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ScottB's avatar

Ben Franklin, genius. If you included political impact, Laki might be the biggest, as it’s considered a contributor to the French Revolution, as crop failures increased an already miserable situation for French peasants.

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Mike Hoy's avatar

This is why Sulfur Dioxide aerosol spraying from high altitude aircraft is being considered to counteract global warming. But it will probably take a mass human die-off from a localized heat wave for any country to actually do it.

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Shoni's avatar

Some people already are! https://makesunsets.com/

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NSAlito's avatar

The downside to "parasol cooling" is that lowering the temperatures without reducing the CO2 means that ocean acidification will increase (Boyle's Law).

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Tanner Janesky's avatar

Love the visualizations!

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Katie's avatar

I'm always grateful to read these posts in the sea of misinformation, denial, panic, and headlines about gutted climate funding. Thank you for the clarity.

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Jason's avatar

Fascinating. I get a couple questions out of this:

How did a one degree change have such a strong impact on crop yields? And what would the impact on yields be if we experienced another Tambora today?

Follow up to the first question is what if you disaggregated the land and ocean anomalies for Tambora?

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Zeke Hausfather's avatar

One degree is a global average value; effects are generally stronger over land, and weather patterns also drive significant regional variability: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2013JD019767

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maurice forget's avatar

Dois-on craindre l'éruption du super volcan yellowstone prochainement?

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NSAlito's avatar

Yellowstone is of a scale that does more direct physical damage than mere sulfate aerosols. The volume of ejecta* means that for large areas anything with lungs would suffer painful silicosis.

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*Geology joke: Material is igneous on the way up and sedimentary on the way down.

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Peace2051's avatar

Have you run across any articles that suggest which "eruption ready" volcanos might be induced to erupt early as a radical attempt at geoengineering? I'm not in favor of this mind you, but a lot of crazy ideas are being floated. Meanwhile drastic cuts to emissions are seen as unrealistic.

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Andrew Dessler's avatar

No one is suggesting that. We don’t have a good understanding of what volcanoes are ready to erupt or how to induce one to erupt. Even if we could, this seems like a terrible idea for people living near the volcano.

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Florian U. Jehn's avatar

Thanks for writing this. I am often surprised how little the potential impacts of these large eruptions are discussed. I wrote about it myself here: https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/p/climate-anomalies-and-societal-collapse

But I would really love to see more research there in general. Especially around how this might interact with out modern, globally connected world.

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