Volcanoes Could be Cooling the Earth

When it comes to climate change, it turns out that volcanoes may NOT be heating up the atmosphere–instead, they may function as a kind of natural air conditioning system. In order to stave off climate change, we need to reduce greenhouse emissions of ALL kinds.

We need to beware of natural causes as well as human ones, although we can’t do much about former. Take volcanoes: In the August 6-7 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley writes, "Abrupt climate change has been a sporadic feature of history since long before the industrial revolution, mostly in the form of cooling caused by volcanoes." He says that when a volcano named Laki erupted in Iceland in 1783, it "spewed out so much sulfur dioxide and hydrogen fluoride that it poisoned 80% of Iceland’s sheep, covered northern Europe in thick smog for a month and caused crop failures that starved perhaps six million people. An exceptionally harsh winter ensued all over the northern hemisphere.

According to Ridley, "Some three decades after Laki, 1816 was known as the ‘year without a summer’ thanks to a big eruption in Indonesia. Even Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused a brief, though small, drop in world temperatures."

In 1998, the Master of the Key burst into Whitley Strieber’s hotel room and told him amazing things, including a warning about an upcoming climate change which has now ARRIVED. You can get a copy of the book (based on MOTKE’S information) that started it all–"The Coming Global Superstorm"–from our NEW Whitley Strieber Collection that comes with a special bookplate signed by Whitley!