Kate Marvel

And following Laki, things happened, and we don't really understand the causes of those.

So the temperatures dropped, but then in Europe, the next summer, it was abnormally hot.

There were massive hailstorms that killed livestock.

And as a result, harvests failed.

There were food shortages.

And I think we all know, especially in France, what those angry peasants and urban dwellers ended up doing.

So I'm not saying that, oh, a volcano caused the French Revolution.

That's way too simplistic.

That's way too deterministic.

But when you look back through history, the really, really impactful things that happen when a volcano goes off are changes to human societies.

We are meddling with forces that are completely outside the power of physics to understand.