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Comment by altero | Hacker News Reader

One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. Just two hundred years ago there was Little Ace Age and river Thames would freeze every winter. Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

Yet somehow it is 110% sure that our CO2 emissions are responsible for global warming. It is even crime to disagree with scientific hypotheses. And governments will happily `solve` this problem by taking away our rights. F*k this.

We should be solving other problems than cow farts; Urbanization, slums, fusion, wealth distribution...

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> One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland. Just two hundred years ago there was Little Ace Age and river Thames would freeze every winter.

One fairly well-supported theory of the cause of the Little Ice Age is that reforestation that due to a decline in Eurasian and American human populations led to an uptake in CO2 absorption [1] [2]. This suggests that at least partially anthropogenic climate change is a phenomenon which existed even before the Industrial Revolution. In any case,

> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

No [3]. Moreover, volcanic eruptions tend to have an overall dimming effect due to their release of sulfur-containing compounds which form sulfuric acid aerosol. There have even been some radical/crackpot geoengineering proposals to release sulfur into the atmosphere to combat global warming [4].

1: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/EI157.1 2: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/06/11/095968361140... 3: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming... 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfate_aerosols_...

> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

Funny, the scientific consensus is that on average, on any given year vulcano emissions represent only about 1% of human emissions [1]. I would very much like to know where you got your numbers. It's very likely that you are being misled.

[1] http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming...

This is a bullshit climate denier argument. http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.h...

Humans produce on the order of 3.10^13 kg of CO2 [1] Atmosphere weighs 5.1 . 10^18 [2] so the CO2 we produce is 1/100000 (or 0.001%) of the total weight.

Atmosphere contains 0.046% CO2 by weight [3]. So, next year, it's going to be 0.047%. In other words, each year we increase the concentration of CO2 by 2%. This isn't only cow farts.

[1] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html

[2] http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.htm....

[3] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-composition-d_212.html

> One thousand years ago there were farms in Greenland.

The current population of Greenland is about 56,300 with 15,400 living in the capital, Nuuk. Animals are kept and crops grown. So it's hardly shocking that the same was happening 1000 years ago.

> Single vulcano explosion releases more CO2 than entire mankind in a decade.

I don't believe this is true. Dixie Lee Ray made a claim similar to this in her book Trashing the Planet (regarding the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption) and Rush Limbaugh picked it up, but IIRC the original claim was based on a math error and a very questionable source. What is actually true that the Pinatubo explosion temporarily cooled the planet by much more than the predicted effect of a decade's worth of CO2 output. But it wasn't the CO2 output that did that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo

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