Of course, by googling you can find any crazy blog or right wing nut who makes unscientific claims. When we try to debunk arguments put forward by skeptics then I mean "scientists" from the skeptics camp. Like Bob Carter, Lindzen, Gray, McIntyre and name another 100 Profs and Dr's in geology, climatology etc.

Do you consider "global warming is a hoax" to be unscientific?  How about "global warming stopped in 1998", is that a ludicrous argument for a scientist?  Both of those come from people in your list, so don't be so quick to say stupid arguments should not be answered, these are high profile people and they do need to be answered.

You'll have to take my word for it, I hear this volcano argument all the time and naive but well meaning people are susceptible to it.

Invent a clever saying, and your name will live forever! -- Anonymous

As everybody knows, around 64 million years ago, the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era came to a close with a remarkable mass extinction.  Many taxa, including most famously the last of the non-avian dinosaurs, disappeared, in a rather sudden way, according to the fossil record.  In the last 30 years, a consensus has emerged that the collision of a large meteoritic object, probably a small asteroid, with the Earth, apparently at the northern end of the Yucatan peninsula, sent up so much particulate matter into the atmosphere, that it caused a severe global cooling for many years, killing off both plants and then animals.

Those scientists who initially rejected that hypothesis, preferring to look for a cause of the extinction based firmly on Earth, pointed out the apparently uncontroversial huge volcanic event that took place around that time in the Deccan region of India.  But the idea there too was that a great amount of particulate matter ejected into the atmosphere would have caused a severe global cooling.

I ask, therefore, if the effect of volcanic eruptions on climate is at all a simple thing to measure.  Is not the effect of any GHGs emitted offset by the ejection of darkening and cooling particulate matter?

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Could you give me the reference so that I can check whether they indeed used silly arguments like that? I have never heard any scientist denying that the gradual rise in CO2 is not man -made. The argument has  always been that there is a logarithmic relationship rather than a linear one so that further CO2 increase has progressively less effect on warming the atmosphere.

"I have never heard a skeptic making that ridiculous claim. It seems you are putting up a straw man in order to be able to kick it. The skeptics are not that dumb."

I have a friend who presented me with this argument recently - he claimed one volcano will emit more CO2 than humans ever have.

Unfortunately neither of us are scientists, and I could not contest his point as I had no idea what the CO2 output of volcanoes versus that of fossil fuel burning was. Isn't the point of this website for people discussing the issue with ANY skeptic, not just scientists (it would be rather pointless if it was just for scientists, as the vast majority don't need convincing)?

My point is my friend must have heard it from somewhere...people do come out with it.

Like I said, I'm no scientist, but I'm not stupid either.

If CO2 is coming from nature (which no one is disputing, it has always done - only in the carbon cycle as much gets re-absorbed too) and the earth's crust and is causing this sudden and rapid rise, why is it that it has only suddenly shot up at the very same time we began to burn fossil fuels??

We can measure how much CO2 is caused by burning fossil fuels by measuring the ratio of carbon isotopes which are different for naturally occuring CO2.

We know the expected range of CO2 in the atmosphere by studying the ice cores.  On short time scales, the level is kept more or less constant through the carbon cycle.  Burning fossil fuels short circuits this process.

The "volcanoes emit more CO2 than mankind" is such a preposterous statement and is demonstrably false.  Mount Pinatubo, certainly the most powerful eruption of the modern era doesn't even register a blip in the Manua Loa measurements.  In reality, all the volcanic activity in the world amounts to about 1% of human activity.

With regards to the cooling effect of volcanoes, that is true and large eruptions can cause significant disruptions in the climate (as we saw with Pinatubo).  However, these particles quickly rain out of the atmosphere.  CO2 takes many centuries to completely leave the atmosphere.

LOL

What a joke

Y'all worried about CO2

Better put out all those mega forest fires..

No, better still, cut down all the forests NOW, we can afford for them to burn.

LOL

This world has burnt several times in the past

CO2 is NOT THE PROBLEM

omegafour.com

The reason this is mentioned has been somewhat twisted from its original source, which is:

If a supervulcano might erupt in the near future (which is actually not such a remote possibility), its CO2 output will vastly overrule any other source.

This was how this came about. Because it was used in combination with the other optional disasters awaiting humanity, where CO2 emissions still play a very minor role in causing any of them to happen.

Loved your comment..it appears the sun is undergoing some unusual activity that is effecting not only the earth..but at virtually the same rate..the mars polar caps are shrinking and is suffering some extreme dust storms...hmmm..think there may just be some correlation? Plus I seriously doubt our emissions have contributed to Mars global warming and why doesn't science pay more attention to historical references to cyclical warming and cooling as so eleoquently noted by Plato, Aristotle; and the Vikings inhabiting then abandoning Greenland as it went from a fairly temperate climate to an almost uninhabitable one?

The volcano argument, believe it or not, is used in many Internet forum arguments by many heavily misinformed people. It stuns me that they would indeed fall for this particular argument, however.

From personal experience I know that the creationists, for example, have a wide spectrum of arguments running from very low brow to more nuanced attacks on evolution.  The average net warrior will tend to gravitate to the lower brow attacks as these are easier to grasp and require little investment of their time.  

In fact on the average internet forum you'd be hard pressed to hear anything but the low brow efforts.

This should really be in the main article but the "not only is that wrong" part should be elaborated to point out that

volcanoes emit 145-233 million tons of co2 in one year.

human emissions come to 24 BILLION tons a year

this was released by the secretary of the interior.