In 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora exploded in multiple spectacular eruptions, two of which were major. In total, it ejected an astonishing 50 cubic kilometers of magma into the atmosphere. the eruptions were heard over 1300 kilometers away (Zollinger, 1855, p.19).
If this estimate is correct, it is a staggering amount of particulate--about 100 billion tons. To compare this to coal-derived particulates, in 2012 the world will consume about 7 billion tons of coal. Only a small percentage of that figure would be airborne ash. Given that that modern plants emit well under 100 ppm particulate mater, Tambora might have emitted over 100,000 times more particulate matter than annual total created by all the coal power plants in the world!
That is a staggering amount of mineral matter.
What History Says
Given that particulate matter, as well as certain chemicals in smog, are known to be able to partially block sunlight, it would not be surprising to learn that there were consequences planet-wide. that the following year, 1816, was known as the Year Without a Summer, or in some quarters, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. It is a historical fact that in North America the northern US failed to bring a crop to market, and farmers were not able to feed their livestock. Hence livestock were slaughtered.
In Europe, oak trees did not grow rings that year, attesting to the extreme cold. It also makes me wonder why people who claim to use tree rings to estimate temperature failed to find any evidence of cold weather in 1816--maybe since the ring is missing altogether, some researchers may have ignored the data.
According to Higdon, "In New England, eastern Canada, and western Europe, the late spring through
early fall of 1816 was extraordinarily cold, an estimated 4-7 Fahrenheit (1.5 to
2.5 Celsius) degrees cooler than normal. In New England alone, wintry weather
continued through the summer; snow fell with strong, frigid storms in every
summer month and severe frosts destroyed crops repeatedly all season. In Canada,
conditions were even worse. Small lakes remained frozen through the middle of
July and even the cold-hardy wheat crop failed. The Lancashire Plain of England
reported its coldest and wettest July in written history and Geneva, Switzerland
had its coldest summer in the span of 1753 to 1960."
According to De Boer and Sanders, "Weather data for the early nineteenth century indicate a
two-to three-year period of weather extremes following the eruption. Throughout 1816, average surface temperatures
in teh Norther Hemisphere were as much as 10 degrees Celsius lower than normal.
A global cooling trend had been in
progress for several years before the eruption of Tambora. The Tambora event accelerated that trend."
The basis for the 10 degree number was not specified by De Boer and Sanders, and appears to substantially higher than other estimates. Schneider. wrote, "In England, the following year temperatures dropped some 1.5
to 2.5 oC. In eastern North America and
in Western Europe, the summer of 1816 was reported in places to be 1 to 2.5 oC
colder than the previous years...In New England the loss of most of the staple
crop of Indian corn and the great reduction of the hay crop caused so much
hardship in isolated subsistence farms that they year became enshrined in
folklore as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.....Whether Tambora caused
these events or was merely a component of them --or even a coincidence--is
still debated. For example, even if the
eruption caused a 3 oC drop in average summer temperatures in New England, such
a large cooling isn’t enough by itself to create mid-summer frosts..."
Earle et al. claim that tree ring growth shows that the 1816 growth ring is missing altogether from trees in Siberia, indicating that the trees did not leave the dormant state and grow during 1816 , presumably due to the cold.
The Scientific Anomaly
The amount of circumstantial testimony concerning 1816 is impressive, at least to the Village Elliot. However, the consensus view from climatologists is that no substantial change occured in global temperature during that time. Nothing much happened, as indicated by the summary graphs below, which are taken from various sources including the famous Mann et al. paper (the "Hockey Stick"). Again, a great deal of fuss has been made about the rise in the 20th century, but I have no major complaint about the 20th century data. Even if the analysis has some errors, there is just too much data indicating that the global average temperature did in fact increase in the 20th century.
The part that I find extraordinary, however, is the implicit assertion that global average temperature remained remarkably constant for thousands of years up until the 20th century, including the Year Without a Summer.
Why it Matters
The failure to characterize the Year Without a Summer may be one of the most
blatant examples of the failure of researchers to agree with the
assertions of history. Moreover, an explanation for the change is
readily available (namely, that the massive Tambora eruption was the most
significant cause of the dramatic cooling of the earth in 1816 and
1817). Thus the existence of the Year Without a Summer does not
directly contradict the carbon dioxide hypothesis.
It does, however call into account the ability of climatologists to
observe changes in global temperature from the past. In my opinion, it
is simply weird that the weather could have been so cold that snow and
frost occurred in June, July and August in the Northern Hemisphere
(Eastern US, northern Europe, and Siberia). In fact it was so cold that
trees on three continents--North America, Europe and Asia-- failed to come out of dormancy in the spring of 1816, so that
tree rings did not even grow. Yet
consensus climatology assures us that the tree ring data is consistent
with only a mild fluctuation of about 0.1 to 0.3 degrees Celsius, juding from the compilation provided to us by Mann et al as well as other groups.
Note that the consensus view also denies that there was a global
temperature change associated with the Little Ice Age or the Medieval
Warming Period. As will be made clear in a future blog, there are very
strong historical reasons for believing that these periods were real.
In particular, it is astonishing to believe that medieval Vikings could
have had settlement of 2000 or more people in 600 farms if the global
temperature were not substantially warmer than it is today.
If the scientific community were to agree
that global temperature changes of a few degrees have occurred in the
historical past, this does not negate the possibility of the CO2
Greenhouse Global Warming Theory being largely correct. It would
however, imply that the door should be left open, at least a crack, for other factors that might influence global temperatures, in addition to carbon dioxide.
For Additional Reading
Tambora Volcano: World's Largest Recorded Volcanic Eruption, J. Daniel Perkins,
http://jdanielperkins.wordpress.com/tag/tambora/
Gerald Stanhill, Shabtai Cohen, Globaldimming: a review of
the evidence for a widespread and significant reduction in global radiation
with discussion of its probable causes and possible agricultural consequences,
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Volume 107, Issue 4, 19 April 2001, Pages 255–278
David G. Streets, Ye Wu, Mian Chin, Two-decadal aerosol
trends as a likely explanation of the global dimming/brightening transition,
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L15806, 4 PP., 2006
Mark Z. Jacobson, Climate response of fossil fuel and
biofuel soot, accounting for soot's feedback to snow and sea ice albedo and
emissivity, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 109, D21201, 15 PP., 2004
P. D. Jones et al., Surface air temperature and its changes
over the past 150 years REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 37, NO. 2, PP. 173-199,
1999
Kushner, Paul J., Isaac M. Held, Thomas L. Delworth, 2001:
Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation Response to Global Warming. J.
Climate, 14, 2238–2249.
J. Hansen, M. Sato,
and R. Ruedy, Long-term changes of the diurnal temperature cycle: implications
about mechanisms of global climate change, Atmospheric Research, Volume 37,
Issues 1–3, July 1995, Pages 175–209.
Steven C. Sherwood,
John R. Lanzante, and Cathryn L. Meyer, Radiosonde Daytime Biases and
Late-20th Century Warming, Published
Online August 11 2005
Science 2 September 2005: Vol. 309 no. 5740 pp. 1556-1559
M. J. Filipiak, C. J. Merchant, H. Kettle1, and P. Le
Borgne, An empirical model for the statistics of sea surface diurnal warming,
Ocean Sci., 8, 197–209, 2012
M. Chenoweth, Ships' logbooks and the year without a summer,
Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society, 1996 vol. 77, no 9, pp.
2077-2093.
Rebecca Wood, The Year Without a Summer, Centreville Patch
http://centreville.patch.com/articles/the-year-without-a-summer
Useful Tree Species for Tree Ring Dating, http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/lorim/good.html
Stoffel, M.; Bollschweiler, M.; Butler, D.R.; Luckman, B.H.
(Eds.), Tree Rings and Natural Hazards: A
State-of-Art Series: Advances in Global Change Research, Vol. 41
1st Edition., 2010, XV, 505 p. 177 illus.
Michael Mann et al., “Proxy-based reconstructions of
hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two
millenia,”
Melody Higdon, the Year Without a Summer, 1816: The Year Without a Summer
http://melodyhigdon.com/climotalk/Year_Without_A_Summer.htm
Jelle Zeilinga De
Boer, Donald Theodore Sanders,
Volcanoes In Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects Of
Major Eruptions
Volcanic dust veils and climate: How clear is the
connection? — An editorial Stephen H. Schneider Climatic Change, VOlume 5 Nujmber 2, 1983,
111-113.s
C. Begin and L Filion Tree Rings and Natural Hazards, A
State of Art...
C. J. Earle, L. B. Brubaker, A. V. Lozhkin and P. M.
Anderson Summer Temperature Since 1600
for the Upper Kolyma Region, Northeastern Russia, Reconstructed from Tree Rings,
Arctic and Alpine Research , Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp.
60-65
Published by: INSTAAR, University of Colorado
The temperature reconstructions are taken from Wikipedia, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png (dowloaded April 2012) with the following annotations:
- (blue 1000-1980): M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes (1999). "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophysical Research Letters 26 (6): 759-762.
- (light blue 1000-1965): Crowley and Lowery (2000). "Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction". Ambio 29: 51-54. Modified as published in Crowley (2000). "Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years". Science 289: 270-277. doi:10.1126/science.289.5477.270
- (lightest blue 1402-1960): K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov (2001). "Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network". J. Geophys. Res. 106: 2929-2941.
- (light turquoise 831-1992): J. Esper, E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber (2002). "Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability". Science 295 (5563): 2250-2253. doi:10.1126/science.1066208.
- (green 200-1980): M.E. Mann and P.D. Jones (2003). "Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia". Geophysical Research Letters 30 (15): 1820. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814.
- (yellow 200-1995): P.D. Jones and M.E. Mann (2004). "Climate Over Past Millennia". Reviews of Geophysics 42: RG2002. doi:10.1029/2003RG000143
- (orange 1500-1980): S. Huang (2004). "Merging Information from Different Resources for New Insights into Climate Change in the Past and Future". Geophys. Res Lett. 31: L13205. doi:10.1029/2004GL019781
- (red 1-1979): A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén (2005). "Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data". nature 443: 613-617. doi:10.1038/nature03265
- (dark red 1600-1990): J.H. Oerlemans (2005). "Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records". Science 308: 675-677. doi:10.1126/science.1107046
- (black 1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the w:Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v [2] was used.
