The Icecap Melteth

I heard an interview on the radio on the way to my office this morning, about global warming and the impending total loss of the Arctic Ice Cap.

Apparently, the climate expert claimed, we're to blame. Yes. All of us, and especially we Australians because per head of population, Aussies are allegedly the most polluting people on the face of the planet. This guy was blaming everything from the hole in the ozone layer to the loss of the Titanic on us, and it got me thinking... could he be right?

I mean, I know I'm guilty of leaving the occasional light switched on, but I do drive a car that does 5 litres per 100km (or around 45 miles per gallon), so I think I can be cut a little slack there. Then again, I do sometimes forget to separate my recyclables and I am known for spending too long in the shower.

He went on to say the last 10 years have been the hottest 10 years in human history, that the polar ice caps are melting and that any minute now, the entire Greenland Ice Shelf is going to slide off into the North Atlantic, raising the sea level by some 15 metres. And it's all our fault...

Or is it?

I remembered something I'd read a few years back about the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, and as I don't actually have a life and have ADD (which means I get distracted by useless stuff like this when I should be working), I decided to dig a little.

Now when I say "dig", I really mean "use Google", because while I'm happy to let the web slog through records for me, actually going out and trawling through a library seems a little too much like hard work.

I discovered something a scary. Really. I'm not trying to be funny here... this is disturbing.

Stay with me for a mo while I bore you with statistics...
Between 1700 and 1799, there were around 34 cataclysmic explosive volcanic eruptions around the world. The geologists say it's very difficult to get an accurate statistic before 1700, and even the figure for that hundred years might be a little rubbery because so much of the world was unexplored by people who gave a shit.

Between 1800 and 1899, there were 41 of these eruptions, and that's more likely to be a close enough to reliable figure because those explorers covered a great deal of territory in a hundred years.

Here's where it gets interesting...

Between 1900 and 1999 there were 69 of these catastrophic explosive eruptions. That's around double the rate for the preceeding two centuries.

And between 2000 and 2006, we're running at one a year, or almost three times the rate for 1700-1899.

Let me get back to Pinatubo... where 15 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere in 15 seconds. Fifteen million... that's equivalent to the entire annual sulphur dioxide generation from all of the activities of man. The total amount of carbon dioxide generated in that eruption is estimated as greater than that generated by all of industry and technology for the preceeding hundred years. From one eruption.

Are you getting a picture here, or do I need to spell it out for you?

Global warming is real... so real that, if you believe the guy in the interview, it's going to kill most of us in the next 20-30 years.

But did we do it?

Mt Pinatubo taken from Clarke Air Force Base. Photo Courtesy of the USGS.