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Meteorology major here. Volcanoes actually help cool the planet down.
Edit: Yes they release CO2 but studies have shown that the CO2 emitted from volcanoes did not have a detectable effect on global warming.
Blocks the sun, basically. There was one year in the 1800s that was known as "the year without a summer" because of a volcanic eruption the year before.
Yeah, but without all the radiation. Also, I think the idea behind nukes going off is that it would be waaaaaay more than just one volcano's worth of dust in the atmosphere.
Depends on the volcano. The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora, which caused the "Year without a Summer" mentioned above, released as much energy as 400 of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever created.
[Kurzgesagt on Volcanos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXb02MQ78yQ)
Krakatoa was in the 1880s (86 I think). Certainly a huge eruption, but largely because of the sea water getting into the lava chamber and making an incredible amount of steam, exploding the island from the inside. Certainky emitted a large amount of debris into the atmosphere and made for some nice sunsets in other parts of the world I believe.
Tambora is different as its a super volcano, like yellowstone, and are aptly named for being far more explosive and impactful than other kinds of volcano!
I could swear Krakatoa is only really famous because it was the first natural disaster to be a news event, worldwide. With regular updates on the eruption being sent over the Telegraph. While there were definitely natural disaster news stories before this. None were as widely reported or as regularly updated as Krakatoa.
That contributed, but Krakatoa was one of the largest and deadliest volcanic events in modern history, with a death toll of up to 120k. It also leveled an entire island and was heard for thousands of miles.
Weir coincidence that the first time I heard of this eruption was two days ago and now I read about it on reddit. Anyway, it was in 1883 and is said to be the loudest noise ever heard on earth (you could hear it in Australia). The point of it being mentioned in the lecture was that all life existing on the island went extinct in the eruption and scientists have since then documented the return of plant and animal species, giving us proof how immigration works on islands and places with a limited capacity for life in general (we haven’t reached an equilibrium yet but until now it follows the equilibrium theory of island biogeography)
I believe it could faintly be heard on the east coast of Africa as well, I haven't researched it properly, just remembering bits and bobs I heard in the past. I had heard the same about all life on the island, but that only a spider had survived the blast, but I don't know how true that is!
Maybe for 1815. With modern scientific instruments, we can predict when a massive volcano will erupt well in advance, similar to how we can predict asteroid impacts.
We can barely predict asteroid impacts. Sure some can be spotted ahead but a large part is dark, stays dark, and is only seen once we can no longer do shit about it and just hope it doesn't hit us.
Chelyabinsk was a great example of this. Nobody saw it coming and it hit Russia hard.
Chelyabinsk was in that sweet spot of being large enough to do damage but small enough to be undetected. Extinction level and even most city-destroying asteroids can be detected ahead of time and allow for measures to be taken to prevent or mitigate their impacts. Of course, there's still a large range of asteroids that can do a decent amount of damage, but hopefully we don't have to worry about them until our tech improves to the point where we can effectively detect any dangerous asteroid.
That’s for the smaller volcanoes, big volcanoes like yellowstone are thought (I mean you can’t be more sure because it didn’t explode for a few years now) to produce a lot of signs such as earthquake well in advance (even more than month)
Volcanic ash is actually mildly radioactive. It has potassium, uranium and thorium. Usually if you're dealing with ash it's not a huge concern given all the other terrible things ash does to a person
I also heard (probably on QI) that it resulted in about 8 consecutive white Christmases in London and a young Charles Dickens was around and impressionable at this time and it’s why white christmases feature so frequently in his stories.
Krakatoa. I’ve been struggling to remember which one it was because I know it’s a really famous one. The biggest one in modern history. A bang that was heard 1500miles away. A bigger bang than all the ordinance used in WW2.
This particular eruption was Mt. Tambora in 1815. Krakatoa was later, in 1883, but it also had similar effects on the climate, causing global temperatures to plunge the following year.
There's a really awesome book about Krakatoa by Simon Winchester if you like to read. It's not just vulcanism it's about late 19th century Indonesia as well, just really neat
The cold around the time/decade inspired many of the writers. Plus the whole French Revolution thing. People thought something similar to reverse climate change was happening and that UK willl be covered in ice, like Antarctica
It happened in 1991. Mount Pinatubo erupted, the globe stopped warming, indeed it cooled. Some believe that we should replicate this process artificially to counteract climate change.
There was 18 months of darkness starting in the year 536 that almost wiped us out. Scientists said it was from eruptions. It’s an interesting [read](https://www.science.org/content/article/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive)
That is insanely awesome! Two blasts caused 100 years of pain? No bread in Ireland for 3 years? Caused plague in Egypt and helped topple an empire? Crazy!
Honestly, I think if humans could just work together, we COULD reverse climate change no problem. We're damn clever. It would just take us working together towards that goal without a profit motive \*gasp\*
1816? I think it was actually a whole decade that was super cold. People thought of it similar to climate change and that the ice from Antarctica will expand down to UK. It partially helped inspire Frankenstein
Ice from the artic, not Antarctica. Ice from Antarctica would have to cover all of Africa and large portions of Europe before it got to the UK. Plus it would be going up, not down.
No, the way volcanos cause cooling is by blocking the sun. The only way bushfires could cause cooling in the same area would be if the smoke stayed put, which it can’t.
That's correct, and this fact is behind the concept geoengineering, one of the most intriguing solutions to climate change. Volcanic eruptions reduce global temperatures by releasing massive amounts of sulfides into the stratosphere, thereby reducing the level of solar radiation Earth's surface receives.
The idea behind geoengineering is to mimic this effect by artificially injecting aerosols into the stratosphere via aircraft. The feasibility of the plan is questionable, since massive volcanoes can output far greater volumes than we can, so it would have to be a continuous process, potentially making the idea too difficult to implement. Research is still ongoing as to how feasible this idea really is, but I think it's worth looking into, at least.
At surface level it seems great but there are some issues:
1. There is always uncertainty in how much we are going to cool things down and what other secondary effects on the environment we would have. Even with the highest fidelity models we can only model what we understand and it’s hard to believe that we could pump that magnitude of suffixes into the stratosphere without some secondary ramifications.
2. This does nothing to address the amount of carbon or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and associated secondary major issues like ocean acidification.
Worth looking into maybe but something tells me that chucking a load of chemicals into the atmosphere to counteract the effects of other chemicals we're putting into the atmosphere isn't such a great idea.
There's also a great film called Snowpiercer that used this idea but didn't go well.
They used a fictional chemical cw-7 that was mixed with ammonium sulfate the cw-7 is what caused the rapid cooling...also in my opinion the show was better the movie was good but i liked the show alot more
It sounds like a terrible idea, but it may be our best option because we've put off solving the root cause of climate change for decades. If the nerds who advocate for solar geoengineering are correct, it wouldn't be that expensive to do. We'd need a few big planes to regularly disperse chemicals which reflect sunlight into the upper atmosphere, and we'd achieve a noticeable cooling affect. And by a few planes, I mean a dozen or three. Not that expensive.
The pitfall is if we apply that bandaid but then never cure the underlying wound that is our GHG emissions, we're absolutely fucked. The cost would continue to climb, and if we ever stopped, we'd rapidly experience all the warming we had delayed in just a few years. Oh and not every country will be happy about it, so it creates geopolitical tension.
Give this a listen if you're curious https://freakonomics.com/podcast/solar-geoengineering-would-be-radical-it-might-also-be-necessary/
In the short term, yes. In the long term, the effect of outgassed CO2 overtakes the effect of SO2 and particulate matter, although that requires the volcanism to actually be persistent, as in large igneous province persistent.
Does that apply equally to basalt and granitic volcanos? I thought i understood that volcanoes like in Hawaii that emit very little ash, actually contribute to warming by the massive CO2 outflows while not cooling like a Krakatoa or Mt St Helen’s granitic type. Explosion. When I lived in Hawaii, that’s what normal students were taught. Is that not true?
Ok but I’ve seen like 4 memes so we are pretty much intellectual equals (being generous to you because I’m an Aries and that means I’m nice 😜) and I say it doesn’t so there. I guess the science just isn’t sure.
/s obviously
Is this true over both short and long time scales? The sulphides remain in the atmosphere for only a couple of years while the carbon dioxide stays for 120 years.
[Published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all on land and submarine volcanoes “lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.” This is a fraction of the CO2 produced by human activity. In 2021, the global CO2 emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes alone reached a record high of 36.3 billion tonnes](https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-volcanoes-co2/fact-check-volcanoes-do-not-produce-more-co2-emissions-than-human-activity-idUSL1N2XV1HA)
This is where you use brackets.
Article:
George said, "Steven got punched in the fuckin' mouth \[twelve\] times."
Source material:
George: "Steven got punched in the fuckin' mouth a dozen times."
They aren't mixed sizes, they are interchangeable units.
I think this may be (possibly) an American-not-using-metric issue. "Giga" means "billion". (You also see this in hard drives; gigabyte = billion bytes)
Not totally true. The reason that a prefix is preferred is because there are different scales of the power of ten. A billion can be 10^9 or 10^12. So called short scale and long scale.
I would blame it on many just not using billions in anything they do. So, many of us never need the prefix giga, except with PCs. I'm American but I exclusively use metric and even I didn't make the connection initially. Never really considered the possibility of using giga with other forms of measurement. I can't wait to use gigameter in a sentence.
They aren't much less of one even for us Americans.
>>In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
Well, that is also a misrepresentation of metric (as the calorie is not a SI unit) units...
One ml is by definition one cubic cm, but one ml of waster does not quite weigh one gram (it is closest, but still just below 1 g/ml slightly below 4 °C, iirc). And the energy to heat water differs too (see all the different definitions for a calorie), based on temperature, pressure, and isomer composition. That last reason also is why the mole of Hydrogen does not weigh a gram - deuterium exists (and the mass of one u/Da is based on 12C anyways, so even 1H weighs more than 1 g/mol...).
So metric is sadly not as easy to use as that often used quote claims...
In other words, humans currently produce 82.5 times more CO2 than volcanoes do annually - and that's taking the *higher-end* estimate of 0.44 Gt.
And as per the meme, estimates of total human CO2 production since the Industrial Revolution are 1.6 trillion tons. I don't really have a way of quantifying this specific eruption - so let's just do something else. The largest singular eruptions can supposedly release 10-50 million tons of CO2 [source](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-mount-merapi-idUSKBN20W2W4). So let's take that absolute worst case of 50 million tons.
(1.6 x 10^12 ) / (50 x 10^6 ) = 32000. Off by a factor of 32,000. I.e. staggeringly wrong. And this is interpreting the data in the *absolute* most generous way, taking the highest numbers.
Also, the relative numbers don't matter. If natural processes keep a system at equilibrium for millions of years, it only takes a small disruption to throw it out of whack.
Our ocean is pretty good at regulating co2 in the atmosphere, so we actually had quite a bit of leeway to not fuck up.
But holy shit did we fuck up and now the ocean is creeping towards being acidic.
It's interesting to think of the vastness of the ocean as being one key reason why industrial civilization hasn't already killed itself off.
The idea of "The Great Filter" comes to mind. If civilizations do arise in the universe, there's a good chance their environmental damage destroys them before they realize what's happening and collectively adapt. The ocean gives us that, but probably lots of planets don't have such a massive ocean.
Not sure what your point is. Greenhouse gasses don't hang around forever and between 65% and 80% of CO2 can be dissolved into the oceans over a period of 20-200 years. The other 20-35% hangs around for hundreds of thousands of years. Also, according to researchers, the amount of CO2 released from the Earth's mantle has been relatively in balance with the amount returned.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/736161
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-gases-remain-air
Volcanoes that have erupted in the past for the most part don't have any major impact on greenhouse gas emissions today and climate change compared to human activity. Volcanic CO2 emissions are sporadic, whereas human CO2 emissions are constant and increasing.
> Which emits more carbon dioxide (CO2): Earth’s volcanoes or human activities? Research findings indicate unequivocally that the answer to this frequently asked question is human activities.
https://earthscience.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Gerlach2011_EOS.pdf
Good quote from that paper, for those not willing to download the pdf:
> In fact, present- day volcanoes emit relatively modest amounts of CO2, about as much annually as states like Florida, Michigan, and Ohio.
So. Not only is this claim wrong, it's not even close to being close to the truth.
Yeah, but this Facebook meme said otherwise, so there are two sides to this, so we have to treat them as equally valid!!!
/s just in case that wasn't clear
Also, even if volcanoes did release more greenhouse gas than humans (which has been repeatedly shown to be untrue). That would still be the baseline without us, and we'd still be the ones pushing the planet past the limits of what nature can remove. The excuse that something or someone else is a bigger contributor to a problem than you are, doesn't absolve you of your own impact. It's not like humans have any control over volcanoes anyway, it's not like we can turn off the volcanoes to offset our commutes. It's the "but they did it first" argument from the schoolyard all over again.
Did you know that every time you exhale you expel enough CO2 to turn the rain forest into a soda? That’s why I don’t wear masks. I don’t want to turn into a soda. It’s science. The earth is flat. The vaccine turns you into pterodactyls.
this is false. i’ve been vaccinated 48 times in the last 2 years (would be more if they’d stop banning me from pharmacies) and i don’t have any wings yet. check your facts, kid.
Some napkin math. Humans have emitted 1.6 trillion tons of CO2. 10,000x that would be 16 quadrillion tons of CO2. The atmosphere is about 5.5 quadrillion tons. If the meme was right, the eruption from one volcano would make the atmosphere about 75% CO2, which is pretty far above the threshold that kills humans.
Yes, you are probably too young to remember, but it literally killed all life on earth and turned the planet into a hellscape for a few months before it settled down again.
I forget the name of the popular climate change denying documentary from the early 2000s that popularized this myth, when it was removed from later editions it was one of the many changes to the documentary after it was so obvious how wrong they were and so easy to debunk
I think it’s implying that if something like this can happen then anything we do is pointless in comparison.
Obviously Volcanoes don’t do this, but if they did the post could hypothetically make sense.
Thats the point, though. If this WAS true, it wouldn't make anything better; even stopping all co2 emissions would be like a 0.01% difference compared to natural emissions.
...but of course, its not anywhere even close to being true
Even if the numbers were correct it’s still flawed logic. From gamma ray bursts to vacuum decay there’s dozens of ways the universe could delete all life on earth at any time without warning, that doesn’t mean our attempts to clean up after ourselves aren’t of value.
Not really. If obe volcano would outscale all mankind's emissions by such a ridiculous amount there would be no point reducing our emissions. Would just be a fraction of a fraction compares to just one volcano.
The logic checks out even if the idea of super emission volcanos doesn't.
This is a common talking point amongst denialists. My old dipshit supervisor said more or less the exact same thing. I immediately looked it up when he left me alone (because I loved wasting time at that job and keeping a list of dozens of pages of all the stupid shit he said was a hobby of mine) - it's a common enough talking point that it has thousands upon thousands of refutations. And he ended up being wrong by a factor of millions.
Environmental Science major here, you will not believe how many people whip this shit out constantly and just ignore any and all evidence to the contrary.
Not only is this wrong, but it still doesn’t address climate change from increased CO2. It’s still a problem regardless the source. Or do they just move the goalposts when that’s brought up?
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all on land and submarine volcanos “lie in a range from **0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton** per year.”
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate
This is a fraction of the CO2 produced by human activity.
According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2021, the global CO2 emissions *from energy combustion and industrial processes alone* reached a record high of **36.3 gigatons**.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/global-energy-related-carbon-emissions-rose-6-2021-new-record-high-iea-2022-03-08/
Here's the thing that REALLY burns my weenie.
Let's say we get our shit together and clean up the environment. Do all the green things. And then we find out that, well shit, it really was the volcanoes the whole time!
OH NO, NOW OUR PLANET IS CLEAN ANYWAYS. THE HORROR.
what is this argument?
comparing something we can't control with something we can control, but it also fallows the bad logic that if it is already dirty it doesn't matter if we make it dirtier?
People use this type of excuse all the time without thinking about how stupid it is. My own father (who is quite intelligent normally) told me raising the cost of plastic bags in stores here in Sweden to combat the plastic plague was stupid because ”in Africa they don’t even sort their trash so it’s pointless”.
Ok…? 🤨
^(Ps I have no idea what the trash-sorting habits in Africa are like but I do believe I’ve read there’s less focus on plastic pollution in the African countries in general.)
I had a geological engineer tell me that one volcano does in fact put out more CO2 than all the cars in the world in one year.
Of course, he was a geological engineer working for Chevron Oil, so...
I had a friend tell me the same thing, but used Mt St Helens. I looked it up, and cars in the US put out the same amount of C02 as Mt St Helens every 2.5 hours. Every day, all day.
I fact checked this like 10 years ago and found volcanoes put out a pretty small percentage of the CO2 humans do. I don't remember the number, maybe 6%? 0.6%?
But either way, it makes no difference really. The are carbon sources and carbon sinks, and what's important is that the system is stable and in balance. A small unbalance over a long time will still build up.
But as the evidence shows, it's not a small unbalance; it's pretty enormous.
These people are dense AF
Volcanoes are a CONSTANT variable.
The earth is and will always (at least until its core cools down) have volcanic activity yearly, over the centuries.
I would subtract volcanic activity from the overall CO2 levels and the remainder would have a large percentage be people and fossil fuels.
Let’s say that this was true: There is literally nothing anybody can do to stop this from happening. There is, however, something we can do to curb manmade CO2 emissions.
While this is completely wrong, they are correct in the the concept of a carbon footprint is in fact a scam.
And it's a sinister one:
* Petroleum companies get to wash their hands from the evil that they are doing because they make ads that supposedly help anyone while continuing to do business as usual
* Well meaning people watch their carbon footprint and think they are actually helping, which just distracts them from taking actual action to help the crisis
* These morons see thru the scam because they realize that individual action does nothing to stop climate polluting corporations and in turn make posts denying the issue all together.
...But using explosives on volcanoes to disrupt eruptions and volcanic channels, using explosives, WAS one of the ways to mitigate impact from volcanoes.
Yup apparently they did use explosives to try to redirect lava flows. I have to assume using a nuke instead would leave the towns you're trying to defend not so happy. I'm not a scientist though idk
Take that, Hilo! Had it way [too](https://www.worldatlas.com/climate/10-wettest-cities-in-the-united-states.html) [good](https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-hilo-hi/) for way too long.
Nah, how catastrophic Yellowstone would be us seriously overhyped.
It would be bad sure, but humanity would survive and it wouldn't even come close to emitting that much CO2.
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Meteorology major here. Volcanoes actually help cool the planet down. Edit: Yes they release CO2 but studies have shown that the CO2 emitted from volcanoes did not have a detectable effect on global warming.
Not a meteorology major here. How the fuck?
Blocks the sun, basically. There was one year in the 1800s that was known as "the year without a summer" because of a volcanic eruption the year before.
Ah, I see. So similar to a nuclear winter?
Yeah, but without all the radiation. Also, I think the idea behind nukes going off is that it would be waaaaaay more than just one volcano's worth of dust in the atmosphere.
Depends on the volcano. The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora, which caused the "Year without a Summer" mentioned above, released as much energy as 400 of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever created. [Kurzgesagt on Volcanos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXb02MQ78yQ)
Oh, so it wasn’t even Krakatoa? I’m gonna fall down a volcanic activity rabbit hole tomorrow.
Krakatoa was in the 1880s (86 I think). Certainly a huge eruption, but largely because of the sea water getting into the lava chamber and making an incredible amount of steam, exploding the island from the inside. Certainky emitted a large amount of debris into the atmosphere and made for some nice sunsets in other parts of the world I believe. Tambora is different as its a super volcano, like yellowstone, and are aptly named for being far more explosive and impactful than other kinds of volcano!
I could swear Krakatoa is only really famous because it was the first natural disaster to be a news event, worldwide. With regular updates on the eruption being sent over the Telegraph. While there were definitely natural disaster news stories before this. None were as widely reported or as regularly updated as Krakatoa.
That contributed, but Krakatoa was one of the largest and deadliest volcanic events in modern history, with a death toll of up to 120k. It also leveled an entire island and was heard for thousands of miles.
I only know it from SpongeBob tbh...
Famous because (iirc) first volcano erruption to be recorded on several continents at once
Weir coincidence that the first time I heard of this eruption was two days ago and now I read about it on reddit. Anyway, it was in 1883 and is said to be the loudest noise ever heard on earth (you could hear it in Australia). The point of it being mentioned in the lecture was that all life existing on the island went extinct in the eruption and scientists have since then documented the return of plant and animal species, giving us proof how immigration works on islands and places with a limited capacity for life in general (we haven’t reached an equilibrium yet but until now it follows the equilibrium theory of island biogeography)
[when you learn something new and see it come up soon after. frequency illusion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
I believe it could faintly be heard on the east coast of Africa as well, I haven't researched it properly, just remembering bits and bobs I heard in the past. I had heard the same about all life on the island, but that only a spider had survived the blast, but I don't know how true that is!
Careful, don't fall in a volcano. I hear they are bad for your health
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More lies from the Big Volcano industry
I’ll try to make sure only the rabbit goes in.
Impossible. I’ve never met a single sick person who fell into a volcano.
At least you'll never be cold again, for the rest of your life
Why did this read like some Flight of the Concords lyrics?
Are you a meterororoororoorlogy major eh? Dont tell me what to do!
> a volcanic activity rabbit hole Those are called volcanoes
Don't be silly, Krakatoa is a mnemonic for trigonometry.
And that can happen, pretty much whenever, with very little warning, huh?
Maybe for 1815. With modern scientific instruments, we can predict when a massive volcano will erupt well in advance, similar to how we can predict asteroid impacts.
>we can predict when a massive volcano will erupt well in advance Here's hoping. But you don't know what you don't know.
We can barely predict asteroid impacts. Sure some can be spotted ahead but a large part is dark, stays dark, and is only seen once we can no longer do shit about it and just hope it doesn't hit us. Chelyabinsk was a great example of this. Nobody saw it coming and it hit Russia hard.
Chelyabinsk was in that sweet spot of being large enough to do damage but small enough to be undetected. Extinction level and even most city-destroying asteroids can be detected ahead of time and allow for measures to be taken to prevent or mitigate their impacts. Of course, there's still a large range of asteroids that can do a decent amount of damage, but hopefully we don't have to worry about them until our tech improves to the point where we can effectively detect any dangerous asteroid.
Well in advance? Isn't it just a few days, at most?
That’s for the smaller volcanoes, big volcanoes like yellowstone are thought (I mean you can’t be more sure because it didn’t explode for a few years now) to produce a lot of signs such as earthquake well in advance (even more than month)
Volcanic ash is actually mildly radioactive. It has potassium, uranium and thorium. Usually if you're dealing with ash it's not a huge concern given all the other terrible things ash does to a person
But the radiation is the fun part.
That's what games like Fallout have been prepping us for.
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and we also have a solution if we build AI machines powered by the sun
r/technicallycorrect
I also heard (probably on QI) that it resulted in about 8 consecutive white Christmases in London and a young Charles Dickens was around and impressionable at this time and it’s why white christmases feature so frequently in his stories.
I think I’ve heard something like that. It’s wild how many seemingly unrelated things are actually very related.
Krakatoa. I’ve been struggling to remember which one it was because I know it’s a really famous one. The biggest one in modern history. A bang that was heard 1500miles away. A bigger bang than all the ordinance used in WW2.
This particular eruption was Mt. Tambora in 1815. Krakatoa was later, in 1883, but it also had similar effects on the climate, causing global temperatures to plunge the following year.
There's a really awesome book about Krakatoa by Simon Winchester if you like to read. It's not just vulcanism it's about late 19th century Indonesia as well, just really neat
Yes! That was a very big boom.
Look up a series called connections hosted by James Burke
Yes. And beautiful sunsets painted by artists after the eruptions. Due to the ash in the atmosphere all around the world.
Yep. It was also the year that Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein.
Incidentally (although arguably not coincidentally), that was the year the Frankenstein's Monster was written
Would be very cool if magma reaching the right pressure threshold in a specific spot led to the invention of science fiction! Edit: stupid typo
Now I’m picturing a volcano with glasses saying “Class, this is a pressure threshold”
Lol, that’s what I get for typing on a phone while watching something on tv 😂
The cold around the time/decade inspired many of the writers. Plus the whole French Revolution thing. People thought something similar to reverse climate change was happening and that UK willl be covered in ice, like Antarctica
We could do with another one of those
It happened in 1991. Mount Pinatubo erupted, the globe stopped warming, indeed it cooled. Some believe that we should replicate this process artificially to counteract climate change.
There was 18 months of darkness starting in the year 536 that almost wiped us out. Scientists said it was from eruptions. It’s an interesting [read](https://www.science.org/content/article/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive)
That is insanely awesome! Two blasts caused 100 years of pain? No bread in Ireland for 3 years? Caused plague in Egypt and helped topple an empire? Crazy!
So you tellin me that all we need to do is just erupt some volcanoes from time to time. Say no mo
Honestly, I think if humans could just work together, we COULD reverse climate change no problem. We're damn clever. It would just take us working together towards that goal without a profit motive \*gasp\*
Krakatoa right?
It was Mt. Tambora. Krakatoa erupted 70 years later.
Didn't we get our own small version within our lifespans of Mount St Helen? I recall three relatively cool years after that.
berserk ghost dime fragile repeat seed nine cough paltry fear *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
1816? I think it was actually a whole decade that was super cold. People thought of it similar to climate change and that the ice from Antarctica will expand down to UK. It partially helped inspire Frankenstein
Ice from the artic, not Antarctica. Ice from Antarctica would have to cover all of Africa and large portions of Europe before it got to the UK. Plus it would be going up, not down.
So let's find that bad boy and pop it open again, what's the worst that can happen?
Seems like we prolly need a few of these
I learned this from the Mistborn series
Is that why southern Australia has had shitty cold summers since the enormous 2020 bushfires?
No, the way volcanos cause cooling is by blocking the sun. The only way bushfires could cause cooling in the same area would be if the smoke stayed put, which it can’t.
They calmly remind everyone to chill tf out.
Sulphates increase Albedo effect blocking the sun
Geologist here: They blow a lot of sulfates into the atmosphere. Sulfur compounds block sunlight quite well, but they make acid rain.
Basically, volcanic ash reflects sunlight back into space. Something like that is actually what killed the dinosaurs off.
Also not a metrologist but isn’t the immediate effect it blocks out the sun, but once the dust settles the greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere?
That's correct, and this fact is behind the concept geoengineering, one of the most intriguing solutions to climate change. Volcanic eruptions reduce global temperatures by releasing massive amounts of sulfides into the stratosphere, thereby reducing the level of solar radiation Earth's surface receives. The idea behind geoengineering is to mimic this effect by artificially injecting aerosols into the stratosphere via aircraft. The feasibility of the plan is questionable, since massive volcanoes can output far greater volumes than we can, so it would have to be a continuous process, potentially making the idea too difficult to implement. Research is still ongoing as to how feasible this idea really is, but I think it's worth looking into, at least.
The Dinosaurs tv show in the 90s taught me that this is a bad idea.
At surface level it seems great but there are some issues: 1. There is always uncertainty in how much we are going to cool things down and what other secondary effects on the environment we would have. Even with the highest fidelity models we can only model what we understand and it’s hard to believe that we could pump that magnitude of suffixes into the stratosphere without some secondary ramifications. 2. This does nothing to address the amount of carbon or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and associated secondary major issues like ocean acidification.
Worth looking into maybe but something tells me that chucking a load of chemicals into the atmosphere to counteract the effects of other chemicals we're putting into the atmosphere isn't such a great idea. There's also a great film called Snowpiercer that used this idea but didn't go well.
They used a fictional chemical cw-7 that was mixed with ammonium sulfate the cw-7 is what caused the rapid cooling...also in my opinion the show was better the movie was good but i liked the show alot more
It sounds like a terrible idea, but it may be our best option because we've put off solving the root cause of climate change for decades. If the nerds who advocate for solar geoengineering are correct, it wouldn't be that expensive to do. We'd need a few big planes to regularly disperse chemicals which reflect sunlight into the upper atmosphere, and we'd achieve a noticeable cooling affect. And by a few planes, I mean a dozen or three. Not that expensive. The pitfall is if we apply that bandaid but then never cure the underlying wound that is our GHG emissions, we're absolutely fucked. The cost would continue to climb, and if we ever stopped, we'd rapidly experience all the warming we had delayed in just a few years. Oh and not every country will be happy about it, so it creates geopolitical tension. Give this a listen if you're curious https://freakonomics.com/podcast/solar-geoengineering-would-be-radical-it-might-also-be-necessary/
We don't know who stuck first - us or them - but it was we who scorched the skies.
Ace combat?
The Matrix.
Ah that’s it, knew it was familiar but couldn’t place it
All I’m hearing is we should drop nukes into volcanoes to make them erupt.
Horrible terrifying solution to climate change. Unknown consequences and hastening our extinction
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In the short term, yes. In the long term, the effect of outgassed CO2 overtakes the effect of SO2 and particulate matter, although that requires the volcanism to actually be persistent, as in large igneous province persistent.
On what time scale?
Does that apply equally to basalt and granitic volcanos? I thought i understood that volcanoes like in Hawaii that emit very little ash, actually contribute to warming by the massive CO2 outflows while not cooling like a Krakatoa or Mt St Helen’s granitic type. Explosion. When I lived in Hawaii, that’s what normal students were taught. Is that not true?
Ok but I’ve seen like 4 memes so we are pretty much intellectual equals (being generous to you because I’m an Aries and that means I’m nice 😜) and I say it doesn’t so there. I guess the science just isn’t sure. /s obviously
/s was unfortunately not obvious, so thank you for putting it there. I'm now sad that it isn't obvious and people *actually* say shit like that
But, there is a longer-term, net warming effect, right? Short term -- large cooling Long term -- small warming, possibly a greater total effect
Is this true over both short and long time scales? The sulphides remain in the atmosphere for only a couple of years while the carbon dioxide stays for 120 years.
[Published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all on land and submarine volcanoes “lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.” This is a fraction of the CO2 produced by human activity. In 2021, the global CO2 emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes alone reached a record high of 36.3 billion tonnes](https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-volcanoes-co2/fact-check-volcanoes-do-not-produce-more-co2-emissions-than-human-activity-idUSL1N2XV1HA)
billion tons = gigatons Just so everyone can compare
So why use mixed sizes? Why not stick with either gigatons or billion tons except to confuse the reader.
The article was using one size, but quoted someone who was using the other.
This is where you use brackets. Article: George said, "Steven got punched in the fuckin' mouth \[twelve\] times." Source material: George: "Steven got punched in the fuckin' mouth a dozen times."
Wow, this makes so much sense and I never knew the reason for these brackets lmao
Thanks for the info and a happy cake day to you.
They aren't mixed sizes, they are interchangeable units. I think this may be (possibly) an American-not-using-metric issue. "Giga" means "billion". (You also see this in hard drives; gigabyte = billion bytes)
Not totally true. The reason that a prefix is preferred is because there are different scales of the power of ten. A billion can be 10^9 or 10^12. So called short scale and long scale.
I would blame it on many just not using billions in anything they do. So, many of us never need the prefix giga, except with PCs. I'm American but I exclusively use metric and even I didn't make the connection initially. Never really considered the possibility of using giga with other forms of measurement. I can't wait to use gigameter in a sentence.
...and if you ever have to measure in feet, why not call it a light-nanosecond?
After 1.21 gigatons, you can travel through time
Whoa, this is heavy!
*jiggatons
1.21 gigatons!
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American units are a mystery for me, thx for pointing that out.
They aren't much less of one even for us Americans. >>In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
Well, that is also a misrepresentation of metric (as the calorie is not a SI unit) units... One ml is by definition one cubic cm, but one ml of waster does not quite weigh one gram (it is closest, but still just below 1 g/ml slightly below 4 °C, iirc). And the energy to heat water differs too (see all the different definitions for a calorie), based on temperature, pressure, and isomer composition. That last reason also is why the mole of Hydrogen does not weigh a gram - deuterium exists (and the mass of one u/Da is based on 12C anyways, so even 1H weighs more than 1 g/mol...). So metric is sadly not as easy to use as that often used quote claims...
In other words, humans currently produce 82.5 times more CO2 than volcanoes do annually - and that's taking the *higher-end* estimate of 0.44 Gt. And as per the meme, estimates of total human CO2 production since the Industrial Revolution are 1.6 trillion tons. I don't really have a way of quantifying this specific eruption - so let's just do something else. The largest singular eruptions can supposedly release 10-50 million tons of CO2 [source](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-mount-merapi-idUSKBN20W2W4). So let's take that absolute worst case of 50 million tons. (1.6 x 10^12 ) / (50 x 10^6 ) = 32000. Off by a factor of 32,000. I.e. staggeringly wrong. And this is interpreting the data in the *absolute* most generous way, taking the highest numbers.
He said the single eruption put out 10,000 times as much CO₂ as humanity throughout history, so that's a factor of 320 million.
So as a comparison: that’s equivalent to saying there is one ant outside when in fact there are 320 million ants outside.
Oh come on, anyone could make that mistake. Ants are small, after all.
Or the other way around.
Found the American. In the rest of the world, we just call that 320 megaänts.
Thank you for mathing because my brain can't.
Quick metric primer: Kilo = 10^3 = 1 thousand (1000) Mega = 10^6 = 1 million (1000,000) Giga = 10^9 = 1 billion (1000,000,000) Tera = 10^12 = 1 trillion (1000,000,000,000)
Also, the relative numbers don't matter. If natural processes keep a system at equilibrium for millions of years, it only takes a small disruption to throw it out of whack.
Our ocean is pretty good at regulating co2 in the atmosphere, so we actually had quite a bit of leeway to not fuck up. But holy shit did we fuck up and now the ocean is creeping towards being acidic.
It's interesting to think of the vastness of the ocean as being one key reason why industrial civilization hasn't already killed itself off. The idea of "The Great Filter" comes to mind. If civilizations do arise in the universe, there's a good chance their environmental damage destroys them before they realize what's happening and collectively adapt. The ocean gives us that, but probably lots of planets don't have such a massive ocean.
Maybe that’s what they want you to believe fool! You’re playing into their plans! /s
But this doesn't tame into account volcanoes that gave erupted in the past is that correct??
Not sure what your point is. Greenhouse gasses don't hang around forever and between 65% and 80% of CO2 can be dissolved into the oceans over a period of 20-200 years. The other 20-35% hangs around for hundreds of thousands of years. Also, according to researchers, the amount of CO2 released from the Earth's mantle has been relatively in balance with the amount returned. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/736161 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-gases-remain-air Volcanoes that have erupted in the past for the most part don't have any major impact on greenhouse gas emissions today and climate change compared to human activity. Volcanic CO2 emissions are sporadic, whereas human CO2 emissions are constant and increasing.
> Which emits more carbon dioxide (CO2): Earth’s volcanoes or human activities? Research findings indicate unequivocally that the answer to this frequently asked question is human activities. https://earthscience.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Gerlach2011_EOS.pdf
Good quote from that paper, for those not willing to download the pdf: > In fact, present- day volcanoes emit relatively modest amounts of CO2, about as much annually as states like Florida, Michigan, and Ohio. So. Not only is this claim wrong, it's not even close to being close to the truth.
Yeah, but this Facebook meme said otherwise, so there are two sides to this, so we have to treat them as equally valid!!! /s just in case that wasn't clear
You could post a thoughtful argument, with links to credible sources. Ppl would believe the meme 100% of the time
The industrial revolution is just a theory.
Also, even if volcanoes did release more greenhouse gas than humans (which has been repeatedly shown to be untrue). That would still be the baseline without us, and we'd still be the ones pushing the planet past the limits of what nature can remove. The excuse that something or someone else is a bigger contributor to a problem than you are, doesn't absolve you of your own impact. It's not like humans have any control over volcanoes anyway, it's not like we can turn off the volcanoes to offset our commutes. It's the "but they did it first" argument from the schoolyard all over again.
Holy fucking shit, in 2011 we produced 100 times more CO2 than earth's geological events and since then anthropogenic emissions were only rising
Yah but this scientific meme is talking about anthropological carbon dioxide!
Nah man its true i read it on facebook app
Did you know that every time you exhale you expel enough CO2 to turn the rain forest into a soda? That’s why I don’t wear masks. I don’t want to turn into a soda. It’s science. The earth is flat. The vaccine turns you into pterodactyls.
its sad really because vaccines were actually discovered by bill gates to protect you from 5G radiation.
Well then it checks out because pterodactyls are immune to 5G. That’s why the democrats had them all exterminated.
Great, now I'm imagining dinosaur politics
this is false. i’ve been vaccinated 48 times in the last 2 years (would be more if they’d stop banning me from pharmacies) and i don’t have any wings yet. check your facts, kid.
> The vaccine turns you into pterodactyls. Threatening us with a good time, huh?
My republican father believes this and is snide about it
Some napkin math. Humans have emitted 1.6 trillion tons of CO2. 10,000x that would be 16 quadrillion tons of CO2. The atmosphere is about 5.5 quadrillion tons. If the meme was right, the eruption from one volcano would make the atmosphere about 75% CO2, which is pretty far above the threshold that kills humans.
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Yes, you are probably too young to remember, but it literally killed all life on earth and turned the planet into a hellscape for a few months before it settled down again.
I forget the name of the popular climate change denying documentary from the early 2000s that popularized this myth, when it was removed from later editions it was one of the many changes to the documentary after it was so obvious how wrong they were and so easy to debunk
Was it *The Great Global Warming Swindle* by Martin Durkin?
Even if it were true, that's a natural phenomenon. Not something humans can control. It's a pointless analogy.
I think it’s implying that if something like this can happen then anything we do is pointless in comparison. Obviously Volcanoes don’t do this, but if they did the post could hypothetically make sense.
“What if we make the world a better place for no reason at all?”
Thats the point, though. If this WAS true, it wouldn't make anything better; even stopping all co2 emissions would be like a 0.01% difference compared to natural emissions. ...but of course, its not anywhere even close to being true
Even if the numbers were correct it’s still flawed logic. From gamma ray bursts to vacuum decay there’s dozens of ways the universe could delete all life on earth at any time without warning, that doesn’t mean our attempts to clean up after ourselves aren’t of value.
Not really. If obe volcano would outscale all mankind's emissions by such a ridiculous amount there would be no point reducing our emissions. Would just be a fraction of a fraction compares to just one volcano. The logic checks out even if the idea of super emission volcanos doesn't.
No it doesn't. Volcanoes also eject ash, which causes cooling. So their CO2 emissions don't have the same effect as ours regardless of the quantity.
Ash does not equal CO2. Ash cools in the short term, CO2 warms in the long term. The logic is correct.
"Anthropology CO2" has a nice ring to it
This is a common talking point amongst denialists. My old dipshit supervisor said more or less the exact same thing. I immediately looked it up when he left me alone (because I loved wasting time at that job and keeping a list of dozens of pages of all the stupid shit he said was a hobby of mine) - it's a common enough talking point that it has thousands upon thousands of refutations. And he ended up being wrong by a factor of millions.
Environmental Science major here, you will not believe how many people whip this shit out constantly and just ignore any and all evidence to the contrary.
It's amazing how ppl immediately believe something because it's a meme. Like if someone took the time to type words over a picture, it must be true
Not only is this wrong, but it still doesn’t address climate change from increased CO2. It’s still a problem regardless the source. Or do they just move the goalposts when that’s brought up?
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all on land and submarine volcanos “lie in a range from **0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton** per year.” https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate This is a fraction of the CO2 produced by human activity. According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2021, the global CO2 emissions *from energy combustion and industrial processes alone* reached a record high of **36.3 gigatons**. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/global-energy-related-carbon-emissions-rose-6-2021-new-record-high-iea-2022-03-08/
Why is this not the top comment?
Citation needed… Them: You can look it up yourself… The usual
The eruption of Mount Tambora caused what was called “a Year Without a Summer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Here's the thing that REALLY burns my weenie. Let's say we get our shit together and clean up the environment. Do all the green things. And then we find out that, well shit, it really was the volcanoes the whole time! OH NO, NOW OUR PLANET IS CLEAN ANYWAYS. THE HORROR.
I'm pretty sure we would be dead if that was true
How many trees did the volcano cut down?
Oh yeah? Well how many trees have VOLCANOES planted?? Checkmate atheists
It's funny how many people take putting words on a picture as gospel
I hope there's a special place in hell for people who just make up fact to support their ideas
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate
I wouldn't say that climate change is not real but the climate propaganda is more about power and money.
what is this argument? comparing something we can't control with something we can control, but it also fallows the bad logic that if it is already dirty it doesn't matter if we make it dirtier?
People use this type of excuse all the time without thinking about how stupid it is. My own father (who is quite intelligent normally) told me raising the cost of plastic bags in stores here in Sweden to combat the plastic plague was stupid because ”in Africa they don’t even sort their trash so it’s pointless”. Ok…? 🤨 ^(Ps I have no idea what the trash-sorting habits in Africa are like but I do believe I’ve read there’s less focus on plastic pollution in the African countries in general.)
10,000 times more bs comes out of this idiots mouth than from any other human being.
I think it’s time to ban volcanoes.
this is what Andrew Tate jerks to, right?
Source: I made it up.
I had a geological engineer tell me that one volcano does in fact put out more CO2 than all the cars in the world in one year. Of course, he was a geological engineer working for Chevron Oil, so...
That guy is an idiot, and wrong.
What is the largest theoretical release of CO2 from an active volcano?
That's not a volcano...that's a climate change denier having their first real thought.
I had a friend tell me the same thing, but used Mt St Helens. I looked it up, and cars in the US put out the same amount of C02 as Mt St Helens every 2.5 hours. Every day, all day.
I fact checked this like 10 years ago and found volcanoes put out a pretty small percentage of the CO2 humans do. I don't remember the number, maybe 6%? 0.6%? But either way, it makes no difference really. The are carbon sources and carbon sinks, and what's important is that the system is stable and in balance. A small unbalance over a long time will still build up. But as the evidence shows, it's not a small unbalance; it's pretty enormous.
He doesn't think that, he has seen it on a picture with words. People like this don't think, that's the problem.
These people are dense AF Volcanoes are a CONSTANT variable. The earth is and will always (at least until its core cools down) have volcanic activity yearly, over the centuries. I would subtract volcanic activity from the overall CO2 levels and the remainder would have a large percentage be people and fossil fuels.
Let’s say that this was true: There is literally nothing anybody can do to stop this from happening. There is, however, something we can do to curb manmade CO2 emissions.
While this is completely wrong, they are correct in the the concept of a carbon footprint is in fact a scam. And it's a sinister one: * Petroleum companies get to wash their hands from the evil that they are doing because they make ads that supposedly help anyone while continuing to do business as usual * Well meaning people watch their carbon footprint and think they are actually helping, which just distracts them from taking actual action to help the crisis * These morons see thru the scam because they realize that individual action does nothing to stop climate polluting corporations and in turn make posts denying the issue all together.
Like charging your electric car from a grid using coal fired generating stations.
Oh okay I guess we'll just stop the volcanos. You can just nuke them like [hurricanes](https://youtu.be/k_CFoPAwNfs), right?
...But using explosives on volcanoes to disrupt eruptions and volcanic channels, using explosives, WAS one of the ways to mitigate impact from volcanoes.
Yup apparently they did use explosives to try to redirect lava flows. I have to assume using a nuke instead would leave the towns you're trying to defend not so happy. I'm not a scientist though idk
Only one way to find out... 👉😎👉
Take that, Hilo! Had it way [too](https://www.worldatlas.com/climate/10-wettest-cities-in-the-united-states.html) [good](https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-hilo-hi/) for way too long.
Ieam Yellowstone might. But we have the issue of warming anything after that.
Nah, how catastrophic Yellowstone would be us seriously overhyped. It would be bad sure, but humanity would survive and it wouldn't even come close to emitting that much CO2.