The "Eyjafjallajökull" factor...

That is what I am going to call the effect that the recent eruptions in Iceland have had in the global warming debate. I think it has a nice ring to it, don't you? Really rolls off the tongue, huh?

Now keep in mind that I am not talking about the suffering and frustration that was suffered by all those travelers that were trapped for nearly a week in strange and foreign airports due to the ash cloud and the various airlines that couldn't fly through it. I'm talking about the known, measured effects of the eruption (thus far) on the "science" that has been forced on us by the global warming supporters.

There is a scale used to measure and compare eruptions by those that study them called the VEI. It is much like a Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale for volcanoes, and it seems (to the best of my understanding) to increase by a factor of 10 times with each numeric increase on the scale. The current Icelandic eruption is a 1 on this VEI scale, so a 2 would have to be 10 times as big as this one is now, and so on and so on. Some readers here may remember the Mt St Helen's eruption of 1980, and that eruption was a 5 (it is also called a "Plinian" eruption because of its comparable nature to the Vesuvian eruption that destroyed Pompey in 79AD, which was also a 5). Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991 at a 6, as did Krakatoa in 1883. The largest volcanic eruption in modern recorded history is the Tambora eruption of 1815, which is listed as a 7 on the VEI scale. This eruption is known to have effected the global weather patterns, in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, for more than 3 years, and was the cause of the Year without a Summer (1816). No eruption bigger than a 7 has occurred in the last 50,000 years.

So, back to my point... We know that the Pinatubo eruption lowered global temperatures by as much as 1.5 degrees over the course of 18 months, and effected levels of sunlight and acid rain for more than a year across the globe. We know that Pinatubo belched as much CO2 into the atmosphere in 12 days as the entire United States created in more than one year. We know that Pinatubo spewed more SO2 into the upper atmosphere than all previous volcanic eruptions for the 20th Century combined, and it was this SO2 that lowered temps across the globe and made for such spectacular red and orange sunsets from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego. It is this influx of gases, aerosols and particulates that the "Global Warmers" use to add grey-area to their magic numbers and global measurements for the entire decade of the 1990's. When they say temps are rising because of man-made CO2 emissions, and I question the facts, they use Pinatubo as the factor that explains the inconsistencies in data.

Eyjafjallajökull will now fill that role for the "Global Warmers". The current eruption isn't near the grand scale of Pinatubo, and it isn't going to bring about another "Year without a Summer" like Tambora did, but there is the possibility that the fissure will continue to spew gas, aerosols and ash for weeks, even months. There are known historical examples of that same fissure erupting almost continually for two years (admittedly, hundreds of years ago), so the possibility is there for a continued effect on European weather and commerce. If nothing else, it poses a real threat to the single largest agricultural business in Iceland... sheep farming. The ash and particulate produced by the eruption is loaded with toxic levels of fluoride, which kills sheep and grass (which sheep eat) at half the concentration currently seen by this eruption. It is also producing vast amounts of SO2, which (as I already explained) is a major contributor to the decrease in both temperature and ozone levels in the atmosphere. So, whenever someone like me questions the "facts and figures" of global warming coming from Europe for the next five to ten years, the "Eyjafjallajökull" effect will come into play and my questions will be dismissed as utterly ignorant and not-worth-the-time-to-explain from the elitist liberals who take for granted that which they see coming from UC Berkeley and Columbia University studies. It has already been estimated that Eyjafjallajökull has produced more CO2 in 7 days than all of the UK did in 7 months... the equivalent of 2,000 cars burning a tank of gas every hour!

What will that do to their arguments?