21 May 2026
In 1784, Benjamin Franklin became possibly the first person to connect volcanic eruptions to climate change. Writing from Paris, where he served as American ambassador, he observed that the winters of 1783-84 were strangely cold across the Northern Hemisphere. He correctly attributed this to Iceland's Laki eruption, which had flooded the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide. The link between volcanism and climate was not widely accepted for another two centuries.
Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures (1784)