Mount St. Helens is WA state's No. 1 air polluter

John Patrick Luethe writes "The Seattle Times has run an article on Mount St. Helens' recent massive pollution. The article claims that since the start of the recent volcanic activity starting in early October the volcano has pumped out between 50 and 250 tons of sulfur dioxide each day and has become the states largest polluter."

Comments

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Obviously the solution is to cut taxes for companies that engage in volcanic activity.

And throw in some more tax cuts for plate tectonic activity too.

And no air permit, too!

[mschaffer]

This is way over the 250 ton/year limit for SO2 for it to be considered a major source, and I cannot find any record of the EPA region 10 approving an air permit for the National Park Service at that site.

Shame, shame on the NPS to operate an attraction that is so polluting. It should be shut down.

Carbon Dioxide emissions

[caseih]

While the SO2 emissions are considered pollution, I was shocked at how high the daily man-made CO2 emissions were. The CO2 emissions wouldn't be such a big deal if they were coming from some organic source, but since they are being added to the carbon cycle, that's a lot of CO2 to absorb. And there's no end in sight. It is high time we started replacing our fossil fuels with organic fuels. At that point CO2 emissions become non-issues since there would be no net increase in the carbon levels of the enviroment. It's not the burning that is the problem (outside of NO2 and SO2 creation); it's the buring of fossil fuels that add CO2 that is the problem.

The Conservatives Position

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no hard evidence that 250 tons of sulphur dioxide per day contribute to pollution. Rather than burden volcanoes with unnecessary restrictions, we should lower taxes on them to stimulate growth and create new jobs.

Pollution?

[glapalom]

How can anyone say that Mt. St. Helens actually pollutes? I mean, isn't this just a natural volcanic reaction, and if so, how can a planet pollute itself with it's own elements? Isn't this just part of being on this planet?

Re:Volcanic emissions compared to human output

[fluffy666]

I took the liberty of creating a link for a Google search for you, since you're too busy trolling to do it yourself.

Your claim was that 'The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for instance, launched more stuff into the atmosphere than all human activity during the 19th and 20th centuries combined.' . Even at a subset, that means you are claiming that the eruption put more CO2, SO2, Nitrogen oxides and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activities for the past 200 years. You've made an absurd claim that you can't back up in a couple of sentances, which looks a lot more like trolling than my post.

A good starting point..

Mt. Pinatubo put around 17 Million tonnes of Sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere (17Tg). Humans emit 66Tg PER YEAR. However, volcanic emissions are injected higher than human ones, making the contribution for a single year approxamately equal.

Mt Pinatubo put around 44 Million tonnes CO2 into the atmosphere. That's around half a day's worth of human emissions. 3 Million tonnes HCl, the vast majority of which rained straight out.

And the effect was a short lived pulse of cooling; the particulates come out in a few months. This is why you don't see anything about longer term effects. There are none.

So, contrary to what is endlessly repeated and recycled, volcanoes do not have anything near the impact of humans and the figures - could you be bothered to research them - support this entirely.

Not representative

[hak hak]

The tone of most reactions to this article (and to all other recent topics on climate change) seems to be, "Well, apparently natural effects are much more important than human effects, so why bother about the human impact on climate change?"

We should realize that this particular case of natural greenhouse gas emission is not at all representative for the relative importance of human and natural effects. If you restrict to a small enough area and timespan, any effect becomes important. Why say that Mt. St. Helens is WA state's biggest pollutor, and not that volcanic effects dwarf human contributions in the whole US (or the whole world)? Because if you look on a bigger scale than just the area around the volcano, volcanic effects are just not that important. I'm not saying they are unimportant, only that industrial effects are at least as important.

And then I'm not even talking about the extremely short timescale this volcano is active (only for a couple of months, while industrial activity continues 24/7).

By the way, I absolutely do not regard myself as overly green or left-wing. I would like to believe that everything's going to be alright, but the facts are unfortunately too obvious to ignore.