REFLECTOR: Mt. Pinatubo (was New Aviation Fuel)

[Steve Goldman]

> "When Mount Pinatubo erupted it pumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than 
> humans did in the entire industrial age. The concern over anthropogenic CO2 
> emissions is politics dressed up as science."
> 
> http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2005/08/09/is-co2-a-pollutant/
> 

So the above quote is actually from a reply on the blog site mentioned above.
Before anyone commits this "fact" to their memory when it appears to be a
factoid (in the original sense of the word not the CNN sense), here's this:

I was dubious of this statement and it is disputed on the blog also. So I
spent some time looking for data. At first all I could find was that 17 million
metric tons (around 20m english tons) of SO2 were emitted by Pinatubo but
no mention of CO2. I did see though that atmospheric concentrations of CO2
dipped slightly for 2-3 years after the eruption so that seemed incompatible.

So I decided to look for how much H20 was emitted since the major components
of an eruption are H20, CO2, SO2 in that order. So I could at least place a
bound on CO2. Well that caused me to find this link:

http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Projects/Emissions/Reports/Pinatubo/pinatubo_abs.html

Which is the abstract of a paper from scientists at the USGS. It says that based
on the ratio of gasses emitted prior to the eruption that the estimate of CO2
from Mt. Pinatubo was 42 million metric tons. Since the 1700's humans have placed
300 BILLION metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yearly CO2 emmissions in the 2000's
seem to be on the order of 7 billion metric tons. So Mt. Pinatubo was worth around
3 days of current human efforts.

Now back to your regularly scheduled Velocity program.

-- 
Steve Goldman
'77 Tiger N28531
Velocity XL5-RG (T-3496hrs)
Pittsboro, NC (9NC8)