Fact check: Humans responsible for more CO2 emissions than volcanoes, including Mt. Etna

Kate S. Petersen, USA TODAY
·4 min read
12

The claim: One eruption of Mt. Etna in Italy released 10,000 times more CO2 than humans ever have

A meme claiming that human CO2 emissions have been dwarfed by emissions from a single volcanic eruption has circulated on social media for years.

The image shows what appears to be a daytime volcanic eruption.

"That one little burp by Mt. Etna has already put more than 10,000 times the CO2 into the atmosphere than mankind has in our entire time on Earth," reads text accompanying a picture of Mt. Etna in a June 6 Facebook post.

USA TODAY found more than 100 examples of the claim on Facebook dating back to 2015.

A June 2 version circulating on Twitter garnered more than 12,000 interactions in eight days.

However, the claim is wrong. The eruption of Mt. Etna shown in the meme did not emit anywhere near the amount of CO2 that humans produce in one year, much less in all of history. Humans produce significantly more CO2 each year than all volcanoes on Earth combined, according to researchers.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook users who shared the post for comment. The Twitter user could not be reached.

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Humans responsible for significantly more CO2 emissions than volcanoes

The meme shows a particularly violent Mt. Etna eruption that took place in December 2015, according to Boris Behncke, a researcher at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

However, it did not release more CO2 than humans have in all of history, he told USA TODAY in an email.

"The statement given in the post with the Etna photo – which has been circulating on social media for a few years by now – is complete nonsense and not based on any scientific facts," Behncke said.

Alessandro Aiuppa, a volcanic gas geochemist at the University of Palermo, also told USA TODAY in an email that the claim was "nonsense for many reasons."

He estimated the 2015 Mt. Etna eruption released far less than a thousandth of a gigaton of CO2 into the atmosphere. That year, human-caused CO2 emissions associated with energy production alone reached more than 32 gigatons, according to International Energy Agency data.

When CO2 emissions associated with land-use change – such as deforestation – are included, human CO2 emissions were roughly 40 gigatons in 2015, according to data The Global Carbon Project provided to USA TODAY.

Even when emissions from all the land and underwater volcanoes on Earth are taken together, they still release less than one gigaton of CO2 each year, according to the U.S. Geological Service.

"We know that volcanic eruptions, even the largest ones that have been well qualified, put only well below 0.05% of the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere compared to human activity in one year," Tobias Fischer, a volcanologist at The University of New Mexico, told USA TODAY in an email.

The claim was previously debunked by Reuters.

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Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that one eruption of Mt. Etna in Italy released 10,000 times more CO2 than humans ever have. The 2015 eruption in question released less CO2 than what humans did just that year. Combined, volcanoes release less than one gigaton of CO2 per year, whereas humans release dozens of gigatons per year.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Humans produce more CO2 than volcanoes, including Mt. Etna