The Volcano Gambit
Filed under:
Carbon cycle Climate Science Greenhouse gases Instrumental Record skeptics
— gavin @ 9 April 2016
Anyone reading pundits and politicians pontificating profusely about climate or environmental science will, at some point, have come across the “volcano gambitâ€. During the discussion they will make a claim that volcanoes (or even a single volcano) produce many times more pollutant emissions than human activities. Often the factor is extremely precise to help give an illusion of science-iness and, remarkably, almost any pollutant can be referenced. This “volcano gambit†is an infallible sign that indicates the author is clueless about climate science, but few are aware of its long and interesting history…
From Augustine to Mt. St. Helens
The ur-usage was a legitimate paper in Science in July 1980 by seismologist David Johnston writing about chlorine emissions in eruptions:
Earlier estimates of the chlorine emission from volcanoes, based upon evaluations of the pre-eruption magmatic chlorine content, are too low for some explosive volcanoes by a factor of 20 to 40 or more. Degassing of ash erupted during 1976 by Augustine Volcano in Alaska released 525 x 106 kg of chlorine (±40%), of which 82 x 106 to 175 x 106 kg may have been ejected into the stratosphere as hydrogen chloride [HCl]. This stratospheric contribution is equivalent to 17 to 36% of the 1975 world industrial production of chlorine in fluorocarbons.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/04/the-volcano-gambit/#more-19242
