thomas malloy wrote:
Compared to the volcanoes, all 6,000,000,000 of us are the equivalent of a pimple on an elephant's rear end.
That is incorrect, as shown by the stats Nick Palmer found. It is also obviously wrong because in North America, we burn roughly twice as much fossil fuel as all of the plants on the continent convert back into carbon and free oxygen. If volcanoes added far more CO2 to the mix then we do, than plants would have a negligible effect and the atmosphere and there would be practically no free oxygen. (By the way, decreasing levels of free oxygen have not been examined, and recent evidence shows this, too, is a threat.)
This notion that people have an inherently smaller effect than natural phenomena is widespread, but it has no logical or factual basis. In North America we have stripped away most of the top soil, cut most of the trees down, destroyed the water table over large areas and paved over an area the size of Nebraska. It is inconceivable that such large scale terraforming would not have a major impact on the environment. At this rate we will destroy most of the continent in a few hundred years as effectively as people in ancient times destroyed Iraq (Mesopotamia).
- Jed
