| schema:text
| - Fact Check: Human activities emit more than 60 times CO2 released by active volcanoes every year
Natural disasters like wildfires, floods, and mudslides have shaken the western part of the world while the Sakurajima
Claim :
Active volcanoes like Sakurajima in Japan spew out more carbon dioxide than human activitiesFact :
Humans are responsible for more CO2, volcanoes are estimated to produce a fraction of CO2 emitted by human activitiesNatural disasters like wildfires, floods, and mudslides have shaken the western part of the world while the Sakurajima volcano in Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture erupted more than once in the year 2025 after erupting in December 2024.
A social media post showing volcanic eruption claims that it shows the eruption of Sakurajima volcano in Japan. The caption on the video goes “Sakurajima Volcano erupts spewing out millions of tonnes of natural CO2 - but please keep thinking your Veganism & electric car is saving the planet. Also, there are so many active volcanoes across the World right now. Weird.”
Here is the archive link for the claim.
Fact check:
The claim that all active volcanoes spew out more carbon dioxide than humans is False.
When we searched for more details using keyword search, we found that the United States Geological Survey published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all on-land and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80-270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates.
The article also states that ‘All studies to date of global volcanic carbon dioxide emissions indicate that present-day subaerial and submarine volcanoes release less than a percent of the carbon dioxide released currently by human activities. While it has been proposed that intense volcanic release of carbon dioxide in the deep geologic past did cause global warming, and possibly some mass extinctions, this is a topic of scientific debate at present.’
According to the NASA website, volcanic eruptions are often discussed in the context of climate change because they release CO2 and other gases into our atmosphere. However, the impact of human activities on the carbon cycle far exceeds that of all the world's volcanoes combined, by more than 100 times.
The most significant eruptions come from super-volcanoes like Yellowstone or Mount Toba, which rarely erupt, about every 100,000 to 200,000 years or more. Yet, the total annual CO2 emissions from human activities are akin to one or more Yellowstone-sized super-eruptions occurring yearly. In essence, CO2 emissions from human activities greatly surpass those from volcanoes.
According to the climate.gov website, human activities emit 60 or more times the amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes each year. Large, violent eruptions may match the rate of human emissions for the few hours that they last, but they are too rare and fleeting to rival humanity’s annual emissions. Human activities, mostly burning of coal and other fossil fuels, but also cement production, deforestation, and other landscape changes, emitted roughly 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2015. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, more than 2,000 billion metric tonne of carbon dioxide has been added to the atmosphere by human activities.
The same claim has been shared on social media over the years and has been debunked by many fact-checking organizations like Reuters, USA Today, etc.
Hence, the claim that active volcanoes spew out more carbon dioxide than human activities is False. Human activities emit more than 60 times the amount of carbon dioxide released by active volcanoes every year.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)