Well, there are accurate historical records on previous eruptions of Icelandic volcanoes going back a thousand years. The historical records also show where the fallout and major effects downwind occurred, as well, because the Europeans recorded these events.
From what I've read, there's only a small "if" factor involved with these volcanoes. They have an established eruptive periodicity of about two hundred years, per the reports I've read. The last big eruption happened early in the nineteenth century and lasted for almost two years. These latest eruptions are right on schedule.
Geologic records show that they've erupted with a fair amount of regularity for millenia.
Maybe we'll get lucky this time and this will only be a minor event, but the geologic record says that's not likely. Read the article. The near-term scenario isn't too promising.
People think that because we’re all modern and everything that those old timey bad things like plagues and pandemics and very bad geologic events such as severe volcanoes won’t happen any more.
Wrong answer. They will. Now? Next year? 100 years? Looks as though this volcanic thing might indeed be a destructive thing.
The other aspect is that because things are all modern and whatnot, if one card goes down, many other cards go down. in earlier times the interconnected stuff wasn’t there, and people were self sufficient in smaller areas. One card going down didn’t mean 100 other cards went down.
Odd that with this Iceland volcano stuff going on regularly like this (if it is) nobody thought to rank this up with major world concerns until oops, air travel was knocked out.