Help me debunk something that doesn't sound right...

[Fountain79]

When I have gotten into discussions with conservative friends/family about global warming they try to point out to me that volcanoes cause more pollution than man does. Anyone have some helpful info to debunk that?

[QuestionAll...]

1. An Inconvenient Truth and it's graphs

splain that bullshit away pretty neatly.

[silverweb]

2. Even if it were true, so what?

Just because there may be a small amount of arsenic in the water supply naturally, does that make it okay to dump more in and call it safe to drink?

Just because volcanoes and forest fires make pollution that we cannot control, does that make it okay for us to wantonly multiply that pollution despite that fact that it's killing the planet?

Their statement is really incredibly stupid.

[rfranklin]

4. The geometric increase in CO2 cannot be explained away....

by such ludicrous tales.

[silverweb]

15. Exactly.

As previous poster mentioned, climatecrisis.net debunks the nonsense.

[jdlh8894]

13. So you are saying

That there were no forest fires or volcanic eruptions before man evolved and attempted to control them?

[silverweb]

14. Huh?

Try again.

[uppityperson]

18. what?

[tandot]

3. Pinatubo Volcano Research Boosts Case For Human-Caused Global Warming

Pinatubo Volcano Research Boosts Case For Human-Caused Global Warming

...

"Most significant, the scientist said, Pinatubo helped validate computer-generated climate models that demonstrate human-caused global warming.

Using computer modeling, said Robock, scientists have been able to account for natural warming and cooling, as found in Arctic and Antarctic ice core samples and tree rings covering hundreds of years up to the last century.

"If you plug in volcanic eruptions, El Niños, solar variations and other natural causes and try to simulate past climate changes, you can do a pretty good job of modeling climate change until the end of the 19th Century," the researcher said.

After that period, he said, natural causes alone don't account for the amount of warming, about 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit), that has taken place in the last century."

more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/02/020220075850.htm

[Hoping4Change]

5. Its true. And since there are naturally occuring pollutants that

can't be regulated isn't that another argument in favour of contolling manmade pollutants.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002105397_volcano01m.html

edited to add link

[newcriminal]

6. Bullshit causes more global warming than volcanoes.

[Tripper11]

7. Besides...volcanoes and forest fires are not new!

Seriously, they have been going on since time began! The earth has a way of equaling things out(IMHO).
Us adding to the mix is more then she can take. I think she can take a lot, but whoa, you know!

[pinto]

8. Lightning strikes cause more forest fires than any arson -

the difference is that arson is a conscious man made decision, lightning is, well, lightning. One we can change. And change is the issue.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

9. They're big point sources.

Generally, a volcano produces more greenhouse gases than a car, but if you add up all the cars and factories and everything else that humans do, volcanoes don't measure up.

[MichiganVote]

10. Volcano FAQ for the non scientists

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/frequent_questions/group4_new.html

[EstimatedProphet]

11. That's an old canard

The argument goes that Mt. Pinatubo put more CO2 into the atmosphere through volcanic ash than all of human activity. It's only true if you don't consider the fact that the CO2 in the ash is bound up chemically, not loose, and therefore has no effect since the ash will fall out of the sky.

[longship]

12. Volcanic pollution

Volcano pollution is mostly particulate. But they also add some CO2, but of the volcanic greenhouse gases H20 is the most prevalent. Of course, H20 doesn't stay in the atmosphere while CO2 does.

But the climate deniers are really playing a silly game here. It's a straw man. Volcanoes always have and always will contribute to the global CO2 budget, so there is very little we can do about this.

In fact, comparing CO2 from Volcanic and anthrogenic sources, the man-made kind overwhelms the volcanic by 150 times. Citation

So the climate deniers' straw man is effectively dead. These guys are full of shit.

[jarnocan]

16. good responses here is one more related quote

global warming is accelerating....
"The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."
Hansen has a theory that man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable.... the White House is blocking that message.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml

[sgxnk]

17. as is so common

ideologues ALWAYS ignore/explain away science when they are threatened

it of course, depends on how you define 'pollution'

pollution qua pollution has little relevance to global warming, in that many, if not most POLLUTANTS have nothing to do with global warming

global warming is a reality imo

but that has little relevance to pollutants in GENERAL. so, it's meaningless

yes, certain pollutants contribute to GWarming. but not all

[rude boy]

19. Are they Ditto heads by any chance?

This sounds like typical Rush Limbaugh disinformation. There's lots out there to debunk it but I found this on a quick Google search.

<snip>
http://mediamatters.org/items/200508160007

Limbaugh fiction: Global warming "one of the biggest hoaxes being perpetrated on the people of the world"

Limbaugh insisted that "environmentalists still cannot prove that this is man-made." To support this assertion, he claimed, "There have been too many global heating and cooling cycles long before man came along and industrialized the planet, and there have been way too many volcanoes spewing pollution that doubles the amount of the total of all the automobiles ever invented and manufactured in the world." On the August 15 broadcast of his show, Limbaugh added that global warming is "one of the biggest hoaxes being perpetrated on the people of the world."

Again, Limbaugh's claims are contradicted by the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion. Though natural phenomena, or "natural forcings," have certainly caused the earth's average temperature to rise and fall in the past, the scientific consensus is that the current warming trend is unprecedented -- at least in the last millennium. In 2001, the IPCC, which was established by the WMO and UNEP, concludedPDF file in its "Third Assessment Report" (TAR) that it is "very likely" (defined in the report as a 90 percent to 99 percent chance) that "the 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in the instrumental record (1861-2000)." Moreover, it is "likely" (defined as a 60 percent to 90 percent chance) that "he increases in surface temperature over the 20th century for the Northern Hemisphere" were "greater than that for any other century in the last thousand years."

Limbaugh's suggestion that volcanoes are primarily responsible for the recent rapid warming is equally baseless. In fact, scientists have concluded that volcanoes and other natural phenomena cannot account for the dramatic increase in global temperatures over the past half-century. According to the IPCC's TAR, which reviewed a wide array of scientific work, "Simulations of the response to natural forcings alone (i.e., the response to variability in solar irradiance and volcanic eruptions) do not explain the warming in the second half of the 20th century." The report included a graphPDF file that illustrates this divergence of actual temperature changes since 1950 (observations) from those predicted by models based entirely on natural causes (model results): ...

[Fountain79]

20. Yeah...they tend to pass off his talking points as their own... n/t

[Cincy911Truth]

21. Just a reminder...

C-SPAN will rebroadcast a panel discussion from the American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 + The Neo-Con Agenda which took place this past June in Los Angeles.

Speakers include BYU Physics Professor Stephen Jones, author Webster Tarpley, Dr. Bob Bowman, Professor James Fetzer and radio talk show host Alex Jones.

This program will appear on C-SPAN tomorrow night (Tuesday, August 1st) at 6:10 pm EDT.

[uppityperson]

23. did you know that spamming like this is against DU rules?

inserting the same thing over and over, especially something that has nothing to do with the topic it is in, catches the eye of some. Beware. Spamming bad. And especially for your first 3 posts. bad

[Xenotime]

22. Volcanos are natural...

Man is not.

[ComerPerro]

24. consider it from a perspective of balance

assume volcaones and fires and whatever else put pollutants in the air. Well, this has no doubt been happening for thousands, millions of years, we still have a planet, so apparently the earth can take care of those.

But now imagine we come along and start dumping extra pollutants, on top of all the pollutants caused by naturally occuring events.

What will become of the extra pollutants?