Radical greens – who long ago picked on flying as the ultimate green sin – may be raising a glass of organic elderberry wine to Eyjafjallajökull, if they can pronounce the Icelandic volcano's name on so heady a brew [by the way, the real name of the volcano is Fimmvorduhals, not Eyjafjallajökull, which is the name of the glacier above it: please, journalists, inform yourselves! ndr.] . But even if it has realised their dreams by grounding thousands of flights, they would be unwise to celebrate.
Let's leave aside how counter-productive it has been to demonise air travel; most measures to save energy and combat global warming, such as insulating homes, greatly benefit people – and cut pollution more – but the greens puritanically prioritised something popular and useful. The real danger is that the blast may distract from combating climate change.
Volcanic eruptions can briefly cool the climate by emitting dust, sulphur and ash particles that reflect sunlight. A much bigger bang at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 cut world temperatures by an average of half a degree centigrade over the next year and temporarily took much of the heat out of concerns over global warming. Of course, carbon dioxide levels were still increasing, so the thermometer rose later to compensate.
The new eruption is much smaller, and is unlikely to have a global effect, but might cool Northern Europe – something that, if last winter is anything to go by, would be exploited by sceptics. New figures show that, worldwide, we have just been through the fourth warmest January to March ever, but the snows in Europe and the US were wrongly used to "prove" the Earth is cooling
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The Laki volcanic fissure in southern Iceland erupted over an eight-month period from 8 June 1783 to February 1784, spewing lava and poisonous gases that devastated the island's agriculture, killing much of the livestock. It is estimated that perhapsa quarter of Iceland's population died through the ensuing famine.
Then, as now, there were more wide-ranging impacts. In Norway, the Netherlands, the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, in North America and even Egypt, the Laki eruption had its consequences, as the haze of dust and sulphur particles thrown up by the volcano was carried over much of the northern hemisphere.
Ships moored up in many ports, effectively fogbound. Crops were affected as the fall-out from the continuing eruption coincided with an abnormally hot summer. A clergyman, the Rev Sir John Cullum, wrote to the Royal Society that barley crops "became brown and withered … as did the leaves of the oats; the rye had the appearance of being mildewed".
The British naturalist Gilbert White described that summer in his classic Natural History of Selborne as "an amazing and portentous one … the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man.
"The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. At the same time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic … the country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun."
Across the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin wrote of "a constant fog over all Europe, and a great part of North America".
The disruption to weather patterns meant the ensuing winter was unusually harsh, with consequent spring flooding claiming more lives. In America the Mississippi reportedly froze at New Orleans.
The eruption is now thought to have disrupted the Asian monsoon cycle, prompting famine in Egypt. Environmental historians have also pointed to the disruption caused to the economies of northern Europe, where food poverty was a major factor in the build-up to the French revolution of 1789.
Volcanologists at the Open University's department of earth sciences say the impact of the Laki eruptions had profound consequences.
Dr John Murray said: "Volcanic eruptions can have significant effects on weather patterns for from two to four years, which in turn have social and economic consequences. We shouldn't discount their possible political impacts."
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