September 10, 2023

While the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, which erupted on January 15, may be causing a spike in temperatures, there’s nothing historic about what’s happening. The Earth has been this hot before…and hotter—and it wasn’t that long ago either.

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Before getting to historic hot spells, it’s worth noting that the volcano may not actually cause a big rise in global temperature over the long run. It’s true that the volcano’s eruption spewed a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere.

However, recent eruptions have also demonstrated volcanoes’ planet-cooling powers. In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew its top, aerosols spewed by this mighty volcanic blast lowered global temperatures by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) for at least one year. Tonga expelled approximately 441,000 tons (400,000 metric tons) of sulfur dioxide, about 2 percent of the amount spewed by Mount Pinatubo during the 1991 eruption.

Image: Another dead whale on the East Coast. YouTube screen grab (cropped).

Basically, we tend not to know in advance what a volcano will do. What we do know is that the media will hysterically opine about climate change records. Except that they’ll be wrong (as always). There’s nothing exceptional about the current heat we’re experiencing:

  • Death Valley, California, holds the world-record temperature high: A whopping 134 F measured on July 10, 1913.
  • North Dakota hit its historic high of 121 F in 1936.
  • Montana experienced its highest temperature of 117F in 1937.
  • Despite being the USA’s warmest state, Florida’s record high is only 108 F, and that occurred in 1931.

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Headlines from the 1930s bespeak incredible temperature spikes. Here are just some examples:

So, it’s always and often been hot. And sometimes it’s cold, which is also deadly. Even the leftist Lancet has admitted that “Cold caused 17 times more deaths than heat in the 13 countries studied.”

What’s really important isn’t that the Earth has extremes of hot and cold. What’s important is that fossil fuel has enabled people to avoid the worst consequences of those extremes:

Over the past hundred years, annual climate-related deaths have declined by more than 96%.

In the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,362 dead per year—or 96.2% lower.

In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the number of dead was even lower at 14,885 — 96.9% lower than the 1920s average.