Volcanic Ramblings

I’m kind of lost when we get into these debates regarding global warming. I have no scientific background. It’s a game of “Who Do You Trust?”. After enough exposure, I decided I would follow along with the scientific community, those who say that GW is real, that humans are exacerbating it, and that if we don’t do something soon to mitigate it, the results will be catastrophic. It was a conscious decision predicated on the knowledge that I don’t know nuthin’.  Short of going back to college, that’s all an ordinary John Q can do, after all – hope that we bet on the right horse.

The debate rages on – tonight on Yellowstone Public Radio, and also over at Craig’s place - what I get out of it is this: there seems to be a sort of Swiftboating of the scientific community going on. There is consensus, the scientists are honest, we ought to pay attention – instead we are swirling in a Rove-a-thon pie throwing contest and doing nothing. And that is the bottom line – while the debate rages, we are doing nothing.

A listener called in to Your Opinion Please tonight on YPR, and repeated all of the right-wing talking points on global warming – that scientists are not always right, just because they agree does not make them right, and they don’t necessarily all agree, they were wrong about the shape of the earth, and yada. He closed with something concrete – he said that there was a volcano in the South Pacific that was spewing out more CO2 each year than had been produced by humans since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Now if that were true, then indeed the scientific community would be caught in a huge conspiracy of lies.

That’s pretty easy to fact check. I surfed a bit, and ended up at San Diego State University Department of Geological Science, in particular at their web page called Climate Effects of Volcanic Eruptions. It’s worth a read. As it turns out, volcanoes do two things – they have an immediate cooling effect as particulate matter fills the atmosphere, and they also contribute to global warming. They do belch out a lot of CO2 and water vapor.

But volcanoes are only minor players. Volcanoes contribute about 110 Million tons/year of CO2, while other sources, including human activity, contribute about 10 Billion tons a year. With a ‘B’. The warming effect of volcanoes is more than offset by the cooling effect brought about by the haze that volcanoes cast in the skies.

This YPR caller was not the first I heard make the outrageous claim about volcanoes (I think you’ll also find similar statements being made about forest fires now, since this is the season.) I had a hunch – I Googled “Limbaugh volcanoes global warming.” Sure enough. Rush, in his book The Way Things Ought To Be, states as follows:

Mount Pinatubo in the Phillippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the fluorocarbons manufactured by wicked, diabolical and insensitive corporations in history…. Mankind can’t possibly equal the output of even one eruption from Pinatubo, much less 4 billion years’ worth of them, so how can we destroy ozone?

I guess the YPR caller confused flurocarbons and CO2, ozone depletion with global warming, but the larger point should be noted well – when Rush Limbaugh talks about climate change, people listen. When scientists speak, people are skeptical. It’s going to be a tough fight, but it is one we must win.