2010 Diary week 16
Book Review
Volcanic eruptions, global warming, climate change, weather extremes
This week there will be a break in book reviews on gardening, farming and food production to move on to books dealing with volcanic eruptions, global warming, climate change, weather extremes.
Global Warming: The Complete Briefing provides the basic information required to understand volcanic eruptions, global warming, climate change and weather extremes. Because this book is so helpful and comprehensive, it will be reviewed over two weeks. “Volcanoes inject enormous quantities of dust and gases into the upper atmosphere.” “One of the largest volcanic eruptions this century was that from Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines on 12 June 1991 which injected about 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere together with enormous amounts of dust.” “The amount of radiation from the sun reaching the lower atmosphere fell by about 2% and global average temperatures fell by about a quarter of a degree Celcius for two years.” “The 1980s and early 1990s have brought some unusually warm years for the globe as a whole; eight of the nine warmest years during the past century have occurred during this period (up to and including 1995).” “‘Warmest’ means only a few tenths of a degree Celcius at most, but in terms of global averages such differences are quite significant. An increase of between 0.3 °C and 0.6 °C has taken place since 1860. Some periods of cooling as well as warming have taken place.” “The low global average temperature in 1992, compared with 1990, 1991, 1994 and 1995 is almost certainly due to the Pinatubo volcanic eruption.” “One of the largest eruptions during the last thousand years was that of Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815, which was followed in many places by two exceptionally cold years, described as the ‘year without a summer’.”