Spy thrillers and superhero movies alike rely on an endless stream of supervillains with grandiose schemes to kill off half the world (or half the universe, if you are Marvel). Something like this: "The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming" from Politico. This is seriously scary stuff: an Israeli company backed by some of the wealthiest people in the world want to release particles into the atmosphere that would block out sunlight to reduce global temperatures. And they have developed the technology to do it. What could go wrong? We don't have to guess because we have several historical accounts of volcanic explosions that forced enough gases or particles into the upper atmosphere to do the same thing, leading to widespread droughts in some areas and heavy rains in others, devastating drops in crop production, and outbreaks of deadly pandemics, things like cholera and aggressive forms of bubonic plague.
The Politico article begins:
Janos Pasztor was conflicted. Sitting in his home office in a village just outside Geneva, he stared into the screen of his computer, where a bizarre Zoom call was taking place. It was Jan. 31, 2024. The chief executive of an Israeli-U.S. startup, to whom Pasztor had only just been introduced, was telling him the company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse. The CEO wanted Pasztor, a former senior United Nations climate official, to help. The company called itself Stardust Solutions.
Pasztor, a deliberate and self-assured Hungarian with thick, arched eyebrows that give him the appearance of a mildly perturbed owl, was stunned by the seriousness of Stardust’s operation. He had long been expecting that some company would try this. But the emergence of a well-financed, highly credentialed group represented a shocking acceleration for a technology still largely confined to research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels.
The Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, was a nuclear physicist who was once deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, and he jumped straight to the point. He wanted Pasztor to advise him on how to build public credibility, which would be necessary to land the government contracts for sunlight reflection that the company and its investors were banking on. The CEO appeared keenly aware that Stardust had the potential for the kind of public image problems normally reserved for James Bond villains. Those challenges were likely not made easier by picking a company name that echoed Star Wars’ “Project Stardust” — the codename the bad guys in the Galactic Empire used for the Death Star, a weapon designed to destroy entire worlds.
Pasztor initially helped the Company because he had drank the global warming Kool-Aid, but he is now troubled: "Apart from a link to his report on Stardust’s homepage, there was little public indication that they were taking his recommendations for transparency seriously. The company had not published a code of conduct it had agreed on with Pasztor and had told him it would release." The Company has secured tens of millions in funds from investors: Silicon Valley luminaries and an Italian industrial dynasty. But it remains secretive.
Here is what the article says about the project:
Stardust claims to have developed a system that can replicate and maintain the global cooling effects of a volcanic eruption, without all the lava and sulfur. The mechanics would be quite simple. Stardust envisages a fleet of around 100 planes — to begin with — flying into the stratosphere to deliver payloads of their particles, landing to reload, then immediately taking off again to repeat, continuously, every flight a tiny volcanic cough. Researchers, including Visioni, found last year that the most efficient way to achieve a steady, uniform decline in the global temperature would be to spread the particles from the regions just north and south of the tropics. That means launching from at least two places, for example Florida and southern Brazil. The particles would then spread around the globe producing a gradual, uniform decline in the global temperature, before eventually dropping out of the sky after around a year, according to Stardust, and needing to be replaced. The particles would reflect a very small proportion of sunlight back into space, but enough to cool the Earth.
The Politico article is not completely ignorant of what such a cooling project could entail. It relates:
In June 1783, a 16-mile volcanic fissure blew open the southern side of Iceland. “First the ground swelled up with tremendous howling, then suddenly a cry shattered it into pieces ... exposing [the Earth’s] guts, like an animal tearing apart its prey,” recalled Jón Steingrímsson, a local pastor. He survived the ordeal to write an account that was published long after his death. It remains one of his country’s earliest and most important autobiographical works.
For the next eight months, lava spewed from the earth. The sun was hidden by ash and smoke. One in five Icelanders died in the aftermath. Steingrímsson himself only escaped by good luck — or perhaps something more divine. One terrible day, a great wave of lava swept toward his church and village. The pastor gathered his congregation and delivered a sermon of such mighty power and devotion that, it was said, God himself diverted the course of the fire.
As the eruption went on, sunlight grew dimmer far beyond Iceland’s shores. The Laki eruption, as it would come to be known, had sent 122 million metric tons of sulfur into the sky. Much of it would reach the stratosphere, the placid layer of the atmosphere that begins between 4 and 12 miles above the Earth’s surface. Those particles drifted on barometric currents around the Northern Hemisphere, wreaking havoc on the world’s weather. China and Egypt were hit by drought, then famine. In North America and Europe, winter was exceptionally brutal. In February, the Mississippi River froze down to New Orleans. Ice floes were seen bobbing into the subtropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
But the Laki eruption is a best case scenario involving only the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere. What about global cooling? The 1815 Mount Tambora eruption, although in the Southern Hemisphere, caused extreme cooling in the Northern Hemisphere producing what was called "the year without a summer." I've written about the Tambora eruption before and its ecological consequences. Quoting from the Wikipedia article at the time:
The 1815 eruption released sulfur into the stratosphere, causing a global climate anomaly. Different methods have estimated the ejected sulfur mass during the eruption: the petrological method; an optical depth measurement based on anatomical observations; and the polar ice core sulfate concentration method, using cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The figures vary depending on the method, ranging from 10E6 to 120E6 tonnes (11,000,000 to 130,000,000 short tons).
In the spring and summer of 1815, a persistent dry fog was observed in the northeastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It was identified as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil. In summer 1816, countries in the Northern Hemisphere suffered extreme weather conditions, dubbed the Year Without a Summer. Average global temperatures decreased about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F), enough to cause significant agricultural problems around the globe. On 4 June 1816, frosts were reported in Connecticut, and by the following day, most of New England was gripped by the cold front. On 6 June 1816, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine. Such conditions occurred for at least three months and ruined most agricultural crops in North America. Canada experienced extreme cold during that summer. Snow 30 cm (12 in) deep accumulated near Quebec City from 6 to 10 June 1816.
1816 was the second coldest year in the northern hemisphere since 1400 CE, after 1601 following the 1600 Huaynaputina eruption in Peru. The 1810s are the coldest decade on record, a result of Tambora's 1815 eruption and other suspected eruptions somewhere between 1809 and 1810 (see sulfate concentration figure from ice core data). The surface temperature anomalies during the summer of 1816, 1817 and 1818 were −0.51 °C (−0.918 °F), −0.44 °C (−0.792 °F) and −0.29 °C (−0.522 °F), respectively. As well as a cooler summer, parts of Europe experienced a stormier winter.
This pattern of climate anomaly has been blamed for the severity of typhus epidemic in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean between 1816 and 1819. The climate changes disrupted Indian monsoons causing three failed harvests and famine contributing to worldwide spread of a new strain of cholera originating in Bengal in 1816. Much livestock died in New England during the winter of 1816–1817. Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Families in Wales traveled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oat and potato harvests. The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply. Due to the unknown cause of the problems, demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.
For a more detailed account of climatic changes, see "Tambora 1815 as a test case for high impact volcanic eruptions: Earth system effects." My interest is more than just the cooling trend or even that it generally caused droughts and famines. Lets dig a little deeper.
In "The Deadliest Volcanic Eruption in History," the author mentions that roughly 100,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of the explosion--basically the people that were close enough to be directly impacted by the blast and ash fall. But the climatic impact killed millions more.
But far more died over the next several years, due to secondary effects that spread all over the globe, says Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World.
“What happened after Tambora is that there was three years of climate change,” he says. “The world got colder, and the weather systems changed completely for three years. And so you had widespread crop failure and starvation all from Asia to the United States to Europe.”
[snip]
It’s difficult to know how many people died because of starvation conditions, but “the death toll is probably about a million people, at least, in the years afterwards,” Wood says. “If you want to include the fact that Tambora unleashed a global pandemic of cholera … then the death toll goes into tens of millions.”
Cholera already existed before the eruption, but the colder temperatures caused by Tambora’s eruption led to the development of a new strain in the Bay of Bengal. Fewer people had immunity to this new strain of cholera, which then spread throughout the world.
Keep the disease aspect in mind, because we will see this as a recurrent theme.
536 A.D. has been labeled the "worst year to be alive". The article, "Why Much of the World Went Dark for 18 Months in 536 A.D." relates:
What exactly did the first 18 months of darkness look like? The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.” He also wrote that it seemed like the sun was constantly in eclipse; and that during this time, “men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”
Accounts like these weren’t taken very seriously until the 1990s, says Michael McCormick, a history professor at Harvard University and co-author of the Antiquity paper. That decade, researchers examined tree rings in Ireland and found that something weird did happen around 536. Summers in Europe and Asia became 35°F to 37°F colder, with China even reporting summer snow. This Late Antique Little Ice Age, as it’s known, came about when volcanic ash blocked out the sun.
“It was a pretty drastic change; it happened overnight,” McCormick says. “The ancient witnesses really were onto something. They were not being hysterical or imagining the end of the world.”
With this realization, accounts of 536 become newly horrifying. “We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon,” wrote Cassiodorus, a Roman politician. He also wrote that the sun had a “bluish” color, the moon had lost its luster and the “seasons seem to be all jumbled up together.”
The effects of the 536 eruption were compounded by eruptions in 540 and 547, and it took a long time for the Northern Hemisphere to recover. “The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in the spring of 536 lasted in western Europe until about 660, and it lasted until about 680 in Central Asia,” McCormick says.
"It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," McCormick told Science.
This period of cold and starvation caused economic stagnation in Europe that intensified in 541 when the first bubonic plague broke out. The plague killed between one-third and one-half of the population in the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire.
At the time the foregoing article was written, it was believed that the 536 event was caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland. It is now known to have been primarily the result of an explosive eruption of Krakatoa in 535 AD.
If the Eruption of Krakatoa was in 535 AD, then the first ever appearance of the Bubonic Plague in Europe in 542 AD is believed to be directly related to it.
The Monk Evagrius wrote a chronicle of the occurrence in Constantinople of an awful, until then unknown disease which over a frighteningly short period of time killed over 250,000 of the city’s inhabitants, until alas one stopped counting the dead.
It was the arrival of a disease which should wreak havoc on Europe for centuries to come. Evagrius believed the illness to have come from Ethiopia. Modern scientists believe this a distinct possibility, as such illnesses incubate in the area of the great lakes of Africa.
The inclination to seek new sources for fresh blood of the flea which spreads the disease increase enormously once the temperature drops below a certain point (the flea’s gut gets blocked and it desperately seeks blood as its own intestines starve it to death).
It is therefore believed that once Krakatoa erupted, the Plague spread at phenomenal speed in the area of the great lakes in Africa.
The plague did not just stop with the Eastern Roman Empire but spread along all its trade routes including eventually to Western England where it devastated the Celts who were struggling against an Anglo-Saxon invasion.
There were other knock on effects. The tribal horse warriors known as the Avars dominated the steps of Mongolia. But the cooler weather reduced the food available to the horses on which they depended. Consequently, they Turkish peoples they had long dominated were able to deliver a resounding defeat against the Avars who fled westward toward Europe where they would eventually stop in Hungary and take up raids against the Byzantine Empire, including ruinous yearly tributes of gold to not carry their raids. And it is believed that the weakening of city states in southern Yemen set the stage for Medina to rise in power and influence and, ultimately, to spawn Islam. For a more detailed look at all of this, watch the video at the bottom of this post.
And I would be remiss if I failed to point out that even the Black Death--the great bubonic plague outbreak of the 14th Century--was immediately preceded by a "Little Ice Age". Estimates are all over the place about the number killed (aggravated by the fact that what we think of as the Black Plague--which arrived in Europe in 1347 was only the first of several waves of plague that swept over Europe). But estimates are that the plague killed between 1/3 and 1/2 of the European population. China and India are believed to have suffered similar levels of death from the plague. As many as 200 million may have perished by the end of the 14th Century out of a total world population of between 360 and 400 million at the beginning of that century.
So when people like Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, and his investors suggest lowering global temperature, keep in mind that they aren't just calling for declining temperature but also the devastating famines, diseases, social and political upheaval that will follow.
VIDEO: "536 AD: The Year That The Sun Disappeared | Catastrophe"
Real History (1 hr 39 min.)
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