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.

These 5 folks are full of bright ideas.
Image Source: PiccoloNamek

Here are a few of the people that I ran into last week who inspire me:

Don Fugler does research through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He developed the Garbage Bag Air Flow Test. He rides his bike to work year round in Ottawa, and wears suspenders. He has a dry sense of humor and has toppled any lingering stereotype I had about Canadians. He told a crowded room at the ACI meetings in Pittsburgh that the way we live in our houses, the way we use our cars, and the way we travel in the air contribute about equally to our carbon footprints. The way we eat contributes a lot also. A pound of beef is responsible for a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases released. I don’t know if Don is a vegetarian, but I think he probably is.

Jim LaRue is a sort-of-retired home performance contractor from Cleveland, Ohio. He designed a really efficient and healthy house for a group of nuns in Ohio and wrote about it for Home Energy. He has also written for the Cleveland Green Building Coalition and for the magazine a Greening Your Home series of articles. I don't know anyone who has worked harder to create healthy, efficient, and affordable housing in Cleveland. He's retired but so far no one has noticed.

Linda Wigington has been with ACI since its beginning and is now the manager of program design and development. At the ACI Summit on global climate change held at the Pacific Energy Center in San Francisco last summer, which she was instrumental in bringing about, she talked about how she lived one whole winter in her home outside of Pittsburgh while never raising her thermostat above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She is passionate about finding ways (mostly not involving such personal discomfort) to drastically reduce the energy use in existing homes to reduce the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.

Kate and Paul Raymer, founders of Hayoka Solutions, a green building and green building advocacy organization, announced the Starting from Home Challenge at the ACI meetings, an annual contest for post secondary school students around the country to create 70%–90% energy savings in existing homes with real people living in them. Hayoka is a Lakota Indian word describing someone who causes others to see things in a completely new way. Paul is an expert in healthy home ventilation. Don't get him started on attached garages. "Why would anyone park their car in their house?" Paul often wonders.

I could go on, and on, and on. These are just a few of the people who inspire me. I hope they inspire you as well.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

37.8686 -122.267