Some of our right wing, climate-change denying, friends like to say that volcanoes contribute more C02 to the atmosphere than anything humans do. They are right — as long as they are talking about 55 million years ago. But of course many of them don’t believe in that either: the earth isn’t that old. As it happens, the earth is that old – and older — and about that long ago, as volcanoes spewed up in the gap opening between Greenland and Europe, C02 saturated the atmosphere.
Life changed. Big time.
Over 2 to 3 thousand years some 1,500 to 4,000 gigatons of C02 were released into the atmosphere. That works out to be something like .5 to 2 gigatons per year.
At the present moment we humans are releasing 7 gigatons a year. Soooo — if we would like to stop this train before we reach 1,000 gigatons we have 142 years … if a chain reaction with methane now frozen in Siberia doesn’t upset our careless planning…