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Humans Produce 100x More CO2 Than All Volcanoes Combined
Humans Produce 100x More CO2 Than All Volcanoes Combined
Humans Produce 100x More CO2 Than All Volcanoes Combined
"We are on the same level of carbon catastrophe which is a bit sobering."
Victor TangermannOctober 1st 2019
The total amount emitted by volcanoes is only about 0.3 gigatons a year — a tiny fraction of the 37
gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.
That means they’re not nearly as big of a contributor to global emissions as some prevailing
theories hold.
“Climate skeptics really jump on volcanoes as a possible contender for top CO2 emissions but it’s
simply not the case,” Marie Edmonds, Professor of Volcanology and Petrology at Queens’ College,
Cambridge, told told Agence France-Presse.
In the distant past, there have been freak incidents on a similar scale to today’s human CO2 output
— and they were catastrophic. One such carbon event was the Chicxulub asteroid impact, 66
million years ago, which the scientists estimate to have released anywhere between 425 and 1,400
gigatons of CO2.
“The amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by [manmade] activity in the last 10-12 years[is
equivalent] to the catastrophic change during these events we’ve seen in Earth’s past,” Edmonds
told AFP.
“We are on the same level of carbon catastrophe which is a bit sobering,” Celina Suarez, Associate
Professor of Geology at the University of Arkansas, added.
The team of scientists released a series of papers as part of the so-called Deep Carbon Observatory,
a global research program founded in 2009.
Unfortunately, for the Earth to level out carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, it’ll be a very long while.
“It will rebalance itself, but not on a timescale that is of significance to humans,” Suarez said.