from what i have read my understanding is that vulcanologist can predict with large certainty eruptions within 6 months for regular volcanos, and with in a certain degree of certaincy for up to a year. mind you, this is not to say, they will give you the day of the eruptions, just that it will happen within that year or within 6 months and then within a month, and finally within a day.
super volcanos are a different story. all they have for it are computer models based on smaller volcanos. vie 1 can only be predicted within a few weeks, and then only a limited success, while vie 4's are as much as a year, and with fairly good success. by extrapalation the computer models say the warnings will be going off for anything between 10 to 100 years, depending on the model. part of the problems is while yellowstone is not giveing off those warning, our goverment is spending a lot of money to study it. long valley is giving off those warnings and could be studied with the possiblity of giving us considerable more warnings, but because its not as widely know of as a super volcano, it does not have the same draw for money that yellowstone has. for that reason it will give little warning when it goes off. that is other than the warnings it has been giving off since at least the mid 80's. if it had been a normal volcano, vulcanologist would have warned at that time that it was going to erupt within the half year. as you said, the goverment does not do a lot of things that would be sensible.
also to correct something said before, the south pole does get direct sunlight, for several months it gets it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just like the north pole, and then has 6 months of darkness.
as far as the land mass contributing to the ice age, i do agree, but i dont believe they cause it. the reason i say this is that there are periods where they land mass is there too, but no ice age exist, then it happens when there is not the full land mass connections.
i do like the idea of a biodegradeable dye, esp one that does not degrade until it gets warm. say one that had an degrade inhibiter that evaporated after tempature got up to a certain point.
