Carbon dioxide streams into a pond near the Sulphur Bank mine at Clear Lake. Volcanic gases are a very small factor in the atmospheric system that controls world climate. Photo by Andrew Alden

Here in the Bay Area, it's easy to find volcanic influences: Just visit one of our many hot springs, or Clear Lake, where I took this photo. These gassy springs that are bubbling with carbon dioxide are associated with young magma underneath the northern Coast Range. Many people believe that volcanic emissions of CO₂ are a much greater influence on world climate than CO₂ from human activities. Is that right?

The answer is no. It's a persistent delusion, similar to the idea that U.S. foreign aid is responsible for the national debt. Volcanoes erupt because of water vapor dissolved in lava. Volcanoes do release CO₂, sometimes a great deal of it, but humans have been outdoing nature for a long time. Geoscientists have made many estimates of global volcanic CO₂ production because it's one of those important numbers in the long-term, geologic carbon cycle. Plate tectonics carries buried carbon down into the deep Earth, and volcanoes burp it back up again.

At the global scale, the natural carbon cycle is slow and gentle, although the numbers may seem large: Volcanoes on land and under the sea release somewhere between 150 and 260 million tons of CO₂ per year. However, human emissions of this greenhouse gas are around 35 billion-with-a-B tons a year when you add up burning oil and gas, manufacturing cement, running coal-fired power plants, and changes in land use like digging up soil and cutting down forests. We are a preposterously greater emitter of CO₂ — two orders of magnitude greater. And while volcanoes are pretty steady, humans are getting worse and worse.

Volcanologist Terry Gerlach, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has been publicizing this inconvenient truth. In a 2011 article in Eos, aimed at scientists, he puts the numbers in a geological context. If volcanoes had to match the human output, he says, it would require one or more Yellowstone-size supereruptions every year. Put another way, there would have to be ten Mount St. Helens eruptions every single day. (By the law of averages the U.S. would get one of these about once a week.) I say, lie back in your local hot spring and rejoice that CO₂ emissions are a problem that human ingenuity and action can address.

Learn more about the basics of volcanic gases at Volcano World.

Coal still king in Greene County, Pa.

Greene County is in the far southwest corner of Pennsylvania. It is bordered on two sides by West Virginia, and outside of its towns, it is filled with winding country roads flanked by rolling hills. Here, coal still reigns.

Every summer, the county hosts the King Coal Show, a week-long festival with mine rescue contests, a parade, and the Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Queen Pageant. On a stormy Sunday evening in August, high school girls in evening gowns touted their coal-mining pedigrees along with their good grades and volunteer work. Like many in the area, most could find a great-grandfather, uncle or father who worked in the mines to claim as their connection to the industry.

Here, said County Commissioner Pam Snyder, coal is not a dirty four-letter word.

“Coal means jobs, sustainability on our tax base, families being able to make a good living, raise their children, have decent health-care,” Snyder said.

Today, the coal patch towns that used to dot the county are a thing of the past, but one in five jobs in Greene County is still in mining, and Snyder said a third of the county’s general fund comes from taxes on coal.

Snyder said she does not see anti-coal campaigns as an attack on her community’s way of life. Rather, it is more like a misunderstanding.

“I think if you live in a part of the country where coal has no place and never existed, you are just used to turning on your light switch,” Snyder said, “never giving thought to where that electricity’s being powered from or how it’s getting into (your) home.”

Snyder said she understands why people take their power for granted, but argues those who oppose coal as a power source need to realize how big a role it plays in the nation’s energy portfolio.

‘You need to be mining coal to get paid’

Greene County is home to four major underground mines, including two of the largest in the country, Enlow Fork and Bailey Mine, which together span 22 miles north to south and spill into neighboring West Virginia.

Miners at Consol Energy’s Bailey mine ride an elevator down 700 feet and take a half-hour-long ride on an underground trolley just to get to the job site. There, a massive automated shearing machine lumbers along an exposed wall of coal and slices away at the coal seam. Braces hold the ceiling up until the cutting drums have cleared, then re-position farther down the wall. Chunks periodically fall from the ceiling into a sludge of water and coal dust.

Highly mechanized longwall mining is a far cry from the days of pick-axes and canaries, but mining is still hard, dirty work. Yet, it pays well, an average of almost $90,000, much higher than the county average.

In August, the Obama administration put in place new rules designed to cut the amount of air pollution from coal-fired power plants by more than half, a move the EPA says would reduce asthma, bronchitis and heart attacks in 31 states. The EPA is drafting global warming rules that could hit coal even harder.

Tom Mills, who has been working in Cumberland Mine in Greene County for five years, said he sees new regulations as a threat.

“No matter what you always worry about your job,” Mills said. “You need to be mining coal to get paid. And if they shut these power plants down, these coal-fired power plants, what are they going to use the coal for?”

Like many in the industry, Mills said the future of energy lies in cleaner-burning coal, not in renewable sources.

“Instead of the Sierra Club donating money to shut these places down, maybe they should have donated those millions of dollars to technology to make them burn cleaner,” Mills said.

Mills is not the only one feeling threatened. Billboards touting the reliability and affordability of coal over renewables pepper the highway in Southwestern Pennsylvania, paid for by a group called “Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy.”

New energy sources in coal’s backyard

Perhaps a more immediate threat than new EPA regulations, though, is the natural gas boom. The tapping of huge reserves in the Marcellus Shale formation right in Greene County and across the region has driven down the price of natural gas and made it more competitive.

Jimmy Brock, chief operating officer for coal for Consol Energy, which owns Bailey mine and also has natural gas operations, said natural gas and new regulations could cut into the market for coal. But if demand drops domestically, he said he is confident the international markets will make up the difference.

“I am not worried for the future of the coal,” Brock said. “I believe coal’s here today, I believe it’ll be here tomorrow, and I believe it’ll be here for many years to come.”

Greene County Commissioner Pam Snyder put it differently. Although she said a serious blow to the coal industry would cripple her county’s economy, “nobody’s pushing panic buttons yet.”

The share of the nation's electricity generated by coal during the first quarter of this year was at its lowest in more than 30 years, due largely to low natural gas prices. But with U.S. demand for electricity expected to grow by about a third in the next quarter century, the industry says King Coal is here to stay.

By reporter Marjorie Sun.

I got interested in this story after hearing Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla speak at a conference this fall in Sausalito. He explained how he decides where to invest in green tech and it was fascinating. He and other top venture capitalists think they can help stop global warming and make a ton of money at the same time. You can listen to Khosla's talk on a webcast and listen to all sorts of entrepreneurs and v.c.'s talk about the latest renewable energy projects.

Khosla says to achieve a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions fast, we have to think about solutions that make big cuts in emissions and will be widely adopted. Buying a Prius is fine, he says, but it's really just "fashion." We need solutions that people in India and China will buy, Khosla says. To him, the key issues that guide his investments are cost, scale, and adoption. If a renewable solution isn't cheaper than coal, forget it, he says. Geothermal "is nice, but it doesn't scale."

Same with wind. It's "a great technology, but it's a toy." As for hydrogen fuel, the adoption risk is too high. Again, forget it, he says. The focus should be a war on coal, oil, and the manufacturing of cement and steel, which are huge emitters of carbon dioxide. (He's a major investor in Calera, an alternative cement maker in Silicon Valley.)

One more area for potentially huge gains is to improve energy efficiency, such as lighting. Another legendary venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins, is also racing to develop renewable energy solutions and make a fortune. (Khosla is a former partner there.) Kleiner's efforts were profiled in a cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently

With the Obama administration, it will be interesting to see what new federal policies– tax, economic and regulatory– will be adopted to accelerate solutions and spur more investment during a double whammy of crises: the economic meltdown and climate change.

Listen to the Building Blocks Go Green radio report online.

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The new FOCE experimental chamber being developed by MBARI scientists.

The scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) are already well-known for uncovering some of the most extreme marine animals in the deep sea, like the incredible vampire squid. But recently, they're using their unique blend of biology and engineering to study one of the least-discussed impacts of climate change: ocean acidification.

When we hear about climate change, we tend of think of the atmosphere – and for good reason. But as MBARI scientists describe, the oceans are a key part of the process. The ocean acts like a giant sponge, absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from the air. And as we add more and more CO2 to air by burning fossil fuels, the ocean is absorbing it. On one level, it's done us a big favor. Scientists say that we would be experiencing much more extreme climate change were it not for the ocean's ability to remove the heat-trapping gas.

However, the carbon dioxide that the ocean absorbs is making the water more acidic. This isn't the first time that the oceans have become more acidic. But as is the case with many impacts of climate change, it's the rate at which acidification is happening that worries scientists the most.

As you can probably guess, the ocean is an incredibly complex system. So ocean acidification poses an interesting question to scientists: what will the impacts be on marine species and ecosystems? What they know already is that there will be winners and losers in more acidic waters. Some creatures may do fine, while others won't be able to adapt in time. Either way, food webs may feel the effects – including webs involving species that humans depend on , like salmon.

Another major concern has to do with marine animals with certain kinds of shells – known as "calcifiers." Corals, clams and others all use carbonate in the water to build their shells out of calcium carbonate. But ocean acidification reduces the amount of carbonate in the water, making it more difficult for them to make shells. That could be devastating for coral reefs, who are already facing a number of stresses.

Even if you're an animal without a shell, ocean acidification could make things difficult. Scientists are studying how much stress this could put on animals that can't regulate their internal pH, or how it could affect the larvae or reproduction of certain species. MBARI scientists are hoping that the flume they are developing to conduct FOCE experiments will help researchers answer some of these questions.

Check out the whole story – watch the "Acidic Seas" audio slide show online.

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