Would the climate changes of a volcanic eruption be permanent?

Answer 1

Well, let's look at the evidence:

5 April 1815, Mt. Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa begins to erupt with the largest recorded eruption in modern times (and 1,300 years for Mt. Tambora). Detonations are heard as far as 870 miles away. on 10 April detonations can clearly be heard as far away as Sumatra, 1,200 miles away. The mountain los roughly one third of its height in the eruptions. Global temperatures are reduced due to volcanic dust in the upper atmosphere for at least a year follow by 0.7-1.3 °F.

26 & 27 August 1883, Krakatoa (Indonesia) erupts and two thirds of the mountain collapses into itself. Global temperatures in drop by an average 2.2 °F for the following year, and climatic patterns are disrupted for nearly a decade after.

October 1902, Santa Maria, Guatemala, erupts. Volcanic ash is caste as far as San Francisco. Temperatures rise and precipitation falters in the western US during all of 1903.

6 June 1912, Novarupta in Alaska erupts with three times the force of Mt. Pinatubo, Phillipines in 1991. Disruption to wildlife and salmon spawning along the west coast of North America lasts for a decade. Upper atmosphere disturbances are observed as far away as Albania. North American temperatures drop roughly .5 °F for years afterward.

Although not a classed a Colossal Eruption like the others listed here, in 1982 El Chichon in Mexico erupted and spewed one of the largest Sulfur Dioxide plumes into the upper atmosphere on record.

June 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, Phillipines marks the largest eruption since Novarupta. Norther Hempisphere lemperatures fall from 0.9 to 1.1 °F for up to three years afterward and a global fall of about 0.7 °F is recorded.

I could go on, but there's no point. Each of these eruptions, ejected clouds of greenhouse gases into the stratosphere in excess of 7 million metric tonnes of SO2 and 20 million metric tonnes of particulate matter(and as much perhaps as 30 million metric tonnes of SO2 and 100 million tonnes of matter). While the "experts" claim that human sources exceed any of these events in producing SO2, that of volcanic eruptions is very well documented, but that of human sources are not quantified anywhere to be found, making a side by side comparison difficult at best.

Suffice it to say that the emission of the coal fired plants here in the Midwest don't tend to shut down air traffic for months like the April 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption did over the North Atlantic, Europe, and Northern Asia, nor do manmade emissions bury tens of thousands of people and millions of square miles of land in hot ash and magma.

While that percolates, consider for a moment that active volcanoes like Mona Loa bubble and burp continuously, 24/7/365. Mona Loa is the largest land volcano on Earth at an honorable 2000 square miles. However, oceanographers recently discovered Tamu Massif, a three to five mile high monster sitting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan that weighs in at a colossal 120,000 square miles. although Tamu Massif is the coldest volcano on Earth, she's as active or more so than Mona Loa, dumping potentially billions of metric tonnes of SO2 into the largest ocean of the world.