A 500-strong international team of scientists that are part of a global research program founded in 2009 called the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) has debunked the common argument by climate science deniers – who claim that volcanism is the source of the recent rise of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere (not human activity!) – with their in-depth, decade long research.
The group released a series of papers outlining how carbon is stored, emitted and reabsorbed by natural and manmade processes. What their research shows is that anthropogenic emissions are up to 100 times higher than the current emission rate from all natural outgassing (such as volcanoes and decaying organic matter) combined.
“Climate skeptics really jump on volcanoes as a possible contender for top CO2 emissions but it’s simply not the case,” Marie Edmonds, Professor of Volcanology and Petrology at Queens’ College, Cambridge, told Agence France-Presse. The DCO found that CO2 released annually by volcanoes hovers around 0.3 and 0.4 gigatonnes while human activity produced 37 gigatons in 2018 alone! Obviously, volcanism is not as big of a contributor to global emissions as some prevailing theories hold. The findings have been published in the journal Elements.
Most of the carbon of Earth is actually stored in our planet’s crust, mantle and core. Only 1.4% of it is above the surface, in oceans, the land, and in the atmosphere. To understand how Earth formed billions of years ago, the DCO has been measuring the prominence of certain carbon isotopes in rock samples around the world. Doing this, they were able to create a timeline stretching back 500 million years to map how carbon moved between land, sea and air.
Compiling all the samples, the DCO found that the planet has been self-regulating atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide over geological time-frames of hundreds of thousands of years. Since higher life forms evolved (for the past 500 million years) Earth has maintained a balanced carbon cycle, returning to the ground about as much carbon as is released as gas. Now, humanity is burning fossil fuels like it’s going out of style, which is releasing carbon at a rate that is more than ten times the rate at which natural geologic processes can trap it and return it below-ground.
The only exception to the planets orderly system of balancing CO2 came in the form of “catastrophic disturbances” to Earth’s carbon cycle – such as immense volcanic eruptions or the meteor strike that killed off the dinosaurs. “In the past we see that these big carbon inputs to the atmosphere cause warming, cause huge changes in both the composition of the ocean and the availability of oxygen,” said Prof. Edmonds, and Ron Oxburgh Fellow in Earth Sciences at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
For example, the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which killed off three-quarters of all life on Earth (the one that killed the dinosaurs), released between 425 and 1,400 gigatonnes of CO2. The scary thing is, today’s yearly human CO2 output of 37 gigatons (and rising) is not so far off. The impact of industrial civilization is comparable to the carbon shock of an asteroid wiping out practically all of life on the planet!
Prof. Edmonds said:
The amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by [manmade] activity in the last 10-12 years [is equivalent] to the catastrophic change during these events we’ve seen in Earth’s past. Climate sceptics really jump on volcanoes as a possible contender for top CO2 emissions but it’s simply not the case.
Celina Suarez, Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Arkansas, added:
We are on the same level of carbon catastrophe which is a bit sobering.
For earth to rebalance itself takes thousands of years. There have been periods of time in the past where Earth’s atmosphere contained even higher concentrations of CO2 than the present day. If it wasn’t caused by a catastrophe, then it took hundreds of thousands of years to slowly accumulate to that point. “Climate deniers always say that Earth always rebalances itself. Well, yes it has. It will rebalance itself, but not on a timescale that is of significance to humans,” said Suarez.
The post CO2 Emissions From Human Activity Are ‘100-Times Greater’ Than Volcanoes appeared first on Intelligent Living.
