vortex-l  

Re: [Vo]:How many volcanoes would it take...

Nick Palmer
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:01:22 -0700

Further to my previous comment - there seems to have been some black propaganda put about that the output of volcanoes dwarfs what humans produce - and we are invited by this "fact" to imagine that nature's effects are much larger than humans and therefore all the talk of manmade global warming must be politically inspired rubbish etc etc. The source of this big lie seems to be that when some volcanoes like Mount St Helens and particularly Mount Pinatubo (the largest recent eruption) erupt they put a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. I was going to say "ah, but they are only erupting for a relatively short time compared to when they are not - a week or so as opposed to many years - so their average output is much less than their peak output and I would have been prepared to believe that the largest volcano in recent times could have "out CO2'd" humans for a couple of weeks BUT... I don't know how reliable this quote is but

"Gerlach and others estimate that, in addition to the measured 17 Mt of SO2, the eruption of approximately 5 km3 of magma was accompanied by release of at least 491 to 921 Mt of H2O, 3 to 16 Mt of Cl, and 42 to 234 Mt of CO2.">>

EIA Anthropogenic CO2 output = ~25,162 MTonnes/yr

So even Mt Pinatubo only put between 1/107th to 1/600th of the CO2 out that humans did in that year. It does look as if the peak output during the climactic few hours of the final eruption did equal us for a few hours but there absolutely isn't any way volcanoes generally are of much significance at all compared to the mighty homo "sapiens"...