Today a massive raft of papers on climate change came to my attention from all directions. The overall picture isn’t good, and once again, the primary message is that our past estimates of the effects of climate change underestimated a lot of factors, and things are getting worse faster than previously thought. Perhaps most disturbing is news that what we thought was a slow oscillation in Atlantic hurricane intensity is now driven by the effects of climate change, and by driven, I mean the oscillation isn’t really there anymore, and what we see is what we’re going to be living with.

In pre-industrial conditions, the hurricane cycles changed over a 40-60 year period that has now been linked to volcanic eruptions. Events like the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption can suspend ash throughout the atmosphere and change our climate for a short period of time. Nowadays, though, that ash isn’t always as dominant a factor. 

Previously, we’d seen a cycle during the industrial age that was actually driven by the cooling effects of industrial sulfur pollution that came to an end with the Clean Air Act and allowed the warming effects of greenhouse gases to dominate the manmade climate impact of this Anthropocene era. Unless a volcano goes off with sufficient ash production to overcome our greenhouse gas pollution, we’re looking at a steady future of massive hurricanes. And as much as I love a good volcanic eruption, the kind of eruption needed is certain to cause either massive loss of life, massive economic damage, or both. I don’t actually want that kind of an eruption.

The team behind this paper is led by Michael Mann and this work appears in Science.

More Information

Penn State press release

“Multidecadal climate oscillations during the past millennium driven by volcanic forcing,” Michael E. Mann et al., 2021 March 5, Science