Mt. Etna vs Humans

Yes, I'm still around. I've just been fairly busy the past few months. The long-debunked myth that Mt. Etna emits more carbon dioxide in one little eruption than human activities have for our entire history as a species has recently reappeared on my social media feed, courtesy of a right-wing cousin of mine.

 I just thought I'd do a quick comparison showing just how wrong that myth is. Using data from tables 2 and 3 in Burton, Sawyer, and Granieri (2013) for volcanic emissions and Boden, Marland, and Andres (2017) for human-related carbon dioxide emissions, I get the following comparison between an entire year's worth of Mt. Etna CO₂ emissions and just one year's worth of human-caused CO₂ emissions.

Mt. Etna produces an average of 7.22 million metric tons of CO₂ per year. That's TOTAL per year, not just "one little burp." In contrast, humans caused 36.14 BILLION metric tons of CO₂ emissions in 2014 alone. Mt. Etna emissions aren't even a rounding error compared to human-caused emissions for just one year. Ah, but that meme specifically compared Mt. Etna emissions from "one little burp" to human-caused emissions for our entire history. Now we don't have data for our entire history as a species, but we do have data since 1751, thanks to Boden, Marland, and Andres.

Adding the annual emissions up since 1751, we get the following:

As before, Mt. Etna produces an average of 7.22 million metric tons of CO₂ per year (not per burp). In contrast, anthropogenic CO2 emissions since 1751 total 1.47 quadrillion metric tons of CO₂. That's 204,208,172 times greater than Mt. Etna's YEARLY output (again, not per burp).

 As one of my favorite cable shows would say, that myth is busted.