No, an eruption of Etna does not pollute more than all of humanity.

Where does the intox come from?

On May 25, a Twitter post seen more than two million times broadcast video of a volcanic eruption. WITH this climatosceptic comment: “Mount Etna, filmed yesterday, emits MORE CO2 than man has ever produced. But you can’t tax volcanoes, so this simple fact is not shared with ordinary people who have to abandon their cars, avoid flying and eat insects to fight climate change.

This publication is not the first of its kind. In 2022, a tweet already claimed that an eruption of Etna rejected “10,000 times more CO2 in the atmosphere than all of humanity”.

Why is this wrong?

The Italian volcano is well awake even though the images used in this tweet show a 2021 eruption and not the May 2023 one.

But in reality, volcanic eruptions represent only a small proportion of CO2 emissions. This is confirmed by Patrick Allard, volcanologist at the Institut de physique du globe de Paris, at Desintox: “Etna is one of the biggest emitters of CO2. Every day, on average, it releases about 5,000 tonnes of CO2. In its periods of intense activity and eruption, it can go up to 20,000, 30,000 tons of CO2 per day. However, anthropogenic emissions, that is to say exclusively linked to human activity, are 115 million tonnes of CO2 per day. That is 40 billion tons per year.

The researcher continues: “Volcanism as a whole, even taking it wide, represents between 0.1% and 1% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on average.” No offense to climatosceptics.