[HN Gopher] Volcanoes can affect climate
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Volcanoes can affect climate
Author : thunderbong
Score : 65 points
Date : 2024-07-05 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usgs.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usgs.gov)
| nadermx wrote:
| I always figured volcanos where the Earth's engine exhaust pipes
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's also water cooled
| mortify wrote:
| Red 5 standing by.
| robxorb wrote:
| I can't stop laughing, thank you.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It was a port, not a pipe
| andrew_eu wrote:
| > Do the Earth's volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities?
| No.
|
| I hope that a moderately dry and educational page like this would
| not be taken down for political satisfaction.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Large eruptions probably would. Short term anyway, they don't
| really happen often enough.
| Retric wrote:
| People average 100x the annual CO2 from all volcanoes
| combined. Large eruptions release a great deal of matter but
| not that much CO2 as a percentage and not very quickly.
|
| Even if by large you're talking about once in 50 year events
| like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo that lasted days
| during which it released 10 cubic kilometers of material. But
| it still only added 0.05 GT of CO2, roughly what people
| currently release every 12 hours.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub.
| ..
|
| There's been larger eruptions, but I think we're looking past
| what people consider 'Large' into apocalyptic events.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Pinatubo affected the ozone layer as well
| Retric wrote:
| Your point?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| People should be discussing it upfront but apparently
| Paul Crutzen thinks it's a risk worth taking so I'll
| watch and wait.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Why would we expect a volcano to emit more than incidental
| amounts of CO2 in the first place? Despite the superficial
| similarities, it's not a bonfire.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| In Neal Stephenson's book Termination Shock, a billionaire builds
| a sulfur cannon designed to fire sulfur into the atmosphere with
| the intent to cool the Earth and alter climate change. He names
| the cannon "Pina2bo" after Mount Pinatubo, which the article
| talks about.
| sitkack wrote:
| We have these already, they are called cargo carriers.
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...
|
| This sucks, it looks like one form of compliance is to "clean"
| the exhaust in ocean water.
|
| https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072023/ship-scrubbers-w...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I wonder if one day we'll figure a way to trigger a massive
| volcanic eruption (in an unpopulated area) as a way to fight
| climate change.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Krakatoa and Mount Tambora led to measurable famine, so it's
| probably not a good idea.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Presumably that would result in massive amounts of air
| pollution (much of it probably heavily localized) which would
| be pretty awful.
| sebnukem2 wrote:
| This post is most likely related to a recent post on HN:
| https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The Paul Crutzen quote is huge. I wonder if Pueyo read Susan
| Solomon's work on Australian wildfires, particulate pollution,
| SO2 and ozone though.
| somat wrote:
| When I am in the right sort of contrary mood I like to do a
| little mustache twirl and boldly proclaim.
|
| We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels...
| What if that was a long term mistake. Perhaps we should be
| putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
|
| Acid rain was not that bad... was it?
| shagie wrote:
| > We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our
| fuels... What if that was a long term mistake.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...
|
| > Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar
| geoengineering (or solar radiation modification) to reduce
| global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the
| stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming and
| increased albedo, which occurs naturally from volcanic winter.
|
| Also read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ (you can find snippets of
| the NOVA program about)
|
| > Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.
|
| Kind of... though it's an interesting thing.
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-airplane-contrails-are-he...
|
| I recall a suggestion that jets should "run rich" which would
| increase the water vapor in the exhaust and create more
| contrails _in combination with_ eliminating redeye flights so
| that contrails aren 't formed at night (allowing more radiative
| escape)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
|
| > Marine cloud brightening also known as marine cloud seeding
| and marine cloud engineering is a proposed solar radiation
| management climate engineering technique that would make clouds
| brighter, reflecting a small fraction of incoming sunlight back
| into space in order to offset anthropogenic global warming.
| Along with stratospheric aerosol injection, it is one of the
| two solar radiation management methods that may most feasibly
| have a substantial climate impact.
| ruined wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The what-if premise of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) is:
|
| What if an enterprising billionaire got tired of waiting for
| meaningful action to mitigate climate change,
|
| and undertook to put sulfur back into the atmosphere, on the
| cheap?
|
| "Taken from tomorrow's headlines..." perhaps. There are no
| international conventions or bodies currently prepared to
| regulate cowboy geoengineering, let alone capable of coercion.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The much better solution is injecting it into the stratosphere,
| where it will have the full reflective effect, while having
| orders of magnitude less acid rain impact.
|
| > _Acid rain was not that bad... was it?_
|
| My least favorite property of environmentalism is the inability
| to consider tradeoffs.
|
| If asked to choose between acid rain and global warming, the
| typical environmentalist will just refuse.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Is it "inability to consider tradeoffs" or "humility in the
| face of our repeated failure to engineer biological systems
| the way we intend to?"
|
| You have very little idea what will happen if we inject
| sulfur into the stratosphere.
| exegete wrote:
| Just because a volcano eruption can cool the planet doesn't mean
| it's a good idea. The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
|
| Check out the Year without a Summer for a historical example:
|
| > The year 1816 AD is known as the Year Without a Summer because
| of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global
| temperatures to decrease by 0.4-0.7 degC (0.7-1 degF). Summer
| temperatures in Europe were the coldest of any on record between
| 1766 and 2000, resulting in crop failures and major food
| shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.
|
| > Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic
| winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora
| in April in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
| nomel wrote:
| > The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
|
| And, increase CO2, increasing warming, in the long term. I
| would also naively assume that the reduced light would somewhat
| pause natural sequestration, from plants, for the duration of
| the cooling.
| silverquiet wrote:
| > The cooling would only be temporary anyway.
|
| I'd say just do it till I no longer need the earth; you all can
| burn it to the ground once I'm gone.
| taeric wrote:
| I've been curious before on how much an underwater volcano would
| impact things. Any chance that is already modeled in a place to
| read?
| 6d6b73 wrote:
| In other news the grass is green.
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