Mount Tambora, Frankenstein and Climate Change
When you are bent at the shovel for twelve hours, you do a lot of thinking.
In April of 1815 a volcano called Mount Tambora erupted in what is now Indonesia. The eruption, classified by volcanologists as “super-colossal” was about twenty times more powerful than the Mt St. Helens eruption in 1980 and was heard 1600 miles away. The eruption knocked 5000 ft off the 14000 ft Mount Tambora. Much of that 5000 feet of mountain circled the globe for the next year in the form of a giant ash cloud. The result was 1816’s “Year Without A Summer”. Temperatures plummeted and Quebec received a foot of snow in June. River ice was observed in Pennsylvania in July and August. Crops failed, resulting in famine in many parts of the world.
During that summer of 1816, eighteen year old Mary Shelley, poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley (her husband) and others vacationed on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Because of the foul weather, they spent most of their time indoors, reading each other German ghost stories. Someone suggested they go off and write their own ghost stories to share with the group. Mary Shelley’s contribution was The Modern Prometheus…which we know as Frankenstein. Shelley’s inspiration for Dr. Frankenstein was Prometheus, a Titan in Greek mythology, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals. He was punished by Zeus by being bound to a rock and having his liver eaten by eagles. Frankenstein is a story, in part, of mankind’s hubris in thinking he can force nature to submit to his will.
I wonder if Mary Shelley, while writing her story at the Villa Diodati, looked out over Lake Geneva under a cold, dark sky and pondered man’s essential helplessness in the face of nature. She and her companions must have wondered if the sun would ever shine warmly on them again.
As of this coming weekend, I’ll be looking at nearly four feet of nature outside my window…each of those feet kicking me straight in the ass. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. The snow is coming and all of our technology and progress won’t keep us from doing what we humans have been doing for thousands of years of nature’s onslaughts: hunker down and wait it out. The collective sense of apocalyptic foreboding that occurs before a storm amuses me to no end. We develop an uneasy sense that civilization is coming to an end because a few gutters are torn off the house or the satellite dish gets buried in a snow drift. As the third storm rears back and gets ready to pound us, in the back of our mines we, perhaps like Mary Shelley, wonder if it’ll ever be warm again.
Of course nature is simply ticking us a little. Not a happy tickle…one of those annoying, “please stop” tickles. The people in Haiti can tell us all we need to know about nature’s real body blows.
I read today that the announcement of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s announcement of it’s new Climate Service was called off because of the Blizzard of 2010 Part Deux. I find a lot of man’s aforementioned hubris pervading today’s debate on climate change. There many facets to this debate, which I’ll probably continue to blog about in later posts. But the one thing that stands out to me is this: the global warming orthodoxy holds that man-made carbon emissions are responsible for the warming temperature of the globe. Yet as emission levels have risen over the last decade, temperatures have leveled off or dropped. Even the notoriously partisan scientists of ClimateGate puzzled over this.
This fact confirms what I’ve always thought: that the climate is indeed changing. Hell, it would be news if the climate wasn’t changing! My opinion is that man’s primary contribution to global warming is to have made it a marketing gimmick. We have very little say in what nature does or doesn’t do. Nature constantly evolves on its own time and in its own way. To think that we can legislate nature’s behavior or, worse, attempt to reengineer nature to stop the climate from changing is, well, like vexing the gods by stealing their fire.
