KLINGAMAN: The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano th

[Oscar]

The Disaster that Made the Modern World

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Two centuries later, with our changing climate, Tambora's power still haunts us.

By Crawford Kilian, March 23, 2013 TheTyee.ca

The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History

William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman
St. Martin's Press (2013)

While we are undoubtedly changing climate, climate is changing us.

The warming of the last 50 or 60 years is likely the root cause of the low-grade civil wars that have been flaring up in the belt just south of the Sahara, from northern Nigeria to South Sudan and the Horn of Africa. Australia is adapting to a new regime of droughts and bushfires followed by rains and floods. Dengue fever is returning to Florida.

Here in B.C., we've seen our forests turn into a pine-beetle utopia, and climate change may finish off the wild salmon regardless of fish farms. Our governments are doing as little as possible about it.

Like St. Augustine praying for release from his sexual urges, we dream of a future without fossil fuels -- "But not yet, O Lord!" Clearly our changing climate will eventually impose fossil-fuel celibacy on us whether we're ready or not, and that will mean extremely difficult political and economic decisions.

Two hundred years ago, climate change drove politics in ways the politicians of the day didn't even recognize. But their responses helped create our world.

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