Iceland Volcano Has Historical Precedent in 1783--Another Chernobyl?

Fat Al Fights Volcanoes With Fire!?

Iceland's location smack dab on the mid-Atlantic ridge separating the two tectonic plates on which Eastern North America and Western Europe lie, give it vulcanism second to none, and European history has been strongly affected by previous eruptions which have lasted much longer than from volcanoes sitting over "hot spots" like Hawaii or Sumatra. When Laki blew its top on June 8, 1783, the consequences still rock Europe today....

The 1783 event is rated as VEI 6 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, but the eight month emission of sulfuric aerosols resulted in one of the most important climatic and socially repercussive events of the last millennium.....The eruption continued until 7 February 1784, but most of the lava was erupted in the first five months. Grímsvötn volcano, from which the Laki fissure extends, was also erupting at the time from 1783 until 1785. The outpouring of gases, including an estimated 8 million tons of hydrogen fluoride and estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide, gave rise to what has since become known as the "Laki haze" across Europe. The consequences for Iceland—known as the Mist Hardships—were catastrophic. An estimated 20-25% of the population died in the famine and fluorine poisoning after the fissure eruptions ceased. ......

Consequences in Europe
An estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide were emitted, approximately equivalent to three times the total annual European industrial output in 2006, and also equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo-1991 eruption every three days.[6] This outpouring of sulfur dioxide during unusual weather conditions caused a thick haze to spread across western Europe, resulting in many thousands of deaths throughout 1783 and the winter of 1784.
The summer of 1783 was the hottest on record and a rare high pressure zone over Iceland caused the winds to blow to the south-east. The poisonous cloud drifted to Bergen in Norway, then spread to Prague in the Province of Bohemia by 17 June, Berlin by 18 June, Paris by 20 June, Le Havre by 22 June, and to Great Britain by 23 June. The fog was so thick that boats stayed in port, unable to navigate, and the sun was described as "blood coloured"......This disruption then led to a most severe winter in 1784, in which Gilbert White at Selborne in Hampshire reported 28 days of continuous frost. The extreme winter is estimated to have caused 8,000 additional deaths in the UK. In the spring thaw, Germany and Central Europe then reported severe flood damage.
The meteorological impact of Laki resonated on, contributing significantly to several years of extreme weather in Europe. In France a sequence of extremes included a surplus harvest in 1785 that caused poverty for rural workers, accompanied by droughts and bad winters and summers, including a violent hailstorm in 1788 that destroyed crops. This in turn contributed significantly to the build up of poverty and famine that may have contributed to the French Revolution in 1789. Laki was only a factor in a decade of climatic disruption, as Grímsvötn was erupting from 1783–1785 and a recent study of El Niño patterns also suggests an unusually strong El-Niño effect from 1789-93.

Contemporaneous accounts, including some by that indefatigable 80-ish American meteorologist Benjamin Franklin, describe the following Winter as the coldest ever, with the Mississippi freezing over with ice at New Orleans, then run by the French, and Charleston, S.C.'s harbor, then almost the largest in the newly independent colonies, freezing over for a month! In other parts of the planet, devastating famines and other weather-related disasters across North Africa and even affecting India's monsoon, which didn't happen that Fall and threw the sub-continent into famine and hardship. In Egypt, a horrible famine killed unknown thousands who starved due to the changed weather conditions and the horrible sulfur dioxide ash actually choking the NIle or altering its beneficial flood-plain hydraulics.

Another Chernobyl, this time Choking All of Western Europe?

Some American meteorologists are dismissing the potential for longer term impact of the April, 2010 Icelandic eruption, and even cite the 1783 as a much more horrific event than the recent explosions, but the weather-based predictions of these Americans are of a piece with a lot a bogus Global Warming hoax predictions. However, a Norwegian vulcanologist who has actually studied Icelandic volcanos for a decade is not at all as sanguine as the American meteorologists:

The airspace over much of northern Europe remains shut and the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, is stranded in New York City because of the threat from a volcanic ash plume being belched out of Iceland. How long will the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano continue and what other kinds of activity can we expect? A volcanologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who has worked extensively in Iceland says a month-long eruption would not be out of the question. But the eruption could also continue for a year or more, he says.

If so, the prevailing winds would blow the nasty ash and rotten-egg gases over Norway, he says. The much greater danger is a much larger volcano buried under a glacier just to the east named Katla, which the much smaller multi-syllabic neighbor now blowing off might have alleviated pressures from the underlying magma basin to a certain extent. If that large system would blow, the effects on climate and the European economy might be very harmful, leading perhaps to a Second French Revolution?

This time around, given their feckless nanny-state cowardice, the guillotines might be manned by Muslims establishing their demographic dominance over tired-out layabouts. Srbenica in reverse, anyone, with this time the cowardly Dutch soldiers losing their heads?!?