Throughout Earth history, extensive, sub-aerial, basaltic lava flows associated with continental rifting and hot spots have been contemporaneous with major global warming—the more extensive the flows, the longer the period of eruption, and the greater the warming of air and oceans. Around 251 Ma, basalts covered an area in Siberia of 5 million km2 probably within 670,000 years, causing equatorial oceans to become highly acidic with temperatures >40°C. Approximately 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrate species went extinct in an environmental crisis mapped globally as the end of the Paleozoic. The Deccan basalts covered an area of 0.5 million km2 around 66 Ma causing warming and extinctions that formed the end of the Mesozoic. Around 56 Ma, rifting of Norway from Greenland extruded as much basalt as 3000 km3 per km of rift per million years, forming the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. Hundreds of smaller basalt eruptions punctuate the geologic time scale ending geologic eras, periods, epochs, and even ages. In historic time, the Great Þjórsá Lava, covering 970 km2 of Iceland, led to major warming around 8600 BP. The King’s Bowl and Wapi lava fields covered 700 km2 of the Snake River Plain in southern Idaho around 2250 BP during the Roman Warm Period. The basaltic volcano Eldgjá covered 800 km2 of Iceland around 939 AD, associated with the Medieval Warm Period. The much smaller volcano Bárðarbunga erupted 85 km2 of basalt in 6 months starting in 2014, the largest basalt flow since 1783, contemporaneous with sudden warming in the northern hemisphere of 0.47oC from 2014 to 2016. The rate of flood-basalt areal coverage was 0.5 km2 per day. The Kona eruption has been extruding basalts covering 0.6 to 0.4 km2 per day from May 3 through July 27. If this eruption continues for 6 months, it could affect climate as much as Bárðarbunga. Warming appears caused by ozone depletion, allowing more UV-B than usual to reach Earth. UV-B radiation is hot enough to burn skin and is 48 times hotter than infrared radiation absorbed strongly by CO2. Basaltic eruptions emit especially high volumes of chlorine and bromine, which are observed to cause ozone depletion. The exact chemical path is not yet well understood. Heat waves during the summer of 2018 are associated with a “sharply kinked” jet stream often thought caused by ozone depletion.

The thermal and chemical structure of the middle atmosphere is determined by molecules of air absorbing high-energy, solar, ultraviolet radiation. The dominant photochemical reaction for forming the stratosphere is dissociation of a molecule of oxygen into two atoms of oxygen. When a molecule is dissociated, the two pieces fly apart at high velocity. Temperature of air is directly proportional to the average velocity of all its molecules and atoms squared. Thus, photochemical dissociation converts bond energy efficiently and completely into air temperature. A molecule of oxygen is dissociated by absorbing ultraviolet-C radiation with frequencies around 1237 terahertz, energies around 5.1 electronvolts. Since oxygen makes up 20.95% of Earth’s atmosphere, there is ample oxygen to absorb all solar ultraviolet-C of appropriate frequencies that reaches the stratosphere, keeping the stratopause 30 to 40 oC warmer than the tropopause. Thus, the stratosphere forms an “electric” blanket warming Earth—electric in the sense that the thermal energy comes from a distant source, Sun, not from the body under the blanket, Earth. The second most important photochemical reaction in the stratosphere is dissociation of ozone by ultraviolet-B radiation with frequencies around 967 terahertz, energies around 4.0 electronvolts. While ozone concentrations, even in the ozone layer, are less than 10 parts per million, ozone is continually being formed and dissociated in the endless ozone-oxygen cycle, absorbing most solar ultraviolet-B radiation. When atoms of chlorine reach the lower stratosphere especially in winter, ozone concentrations that normally increase in winter can be depleted. One atom of chlorine, under the right conditions, can destroy 100,000 molecules of ozone. Depletion of the ozone layer allows more ultraviolet-B radiation than normal to reach Earth. Ultraviolet-B radiation is observed to cause sunburn, cataracts, skin cancer and mutations. It also dissociates ground-level ozone pollution, warming air in populated regions and penetrates oceans more than one hundred meters, very efficiently increasing ocean heat content as observed. Because of the ozone-oxygen cycle, where there are increased concentrations of ozone in the atmosphere, there is increased temperature. Sudden stratospheric warmings of 30-40 oC within days are typically associated with high concentrations of ozone and occur most frequently at altitudes of 30-50 km where dissociation of oxygen and ozone are most efficient. In 1798, Sir Benjamin Thompson proposed the mechanical theory of heat generated by friction when boring canon. This mechanical theory evolved into two fundamental assumptions: 1) heat is a flux of thermal energy measured in watts per square meter and 2) the greater the amount of flux absorbed, the hotter the body will become. Note that this approach never addresses the issue of what heat or thermal energy are, physically. (Complete abstract in poster file.)

Oxygen-isotope proxies for air temperature in Greenland ice cores, with time resolutions of years to decades, document 25 periods from 120,000 to 14,000 BP when air temperatures warmed 5 to 16 oC within decades and cooled slowly, incrementally, over millennia back down into ice-age conditions. These clearly-observed Dansgaard--Oeschger events averaged 4000 years in length but were highly erratic in time of onset, intensity, and duration. They were typically associated with volcanic sulfate deposits and floods of fresh water into the North Atlantic. They appear to be caused primarily by sub-glacial basaltic eruptions in Iceland, the most intense of which lasted from 12,000 to 9500 BP, long enough to warm the oceans out of the last ice age. Similar sequences of current and warmer temperatures are observed in fine-layered sediments in the Eocene Green River Formation where erratic sequences averaged 5000 years. The most rapid and intense changes in sedimentation and fossils in the geologic time scale are contemporaneous with massive basaltic lava flows covering millions of square kilometers of continental rifts at the end of the Paleozoic, Carnian, Triassic, Pliensbachian, Albian, Mesozoic, Paleocene, Eocene, etc. Large, explosive, subduction-related volcanic eruptions form aerosols in the lower stratosphere cooling the globe 0.5 oC for a few years. Modelling shows that such short-term cooling of the whole ocean surface affects ocean temperatures for as long as a century. In this way, several major explosive eruptions per century over millennia cause slow, incremental cooling down into ice-age conditions as clearly resolved in deep ocean cores. It is very hard to explain these well-observed footprints of climate change using greenhouse gases. While Pinatubo erupted as much as 234 megatons of CO2 in 1991, concentrations at Mauna Loa slowed their rise due to cooling of the ocean surface. A set of 16 short videos, numerous papers, a book, and dozens of web pages all referenced at WhyClimateChanges.com document evidence for major effusive basaltic lava flows being the primary cause of fast global warming and sequences of major explosive volcanic eruptions being the major cause of slow incremental global cooling. Furthermore, they explain why greenhouse-warming theory is not only mistaken, it is Physically-Impossible.com.