I’m really kinda looking forward to it wiping out humanity.
+1 for the supervolcano.
I’m optimistic about the jobs the supervolcano eruption will create.
Let’s save the world by putting tariffs on magma, making an eruption economically infeasible.
Erupt fast and swallow things.
My Saturday night motto.
Don’t look down
So, damn. I was hoping for a very cool report on how we would die instantly in a fiery explosion, but it’s just dumping more carbon into the atmosphere and slowly worsening climate change.
I can hear climate change deniers already. “It’s not humans, it’s the volcanoes”
It is true that volcanoes have an effect. It’s just nothing compared to the scale humans are working at.
Volcanoes release less than 1% of the CO2 of anthropogenic emissions, according to USGS. But they also have a cooling effect by releasing sulfur particles that reflect sunlight. So yeah, volcanoes pretty much a wash, or at least de minimis compared to humans.
I don’t think you’re accounting for the massive difference in scale when considering a super-volcanic eruption. It would cause global famine and a massive die-off of most species including humans. If Yellowstone went off, for instance, we would be living under volcanic winter for at least a decade. It would release something like 1,000 gigatons of CO2, which would be roughly equivalent to all human caused CO2 since the industrial revolution, and it would do it all at once.
By way of example, the Toba supervolcano was so devastating and caused so much death it literally created a pronounced genetic bottleneck in the history of human genome.
The article is not referencing a catastrophic eruption. Super volcanoes don’t have to end the world, they can, but they don’t have to.
Brother, if Yellowstone erupted, global warming would be the least of our problems.
Yeah, it would mostly be the sulfur and volcanic winter. And the famine.
The article is talking about supervolcanoes, and you’re talking about regular volcanic eruptions. I’m clarifying the difference in magnitude.
Well, no. The article is not talking about the kind of catastrophic supervolcano eruption that you are. It’s talking about small-scale emissions, 4000-5000 tons per day from a single supervolcano crater in Italy, which totals less than 2 million tons per year or about 0.005% of global CO2 inventory.
You introduced the concept of a catastrophic supervolcano eruption for the first time. That wasn’t the topic of the article or the comment chain I responded to.
followed by Trump drawing a cartoon
dicknuke on the map and claiming it’s the only way to stop climate change.
Reminiscent of a line from Supernatural: “I guess I’m just a little numb to the Earth-shattering revelations at this point.”
“crises” is the plural form of crisis.
since 2005
Interesting read, but fuck that site for making the article unreadable for periodic moments to push ads. Probably a mobile specific thing, but cropping the edges off your article as an ad presentation is next level annoyance.
Thank god. I was hoping for an asteroid but this works too. Hurry the fuck up.
You know, I never understood how people comment things like this. The world is messed up, but there is always hope for change, for betterment, for there to be a fresh start in the morning.
Comments like this just released into this kind of depressing echo chamber just spread negativity and hopelessness that is not needed in the world today.
We love to commiserate. Shared pain = half pain in my mother tongue. Shared laughter = double laughter.
Comments like this just released into this kind of depressing echo chamber just spread negativity and hopelessness that is not needed in the world today.
look bro the only thing that brings me happiness and solace in life is nature, which is being fucked over, so i pretend that isn’t happening, and doing shit. So i just do a lot of things.
Sometimes it’s good to recognize the shitty in the world, just to see through to the good. Especially in something that you have no control over ultimately at the end of the day.
I don’t disagree, but also I can find hope in this too. Humans likely aren’t going anywhere, nor is the Earth. Us getting largely wiped out us a chance for a fresh start. We’d lose a lot, and there’d be a lot of suffering, but I personally can also find hope in a soft reset. Most of our information probably wouldn’t be lost, but we could come back and hopefully have an understanding of how we can impact the planet.
This volcano isn’t it though. It’s just going to hurt a lot of people, but it’s not big enough for any kind of reset of societal norms.
Thanks for saying this.
I think these posts have a way of propagating doomer-think in a way that almost creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all collectively assume good will never win so we don’t do anything, so good doesn’t win, but then we collectively at least feel smug and perceptive.
For all of us, but I think especially for younger generations, it’s hard to see any “wins” from the side of good, so it’s tempting and almost comfortable to just make sardonic memes and embrace depressive nihilism. We’ve been conditioned to helplessness.
We laud cynical storytelling about selfish horrible people because it’s “realistic”. We meme about mass-extinction. We see boring-cyberpunk dystopias as our inevitable near future. We doomscroll about each and every terrible rotten thing that happens on every square inch of the planet that we can’t do anything about and believe it’s our fault.
But we gotta combat this with hope if there’s any possibility for a brighter future.
I’m just gonna leave this here. It’s profound and I think of it every day to keep going:
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
–Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers (film version)
That quote always fills me with hope. Thanks for reminding me of it
Yeah! I’m glad! :D
If the world’s gotta be dark, I’d much rather it be “nobledark” than “grimdark”!
We are the stories we read and tell. Don’t lose heart. :)
I wish I could only selectively see the seemingly fewer and fewer good things in life, but I’ve lived long enough to see how far downhill we’ve gone over the past handful of decades. It’s made even more depressing by the fact of having seen the root cause (mostly aggressive manipulation by the right wing eaten up by selfish masses) of what was an upward trajectory turned to shit needlessly in order to serve as a scoreboard to a pissing match for the ultra-domineering control freaks.
Even if climate change doesn’t make human life completely unbearable for humans on what’s left of the planet, it’s going to take too long to rebalance our living circumstances to see much hope for a good future for the masses. Especially as those at the top work so vociferously against the common interest.
Look around. The world has been ending for a long time. Just because it hasn’t been for you doesn’t mean the apocalypse isn’t already here for many people or even most.
This is what I’m talking about though, this pessimistic attitude of we’re already at the end, “O woe is humanity, we’re finished, there’s no point in trying to help! Lets just all wallow in our own self misery and not try to find a better way.”
This is why it’s exhausting to try and get anything done to try and better the world.
These eruptions can eject more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material into the atmosphere Sounds like a good way of rapidly decreasing global temperatures!
Do you think conservatives will think the dems triggered the volcano or that climate change isn’t real when the world is suddenly colder.
These eruptions can eject more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of material into the atmosphere
Sounds like a sky problem, not a “my” problem ☝️😎
Most uplifting news I’ve heard in a while, I’ll take it
Are you magma?
No, I’m yo-ma
-ma
…I’ll see myself out
