Hunga Tonga Volcanic Eruption Part II: Is that volcanic eruption actually warming the atmosphere?

Hunga Tonga’s January eruption, which was found to likely be Earth’s most powerful in 140 years since Krakatoa, sent an eruption plume 180,000 feet into the atmosphere – reaching the mesosphere. Because the plume contained little sulfur, atmospheric cooling was not expected. But this underwater volcano sat at almost the ideal depth beneath the sea to inject record-shattering amounts of another gas – water vapor – into the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, the amount of water vapor injected into the stratosphere is likely to lead to some surface warming – unusual for a volcanic eruption!

Shifting Baseline Syndrome and its Effect on Normalizing Increasingly Extreme Temperatures

The summer of 2022 was another summer of increasingly warm temperatures and drought, particularly across the Western United States, Europe, and other areas of the world. But a sociological and psychological phenomenon called Shifting Baseline Syndrome affects nearly everyone and people have a tough time understanding that what is occurring now and in their own area is not normal. After the historic 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for example, record average temperatures this summer have seemed to many in the region to simply be more “normal” – though there was nothing normal about them as July and August shattered multiple records. The baseline upon which we psychologically measure what is normal is shifting – which causes us to becoming increasingly blind to a changing climate.