Volcanoes can dramatically influence the earth’s climate, but sometimes in ways you might not expect. We often imagine volcanoes as sources of heat, but when they erupt, the ash they spew can also act as an atmospheric layer that actually helps keep the earth cool.

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“Two major volcanoes — El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991 — caused global average temperature to dip as a result of volcanic ash, soot and debris reflecting sunlight back into space,” The Daily Caller noted.

Think of the volcanic ash as a windshield sun reflector that protects a car on a hot day. Particles thrown into the sky by large volcanoes shield the earth from the sun’s rays, and the earth stays cooler as a result.

The University of Alabama scientists believe that this is essentially what happened 30 years ago. Because those two significant 1982 and 1991 volcanoes occurred right around the time a major global warming study began, the eruptions skewed the data and made the result look more dramatic than it truly was.

“Those eruptions happened relatively early in our study period, which pushed down temperatures in the first part of the dataset, which caused the overall record to show an exaggerated warming trend,” Christy said.

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“While volcanic eruptions are natural events, it was the timing of these that had such a noticeable effect on the trend

“If the same eruptions had happened near the more recent end of the dataset, they could have pushed the overall trend into negative numbers, or a long-term cooling,” he said.

That means that current climate models that predict dramatic global warming are most likely wrong, or at least highly exaggerated. They include temperature spikes that appear higher than they truly are because volcanic eruptions created a false baseline.

As soon as those errors are removed, the global warming rate is suddenly very steady over the last three decades and does not seem to be dramatically climbing. Of course, that doesn’t help push massive economic takeovers or pad Al Gore’s pockets the same way as alarmist panic.

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Perhaps the real takeaway of this recent study is that science is constantly changing and being revised.

If the experts didn’t realize that volcanoes were affecting conclusions for 30 years, what other “settled science” is actually based on false conclusions?

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In truth, science is never settled. Scientific facts are not a democracy, and a false “consensus” doesn’t actually impact reality any more than hundreds of scientists claiming the sun orbits the earth would somehow make it true.

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Good scientists are always questioning and revising.
When a group seems openly hostile to questions
and angrily bitter against skeptics, the odds
are they are on the wrong side of reality.