Humans Have Put 100 Times More Carbon Dioxide In The Air Than All Of Earth's Volcanoes Combined

Humans have polluted the Earth to the point that it's on the brink of rejecting us entirely. We know this, but putting it into context can be sobering.

For instance, this latest study shows how we've put vastly more CO2 into the ecosystem than natural process ever could.

Images courtesy: Reuters

A group of international scientists have been carrying out a study over the past decade, called Deep Carbon Observatory, a global research program founded in 2009. They've been analysing just how much carbon dioxide has made its way into the atmosphere and oceans thanks to us. They say that, in our time on Earth, the CO2 we've output amounts to at least 100 times the planet-warming effects of all the volcanoes in the world.

Every volcano on Earth together only output about 0.3 gigatons of CO2 a year. A fraction compared to the 37 gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.

"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 told Agence France-Presse.

In the past there have been a few freak accidents that have output massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, comparable to our modern day contributions, and those were catastrophic. One in particular was the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which the scientists estimate released anywhere between 425 and 1,400 gigatons of CO2.

But that was a single freak accident. Whereas the team says we're outputting enough CO2 on a yearly basis that we're reaching similar levels of stress on the environment. "The amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by manmade activity in the last 10-12 years is equal to the catastrophic change during these events we've seen in Earth's past," Edmonds said.

"We are on the same level of carbon catastrophe which is a bit sobering," added Celina Suarez, Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Arkansas.

And it's sadly not going to be enough to just stop polluting. We need to do that immediately of course, but it'll take decades at least before the environment is balanced again. "It will rebalance itself, but not on a timescale that is of significance to humans," Suarez said.