2 December 2011
ACM
Posted by Callan Bentley
From “Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide” by Terry Gerlach in the June 14, 2011 issue of EOS:
Human activities emit ~135 times as much carbon dioxide as the world’s volcanoes? Holy cow.
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About Callan
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.
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Impressive, eh? Yet some people still insist that volcanoes produce more, we’re just “missing” all those volcanic emissions. Go figure.
I don’t find the 135x multiplier all that surprising. There are hundreds of millions more cars on earth than volcanoes. With all the other sources of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.
What I find more concerning is the drastic change in the ACM multiplier slope following WWII. Also worrisome is that the slope hasn’t changed in the past 10 years, despite increased awareness about global climate change. How much of that is to blame on developing countries? I don’t know but probably not as much as we would like to think.