A post from the denier aggregation site climatechangedispatch about volcanoes, written by former petroleum geologist James Kamis, erupted last week. He was a relatively new name for us, so to quickly catch up on where he’s coming from, Kamis says on his blog that he believes that tectonic plate activity, and the release of heat from the Earth’s crust, could be an alternative explanation for global warming.
The theory Kamis lays out in this post, though, is more specific. Kamis claims that CO2 emissions from volcanoes have been vastly undercounted, and that non-erupting volcanoes around the world are actually emitting the CO2 that’s changing the basic composition of our atmosphere.
Kamis concludes that “Clearly, its [sic] time to put on hold all environmental action plans based on the cornerstone AGW principle of the global warming theory until additional geological CO2 emission research is conducted.”
Which, okay, could, potentially, theoretically, be true. Maybe our understanding of volcanoes, and the amount of CO2 they emit, is wrong. Maybe they’re actually emitting twice as much CO2 as we thought. Maybe it’s 10 times as much. Maybe it’s 100 times as much.
Regardless, that wouldn’t mean it’d be time to put climate action on hold, because at no point does Kamis try and explain away the fact that burning fossil fuels produces CO2. We can measure the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is increasing, and we know how much CO2 is produced by burning various types of fossil fuels.
So if we were undercounting volcanoes, that would mean the basic physics and chemistry of tracking emissions would be all wrong, which isn’t something Kamis even tries to prove.
Even still, if volcanoes are contributing to the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, that would be MORE, not less of a reason to reduce our emissions elsewhere! We (assumingly) couldn’t do anything about the increased volcano emissions, so keeping CO2 concentrations in a livable range would require even more action, more quickly, to offset this unexpected volcanic increase.
Make no mistake, we’d lava reason not to care about burning fossil fuels, and if this were true, we’d be plenty gracious and forgiving to the deniers, because we like to consider ourselves magmananimous.
If it is actually volcanoes though, not cars and cows and such, causing climate change, that might be even more worrisome. We can switch to clean energy, and could (at least in theory) eat less meat.
But we don’t know how to turn off volcanoes, at least not without making some literal sacrifices...
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