Well, to be honest I think anthropogenic global warming is only half real. I used to live on Hawaii island and during the massive lava flow of 2018 it inundated my side of the island and I watched literally BILLIONS of gallons of lava, ash and volcanic gasses spew out of multiple vents for 3.5 months. That volcano has been continuously erupting for nearly 35 years and it recently has been spewing massive volumes again.
Kilauea volcano is part of the Ring of Fire - about 40,000 km long and up to about 500 km wide, and contains about 750 volcanoes. I have a very hard time believing that my little put put car is what’s causing most of global warming when I have witnessed the incredible volume of gas coming out of the earth.
Imagine a lake, say the one below Niagara Falls. Water flows in, and water flows out. It seems impossible that lake could ever flood bases on the puny efforts of humanity, doesn’t it? But, if you upset the balance, either adding too much water, or taking away too much, that lake will flood or nearly disappear. And it doesn’t take the volume of Niagara Falls to make that happen, just more, or less, than the existing system can handle. And it may not happen in a day, or even in a year. But that’s okay, we’ve been putting carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into the atmosphere for a couple centuries.
Our planet has had volcanoes since it had a surface for volcanoes to erupt from. The carbon in that oil hasn’t been interacting with our atmosphere for a long time. And it’s true that the planet, and life on it, will continue if we released all of it. But evolution is generally very slow at adapting, and when it’s fast it’s usually because the things that can’t handle the change die off to make way for species that are more fit for the new environment than the current ones. One of those creatures that could die off, or have a massive die-back before recovering, is humanity, and I’d rather my species not have to go through that.
And no, your single car doesn’t produce much. A single mosquito doesn’t kill many people, either. But there are millions of cars just like yours, just like there are billions of mosquitoes spreading disease to humans, killing millions every year. So, even though a barrel of crude oil is only the equivalent to about half a ton of atmospheric CO2, those 35 billion barrels of oil per year gives us about 16 billion tons of CO2. All of that above and beyond the relatively stable environment we’ve had the last 5000 years or so. And by the way, volcanoes are estimated to emit about half a billion tons of CO2 per year, whereas humans emit about 35 billion tons, about half of that from oil alone. Sure, your little car doesn’t look like much, and the smog in a big city isn’t that much compared to what a volcanoes puts out on a good day, but that’s mostly because that volcano is doing all that emitting in one place. Oil wells would look pretty impressive, too, if we burned everything we were pumping as soon as we had it out of the ground.
Well, to be honest I think anthropogenic global warming is only half real. I used to live on Hawaii island and during the massive lava flow of 2018 it inundated my side of the island and I watched literally BILLIONS of gallons of lava, ash and volcanic gasses spew out of multiple vents for 3.5 months. That volcano has been continuously erupting for nearly 35 years and it recently has been spewing massive volumes again.
Kilauea volcano is part of the Ring of Fire - about 40,000 km long and up to about 500 km wide, and contains about 750 volcanoes. I have a very hard time believing that my little put put car is what’s causing most of global warming when I have witnessed the incredible volume of gas coming out of the earth.
Imagine a lake, say the one below Niagara Falls. Water flows in, and water flows out. It seems impossible that lake could ever flood bases on the puny efforts of humanity, doesn’t it? But, if you upset the balance, either adding too much water, or taking away too much, that lake will flood or nearly disappear. And it doesn’t take the volume of Niagara Falls to make that happen, just more, or less, than the existing system can handle. And it may not happen in a day, or even in a year. But that’s okay, we’ve been putting carbon dioxide from fossil fuels into the atmosphere for a couple centuries.
Our planet has had volcanoes since it had a surface for volcanoes to erupt from. The carbon in that oil hasn’t been interacting with our atmosphere for a long time. And it’s true that the planet, and life on it, will continue if we released all of it. But evolution is generally very slow at adapting, and when it’s fast it’s usually because the things that can’t handle the change die off to make way for species that are more fit for the new environment than the current ones. One of those creatures that could die off, or have a massive die-back before recovering, is humanity, and I’d rather my species not have to go through that.
And no, your single car doesn’t produce much. A single mosquito doesn’t kill many people, either. But there are millions of cars just like yours, just like there are billions of mosquitoes spreading disease to humans, killing millions every year. So, even though a barrel of crude oil is only the equivalent to about half a ton of atmospheric CO2, those 35 billion barrels of oil per year gives us about 16 billion tons of CO2. All of that above and beyond the relatively stable environment we’ve had the last 5000 years or so. And by the way, volcanoes are estimated to emit about half a billion tons of CO2 per year, whereas humans emit about 35 billion tons, about half of that from oil alone. Sure, your little car doesn’t look like much, and the smog in a big city isn’t that much compared to what a volcanoes puts out on a good day, but that’s mostly because that volcano is doing all that emitting in one place. Oil wells would look pretty impressive, too, if we burned everything we were pumping as soon as we had it out of the ground.