It's Time We All Stopped Trying to Bend the Planet and Paid Attention to the Volcanoes Instead

Guest Post by Duggan Flanakin of CFact.

As America’s “greenest” President (Joe Biden) fades into the sunset, one is reminded of the 1990 Tom Hanks blockbuster Joe Versus the Volcano. Our salvation may be near.

In the movie, Joe Banks (Hanks) is told by a doctor he is dying. He is then duped by an unscrupulous billionaire into throwing himself into a volcano. The billionaire (and crony of the lying doctor) needs a sucker to appease the gods of the native Pacific islanders who control access to a mineral essential for manufacturing superconductors.

Greta Thunberg, literally the poster child for self-sacrifice “for the sake of the planet,” has likewise been duped by unscrupulous billionaires into throwing her life away, convinced (as is the case with countless other youth) that she really has nothing else left to live for. Greta lovers worldwide have sworn off adulthood, including bearing children, because “who would want to bring children into a dying world?”

Oddly, in the 1990 movie, the volcano’s eruption turns out to be Joe’s true liberator, as he and the billionaire’s daughter (who had jumped in with him) are spewed out (like Jonah from the whale), land on their feet, and sail off into a promising future together – away from her evil dad.

Perhaps it will be volcanoes that provide a global warming reprieve for the Greta generation as well. Volcanoes are known for cooling the planet. Ben Franklin long ago concluded that it was a series of eruptions in Iceland that brought record low temperatures to Philadelphia.

Lava flows and belching sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride from the Laki fissure system over 8 months produced an ash cloud that may have reached the stratosphere, dimming the sun from the U.S. all the way to Siberia. On the downside, the eruptions also destroyed crops and killed three-quarters of Iceland’s livestock and a quarter of its people.

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helen’s in Washington State also caused short-term cooling. The high-speed blast also leveled millions of trees, ripped soil from bedrock, sent a towering plume of ash that winds carried hundreds of miles away and destroyed entire forests, bridges, roads, and buildings while also killing 57 people.

Eleven years later an even larger eruption at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines came shortly after a nearby earthquake. The first blast sent an ash column 12 miles into the atmosphere; the second ash cloud reached 25 miles up, while volcanic ash and pumice blanketed the countryside.

Fine ash fell into the Indian Ocean, nearly 2,000 miles to the west. The debris left behind created huge mudflows for years from rainfall, causing damage to bridges, irrigation canals, roads, cropland, and even urban areas.

Global cooling by volcano, it appears, is not always such a desirable outcome. Fortunately, volcano-induced cooling has been temporary, and people today may be better prepared.

In the 21^st Century, NASA has reported only three major volcanic eruptions: the 2008 Kasatochi event in Alaska, the 2015 Calbuco eruption in Chile, and the big enchilada – 2022’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The first two paled in comparison to the underwater eruption that sent plumes of water vapor far into the stratosphere, disrupting weather patterns and possibly worsening ozone layer depletion. The explosiveness of the deep-water Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai was so powerful that it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice.

The enormity of the water vapor plume – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools – rose as high as 33 miles above the Earth’s surface and added an estimated 10 percent to the total water vapor in the stratosphere – four times what Mount Pinatubo had sent.

Icelandic volcanoes are again in the news. Just last week, a new volcano erupted on the Reykjanes peninsula, the sixth in the region since December 2023 and the ninth since 2021 in a geological system that had been dormant for 800 years.

One of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes sits in Yellowstone National Park. Though the super volcano’s last eruption was reportedly roughly 630,000 years ago, just months ago, park visitors had to flee from a geyser eruption that ejected boiling water and rocks to a height of about 600 feet.

According to Michael Poland of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, even a small eruption would cause serious problems, and a large eruption would impact the climate worldwide, lowering global temperatures for many years. The 1816 Tambora eruption caused the “Year without a Summer” in both North America and Europe.

The great threat today from volcanoes, however, centers on Antarctica, where active under-ice volcanoes have been heating up the Larsen C ice shelf, sending icebergs floating (and melting) into the ocean.

Using satellite data and radar surveys, scientists have been mapping the topography of bedrock covered by an ice sheet averaging 1.4 miles thick. Not only did they discover that the Denman Glacier, more than 11,500 feet below sea level, is much larger than previously thought, they also found 138 volcanoes in West Antarctica alone. Nine are active today, including the 12,448-foot-tall Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on the planet,

A 2019 article in Nature acknowledged that “explosive volcanic eruptions are the largest non-anthropogenic perturbations for Earth’s climate.” The injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere causes significant radiation imbalances, resulting in surface cooling for most of the globe.

Yet the impact on Antarctica is a slight warming. The authors concluded that warming induced by future volcanic eruptions may further enhance the vulnerability of the ice shelves off the Antarctic Peninsula. At the same time, though, huge releases of water vapor into the upper atmosphere may bring clouds and rain that produce another cooling effect.

The truth is that we know very little about the Earth’s core or why volcanoes erupt, often after centuries of dormancy. We have learned that the core is an extremely hot nickel-iron sphere similar in temperature to the surface of the Sun. But the BBC agrees that it is a near impossibility to get even within a thousand kilometers of the core, so all of our knowledge is indirect and depends on seismology – the science of earthquakes.

Which brings us back to faith. Faith that tomorrow will come, that for the most part, planetary changes are gradual (though there are occasional significant disruptions like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) and that even those disruptions tend to impact only small portions of the planet’s 8 billion humans.

Bending the Planet?

The other thing we know is that those with the deepest pockets may think themselves capable of bending the entire planet (or at least major portions of it) to their will – by any means necessary.

Joe Banks was one of those duped, but perhaps the god of the volcano provided him – and his lady – with the grace to let them return to the living.

Greta and her children’s army (so many have been emotionally scarred by fear of a slightly warmer planet), like Joe, have been duped into abandoning the lush life available to them.

Yet, they may also find themselves saved by volcanoes.

Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

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