According to a decade-long study by an international team of researchers, human CO2 emissions total 100 times more than the planet-warming effects of all volcanoes combined.
The total amount emitted by volcanoes is only about 0.3 gigatons a year — a tiny fraction of the 37 gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.
In the distant past, there have been freak incidents on a similar scale to today’s human CO2 output — and they were catastrophic. One such carbon event was the Chicxulub asteroid impact, 66 million years ago, which the scientists estimate to have released anywhere between 425 and 1,400 gigatons of CO2.
But the impact of industrial civilization is now taking a comparable toll.
The amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by man-made activity in the last 10-12 years is equivalent to the catastrophic changes during these events which we’ve seen in Earth’s past.
Unfortunately, for the Earth to level out carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, it’ll be a very long while.
“It will rebalance itself, but not on a timescale that is of significance to humans.”
Reference- Deep Carbon Observatory Research Program, Futurism, Agence France-Presse