Over at the Daily Signal, columnist (to use the term lightly) Walter Williams took a break this week from denying the reality of transgender people, attacking marijuana, and lamenting the “Demonization of White Men” (Williams is black, for the record) to offer his thoughts on the status of the planet in a piece headlined “Our planet is not fragile.”
According to Williams, the fact that volcanoes exist and asteroids have hit the Earth in the past means we have nothing to worry about when it comes to climate change.
Williams cites the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which had the force of “13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II.” He then mentions an even more powerful 1815 eruption, which led to “the year without a summer.” But this doesn’t show the planet’s resilience, it shows just how much havoc a change in climate can wreak, with a short-term global cooling causing crop failures and famine.
Continuing on with his tirade about natural disasters existing before we changed the climate, Williams also points to floods in China in 1887 and 1931, both of which he notes killed millions. That admission should have been an obvious indication that there’s a difference between what the planet can handle and what society can withstand.
He then goes back literally a billion years to talk about asteroids striking the planet and leaving giant craters. This, apparently, is supposed to reassure readers that current pollution is fine, because the Earth’s seen worse.
Williams concludes by asking if human activity could ever compete with these Earth-shattering events. Well, yes, Williams, we can.
Every single second carbon dioxide is causing our climate to gain 4 Hiroshimas worth of energy. So far, humans have put over 2 billion Hiroshima’s worth of heat into the atmosphere, putting Krakatoa’s 13,300 to shame in just 3,325 seconds (or 55 and a half minutes).
Overall, per the USGS, volcanoes emit 0.26 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, while humans emit 32.3 gigatons per year. So while volcanoes are responsible for millions of tons of CO2 pollution, human activity is responsible for billions.
More importantly, climate concerns aren’t about the planet itself falling apart. We’re more worried about protecting those of us living on it. But hey, if Williams thinks natural disasters like asteroid strikes let us off the hook for fighting pollution, we should check with survivors of those cataclysms.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any dinosaurs available for comment.
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