some sort of pattern here. I then took the next thousand year period, and the the next, and so on, until I got back to 12000 B.C. I added up the totals, and …
The rest of the story will be published when I manage to finish my analysis.
