[ExI] Tambora

[Keith Henson]

I want to recommend a book.

Tambora:

The Eruption That Changed the World

by Gillen D’Arcy Wood


When Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most
destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in
thousands of years. The volcano’s massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped
the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems
for more than three years. Amid devastating storms, drought, and
floods, communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil
unrest on a catastrophic scale. On the eve of the bicentenary of the
great eruption, Tambora tells the extraordinary story of the weather
chaos it wrought, weaving the latest climate science with the social
history of this frightening period to offer a cautionary tale about
the potential tragic impacts of drastic climate change in our own
century.

The year following Tambora’s eruption became known as the “Year
without a Summer,” when weather anomalies in Europe and New England
ruined crops, displaced millions, and spawned chaos and disease. Here,
for the first time, Gillen D’Arcy Wood traces Tambora’s full global
and historical reach: how the volcano’s three-year climate change
regime initiated the first worldwide cholera pandemic, expanded opium
markets in China, set the stage for Ireland’s Great Famine, and
plunged the United States into its first economic depression. Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster, inspired by Tambora’s terrifying
storms, embodied the fears and misery of global humanity during this
transformative period, the most recent sustained climate crisis the
world has faced.

Bringing the history of this planetary emergency grippingly to life,
Tambora sheds light on the fragile interdependence of climate and
human societies, and the threat a new era of extreme global weather
poses to us all.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10195.html

It is worth reading an thinking about what a global weather upset will
do to the current world.  Actually, you can make a case that the
current mess in the mid east is due to a drought in Syria and other
places which has driven up to cost of food.

Keith