CO2 from Volcano's vs CO2 from humans [View All]

[Quixote1818]

Its funny how when I ask people if they believe one volcano can impact temperatures and influence weather they often say "Of course". But tell them that 365 days out of the year, billions of cars and thousands of factories around the world are pumping chemicals into the atmosphere and are changing the climate; for some reason that becomes far fetched. Even with the Earth getting hotter each year as has been predicted by NASA and NOAA. This got me interested in the actual numbers which stunned me!


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Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually.

This seems like a huge amount of CO2, but a visit to the U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) website (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/) helps anyone armed with a handheld calculator and a high school chemistry text put the volcanic CO2 tally into perspective. Because while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value.

http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/2007/07_02_15.html