Oh Dear Another Year Of Carbon Emmission Savings Up The Pictures!

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42132912
Can't we stick giant corks in all these?

[jim360]

I've not been able to find a helpful graph to illustrate the point, but nevertheless it's pretty intuitive that volcanic eruptions are going to fluctuate annually but stay around the same on average per year. There's no mechanism to drive a sustained, long-term increase in volcanic CO2 emissions. So you may as well treat it as effectively constant per year, to a reasonable approximation.

In that case it makes no sense to talk about volcanic emissions "wiping out" any reduction in our own, because essentially the same emissions level will have occurred last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and so on.

It's true that as long as human activities aren't changed significantly then any minor change vanishes in the grand scheme of things, but that's not because volcanoes wipe that reduction out but because it wasn't really big enough to matter anyway. Put another way, if humans seriously decided to change their habits in a way that cut CO2 emissions (from, eg, burning coal and gas) by about 50% then there is no natural force that could cancel that* out.

As it happens, though, CO2 emissions from human activity are still rising and continue to rise. 2017 is expected to be a particularly bad year, owing mainly to a (possibly short-term) spike in Chinese emissions.

*Of course, a particularly violent event would indeed dwarf anything humans could do. But I'm fairly sure that such an event would be so catastrophic that we wouldn't really be worrying about a spike in CO2 emissions at that point.

[EDDIE51]

Jim360 I also believe the Yellowstone volcano is not worth worrying about. If it erupts , then is the time to worry.
TTT , your post about the USA being uninhabited raised a question I have been thinking about for a while. We see videos of large US cities and it seems to me they are very sparsely populated. There was a program about Denver, Colarado a short time back. The traffic in the main street was far less than in my small town on a quiet afternoon. Only in films of New York and Los Angeles have I seen traffic levels that come remotely near what we in the UK get in even a medium size town.

[atalanta]

Look on the bright side - if the volcano chucks out enough particles, they will cool the earth and reduce global warming !