Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Professor Ian Plimer could not have said it better!

Okay, here's the bombshell.. The volcanic eruption in Iceland, since its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet, all of you.

Of course you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress, that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow, and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans, and all animal life.

I know, it's very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of: driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kid's "The Green Revolution" science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cents light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs...well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days.

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in just four days - yes - FOUR DAYS ONLY by that volcano in Iceland, has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud any one time - EVERY DAY.

I don't really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire YEARS on earth. Yes folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over one year, think about it.

Of course I shouldn't spoil this touchy-feely tree-hugging moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keep happening, despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change.

And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year.

Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you on the basis of the bogus ''human-caused'' climate change scenario.

Hey, isn't it interesting how they don't mention ''Global Warming'' any more, but just ''Climate Change'' - you know why? It's because the planet has COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century and these global warming bull artists got caught with their pants down.

And just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme (that whopping new tax)

imposed on you, that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer. It won't stop any volcanoes from erupting, that's for sure.

But hey, relax, give the world a hug and have a nice day!

PS: I wonder if Iceland is buying carbon offsets?

Al Gore can now officially suck it.

-clap, clap, clap-

Bravo!

I really think the whole "green" movement is about smugness and feeling superior. I forget the exact % but somewhere between 92-97% of green houses are emited by volcanoes each year anyway.

Really like the bit about the earth cooling, that is classic

So, we cant win, so don't try?

Glad I wasnt the only one that thought about those things.


Also, Im not saying pump the carbon up to 15, but being taxed and all that BS is just stupid. Gee thanks for making me pay more in tax money for something that I have nothing to do with

Mr. Burning wrote:So, we cant win, so don't try?

Oh contraire. Join the winning team. Buy a gas guzzler.

Should of gotten that Volcano insurance after all

Carbon isn't the only negative thing that humans release into the environment. Half of those 'green' efforts have absolutely nothing to do with reducing carbon emissions.

Having done more research, it turns out Professor Plimer has been previously refuted on this argument, and his book and works have been heavily criticized by the scientific community.

WHile I WANT to believe him...the facts just don't support what he's saying.

Source: US Geological Survey

Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for some 36,300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2008 [Le Quéré et al., 2009], release at least a hundred times more CO2 annually than all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2010).

The half dozen or so published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 132 million (minimum) to 378 million (maximum) metric tons per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998; Kerrick, 2001). If estimate medians and author-preferred estimates of these studies are used to lessen the influence of outlier estimates, the range is restricted to about 150-270 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The current anthropogenic CO2 emission rate of some 36,300-million metric tons of CO2 per year is about 100 to 300 times larger than these estimated ranges for global volcanic CO2 emissions.

In recent times, about 50-60 volcanoes are normally active on the Earth’s subaerial terrain. One of these is Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, which has an annual baseline CO2 output of about 3.1 million metric tons per year [Gerlach et al., 2002]. It would take a huge addition of volcanoes to the subaerial landscape—the equivalent of an extra 11,700 Kīlauea volcanoes—to scale up the global volcanic CO2 emission rate to the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate. Similarly, scaling up the volcanic rate to the current anthropogenic rate by adding more submarine volcanoes would require the addition of over 100 mid-oceanic ridge systems to the sea floor.

Global volcanic CO2 emission estimates are uncertain, but there is little doubt that the anthropogenic CO2 emission rate is more than a hundred times greater than the global volcanic CO2 emission rate.

Probably because he's pointing out what the Goverments want us to remain oblivious too. Scupper their new tax collecting scam.

Conversely, I don't mind recycling, I feel that is a very useful thing to be doing. Desposing of things in a safe and enviromentally sound way as well is not a bad thing either, so that kind of tax I'm all for.

It doesn't help when the whole campaign over here in the UK, is sourced around 'reducing your carbon footprint' so the thought that Volcano's are spewing that much Co2 when they crash and burn does make you raise an eyebrow.

Especially when you look at the temperatures of the planet and the way it shifts between hot and cold periods, so this may be a blip on the radar anyways and a lot of scientists might be going to look pretty sheepish in ten or twenty years.

Misguided thread premise.

1. Carbon emissions. It isnt about volume of CO2, the volume of CO2 is just a visible measure of the problem. The problem is breathing in car exhaust fumes, breathing in factory fumes. Its all about location location location. The fact that a volcano is spewing out CO2 is irrelevant except as a propoganda tool. Yes it might emit lots of CO2, so do animals , its part of the natural order. However even the densest Green hating grognard might have realised that is somewhat unhealthy to be close to that volcano, and in there lies the truth. Natural emission levels don't matter, human emission levels matter a whole lot more because of the junk they carry.
It doesnt matter if the volcano spews out more than all the car exhausts, if the volcano smog was distributed between our cities we would notice fast enough, so why not notice the problem of urban and industrial pollution.

2. Other stuff. People dont listen much about that volcano and all the ?millions/billions? of cubic metres of gas and debris it spews. However we could get a pucker factor real quick if a comparatively insignificant amount of emission came from Fukushima. Moral of the story: volume isn't everything. Volcanic ash isnt even a pollutant except in terms of its immediate effect, you can choke on it and it can lay waste to regions, but its damn good fertiliser. Car exhausts arent, other human pollutants often aren't, even human body waste, which should be, isnt because of how we dispose of it; and as for nuclear....

As an ecologically aware person I am pleased to say that after much soul searching, I don't care what the hell you do, make the hole in the ozone bigger, wipe out the tigers, pollute the sea etc etc.

It is clear to me now that an extinction or massive reduction in the number of human beings is the only way the planet can recover and so I'm just going to stop worrying about it and wait for the pandemic/food shortage wars/asteroid that will wipe us off the earth and allow other life to inherit it.

anyone for a G&T?

warpcrafter wrote:Confirmation bias.

Read more, then talk. This argument has, at the very least, been disputed by hundreds of people.

And, a bit of personal advice, if you want to call yourself of skeptic (and I know that you do) then you should spend most of your time being critical of the things that you want to believe.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/apr/21/iceland-volcano-climate-sceptics?cat=environment&type=article

He didn't say that it did more than we did, only that it did more than we reduced by. Which is more believable, since most "green" actions are either silly and essentially flawed ideas ("save the Earth by doing something random with no impact on anything, on the smallest scale possible!"), PR/marketing schemes ("pretend we're this 'green' those hippies keep going on about, and we can take all their money!"), or critically sabotaged by their opponents down to ineffectual levels ("we can't have no 'effective measure' sah, mah campaign sponsahs won't allow it!"). Probably still a wild fantasy, though.

MeanGreenStompa wrote:As an ecologically aware person I am pleased to say that after much soul searching, I don't care what the hell you do, make the hole in the ozone bigger, wipe out the tigers, pollute the sea etc etc.

It is clear to me now that an extinction or massive reduction in the number of human beings is the only way the planet can recover and so I'm just going to stop worrying about it and wait for the pandemic/food shortage wars/asteroid that will wipe us off the earth and allow other life to inherit it.

anyone for a G&T?

I'll get maudlin drunk to that!

Mother nature does everything it can to try and thin our ranks but only our genetic flaws keep us slightly ahead of the curve, or so it seems to me.

Our ability to keep cheating death must be an aberation rather than a positive thing.

MeanGreenStompa wrote:
It is clear to me now that an extinction or massive reduction in the number of human beings is the only way the planet can recover

Recover? That assumes there's something wrong.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:Probably still a wild fantasy, though.

I'm guessing its a case of "I see a big number, therefore my side of the argument must be right!"

Frazzled wrote:

MeanGreenStompa wrote:
It is clear to me now that an extinction or massive reduction in the number of human beings is the only way the planet can recover

Recover? That assumes there's something wrong.

Destructive human activities have led to the current rate of species extinction, which is at least 100–1,000 times higher than the expected natural rate. - WWF

"...Acre-and-a-half is lost every second of every day. That’s an area more than twice the size of Florida that goes up in smoke every year! "If present rates of destruction continue, half our remaining rainforests will be gone by the year 2025, and by 2060 there will be no rainforests remaining." - Rainforest Action Network

In the past two years the number of "dead zones" in the oceans have increased by one third - (Ocean Planet, 1995).


Nothing to worry about then.

Stompa is right. If ecology is a fad, it's the last one.

Massive reduction in the number of humans is the only option for the planet, and we don't need mother natures help. Our search for the % will do very nicely.

The bad news is the permanent damage done to the planet in the meantime. Two key problems: nuclear emissions/leakage/war, and the extinction of key species.

We might possibly ark away the latter so long as some responsible humans steward the process. The former is the real danger. Many nuclear materials remain toxic for a long time and in miniscule quantities, nuclear fallout from bombs isn't the big worry, its 'upcapped' reactors for any large scale weapons nuclear or conventional that is the real shitstorm.

I think it's fair to note that Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion has become an impromptu wildlife sanctuary due to the lack of human presence. One of the worst radiological disasters of all history.....and nature is coping along just fine.

People seriously overestimate nukes. Yes they have a lot of power, but they're still extremely limited.

MeanGreenStompa wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

MeanGreenStompa wrote:
It is clear to me now that an extinction or massive reduction in the number of human beings is the only way the planet can recover

Recover? That assumes there's something wrong.

Destructive human activities have led to the current rate of species extinction, which is at least 100–1,000 times higher than the expected natural rate. - WWF

"...Acre-and-a-half is lost every second of every day. That’s an area more than twice the size of Florida that goes up in smoke every year! "If present rates of destruction continue, half our remaining rainforests will be gone by the year 2025, and by 2060 there will be no rainforests remaining." - Rainforest Action Network

In the past two years the number of "dead zones" in the oceans have increased by one third - (Ocean Planet, 1995).


Nothing to worry about then.

You don't seem to have realized that life likes to destroy life. In fact, almost every single living on the planet survives by killing other living things. Humans just happened to be the gamebreaker in natural evolution, with the capacity to bypass all the pesky, expensive, incremental genetic evolution, and go right to just making something that mimics it. Let's look at natural weapons, like claws: these took millions of years to evolve, and have the disadvantage of needing to be on top of something to hurt it. A human beat that in ten minutes by sharpening a stick to a point. Fur to survive in cold climates: millions of years. Humans beat that in half an hour by stabbing something furry with a pointy stick and hacking its skin off. Nature is outdated, and its methods useless beyond what we may exploit from them. Long before we have impacted it to the point of genuine difficulty we will have replaced anything we may take from it with superior versions of our own creation, leaving its fate irrelevant. We'll probably clean it up a bit; most of us are rather sentimental about the whole thing, after all, but it doesn't matter in the end, and we'll certainly be able to afford such luxuries then.

Funny you should mention pointy sticks at animals given the justified if at times hysterical outcry over the sensless killing of animals in a Mancester park.

Apart from that we have already impacted on the health of the planet.
All the carbon stored away over huge periods of time gets pumped back out into the atmosphere in a day and the organisms needed to store the carbon are being removed.

I was under the impression that volcanic emmissions were part of a cycle whereby the materials that create greenhouse gases are removed.

I also get the impression that Plimer's opinion is not backed up by a lot of science and criticised.








Automatically Appended Next Post:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/story-e6frg8no-1225710387147

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Funny you should mention pointy sticks at animals given the justified if at times hysterical outcry over the sensless killing of animals in a Mancester park.

Only if by "funny" you mean "completely irrelevant".

Apart from that we have already impacted on the health of the planet.

I said "impacted to the point of genuine difficulty," meaning difficulty for us. We won't get there for decades to come, long after at least we in the first world have the means to ignore the environment entirely, to say nothing of negating our impact on it. Of course, that won't really matter when almost half of humanity exists places like China and India, who've now managed to surpass the US in terms of carbon emissions alone, to say nothing of their non-existent pollution controls.

All the carbon stored away over huge periods of time gets pumped back out into the atmosphere in a day and the organisms needed to store the carbon are being removed.

A minor matter in the long run, since it won't destroy anything we need before we've concocted an artificial replacement.

I was under the impression that volcanic emmissions were part of a cycle whereby the materials that create greenhouse gases are removed.

They're not, though the do have a cooling effect on account of the reflective nature of the ash and other chemicals (similar to the contrails from jets) which reduce the amount of sunlight getting through the atmosphere, meaning less heat. Basically extra cloud cover.

Anyone getting comfort from this Ian Plimer chap has missed the point. When you take action to cut carbon emissions you are remediating human emissions not natural ones. The human ones are the ones upsetting the system.

Volcanic eruptions are part of a package of things that in the long term contribute to the carbon cycle of the planet and ultimately determine the background CO2 concentration of the atmosphere, which can change but very gradually over long periods of time, for the most part it's been fairly steady over the period covering human existance. The problem with emissions resulting from human activity is that they upset this balance causing an obvious surge in CO2 concentration over the last century.

So by cutting down on human emissions you are achieving something. You're not trying to negate the effects of a volcano, in broad terms that's already taken into account when determining the average CO2 concentration of the atmosphere across many centuries, it's the human emissions which need to be controlled because those are the ones feeding into the system and rapidly changing the CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere.

Well yes it is completely irrelevant and I was wondering what it had to do with the issue of global warming

As I understand it, there is another part of the cycle whereby the plate tectonics take carbonifeous rock down into the mantle.
That is what I was refering to not just the smokey stuff.

How is it only a "minor matter"?
What Howard said.

Again, Plimer has not subjected his opinions to peer review AFAIK. He has used erroneous data to support his ideas, so to jump up and down on the grave of environmentalism is a tad premature.

Let's say you're in a swimming pool. People tell you to stop pissing in the swimming pool, because it's not healthy. If a dog goes and pisses in the pool, is that a sign that you should go ahead and piss all you want in the pool?

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Well yes it is completely irrelevant and I was wondering what it had to do with the issue of global warming

It is part of a condemnation of the notion that this planet is more important or worthwhile than we are. The world is a crucible for genetic variants, we are the gamebreaker, the set of variants that "won". The rest of its diversity is worthless in the face of our successes, for we can do within one lifetime, within a decade or a year in some cases, what took random trial and error millions of years to accomplish. Human technology and engineering surpasses the random variance of nature a thousandfold.

As I understand it, there is another part of the cycle whereby the plate tectonics take carbonifeous rock down into the mantle.
That is what I was refering to not just the smokey stuff.

That wouldn't be sequestration, that would be taking already sequestered material and pushing it further from the surface.

How is it only a "minor matter"?

It is minor to us, and our purposes are the only ones which matter. It will not have tangible effects for decades, more than long enough to compensate for it. Even nature's fastest change, something that only takes a couple of centuries to come to fruition, pales in comparison to human feats of engineering.

Again, Plimer has not subjected his opinions to peer review AFAIK. He has used erroneous data to support his ideas, so to jump up and down on the grave of environmentalism is a tad premature.

Of course he's a crank, that's the universal defining feature of anyone who tries to pretend we're not having an effect on the planet. What I'm saying is basically "that damage doesn't matter to our survival, because we're just that awesome".

ChrisWWII wrote:I think it's fair to note that Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion has become an impromptu wildlife sanctuary due to the lack of human presence. One of the worst radiological disasters of all history.....and nature is coping along just fine.

People seriously overestimate nukes. Yes they have a lot of power, but they're still extremely limited.

Thats because of biorobots, and a society willing to use them. A war rather than an accident could blow the rooves (not plural) of reactors destroy all containment and prevent any method of cleanup.

Orlanth wrote:

Thats because of biorobots, and a society willing to use them. A war rather than an accident could blow the rooves (not plural) of reactors destroy all containment and prevent any method of cleanup.

Even if it weren't for the Liquidators shovelling the dangerous pieces of crap into the reactor, the situation would remain the same, except a small area right around the reactor would be uninhabitable.

Besides, Hiroshima and Nagasaki both used EXTREMELY inefficient devices that left behind obscene amounts of radiation. Yet 60 years later, people are livng in both cities perfectly fine.

ChrisWWII wrote:

Orlanth wrote:

Thats because of biorobots, and a society willing to use them. A war rather than an accident could blow the rooves (not plural) of reactors destroy all containment and prevent any method of cleanup.

Even if it weren't for the Liquidators shovelling the dangerous pieces of crap into the reactor, the situation would remain the same, except a small area right around the reactor would be uninhabitable.

Besides, Hiroshima and Nagasaki both used EXTREMELY inefficient devices that left behind obscene amounts of radiation. Yet 60 years later, people are livng in both cities perfectly fine.

Wishful thinking. This is why I made the point that an uncapped reactor is worse than a nuke. A nukes worst effects are gone in about 6 weeks, an uncapped reactor is going to poison the land around for centuries unless it is covered over quickly. Chernobyl was mostly halted, it could have been much much worse. Had it happened outside a totalitarian state it would have been much worse.