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by vlovich123
794 days ago
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It’s important to remember that it’s really tough to separate this stuff out and properly attribute changes. There could be natural causes for the little ice age starting/ending but there’s also evidence pointing that decreased human activity resulted in cooling and increased activity resulted in heating. Aside from CO2 emissions, there’s deforestation, controlled burns, and other terraforming projects on a massive scale around that time period that could easily have contributed in a major way. |
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For example, in 1883, Krakatoa erupted, one of the most powerful volcano events in recorded history.
The eruption of Krakatoa had a significant impact on global climate, with summer temperatures in 1883 falling by as much as 1.2°C (2.2°F) below normal in parts of the Northern Hemisphere. It changed the skies to various colors like blue, gold, green, and purple, "... more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets... the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire."
And that was just a single volcanic eruption, in the southeastern hemisphere, massively affecting temperatures on the opposite side of the planet. There have been other natural events, like a massive simultaneous triple-eruption, possibly in 536, that plunged the planet into a short ice age.
Other interesting natural phenomena are things like solar storms that can cause a global increase in both wildfires and electrical storms (or the cooling effect during less active cycles) as well as the significant dust clouds that occur when a large meteor strikes the earth.
An interesting one that didn't seem to cause any climate changes was the Tunguska event. In 1908 in Siberia, it was thought to have been a meteor, except for the total lack of an impact crater, and is now believed by leading scientists to have been a meteor air burst. (Of course scientific consensus always is, until it isn't.) This didn't seem to cause a significant dust cloud or changes in weather patterns, but there are many other documented cases of meteors and volcanoes massively changing the weather. It'd be very interesting to map the climate curves (such as they may be known) against various known natural phenomena over the centuries.