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Originally Posted by Ladogaboy
This would be an interesting, and valid point, IF Kilauea was the only active volcano on the planet. From the numbers I've read, Eyjafjallajoekull was releasing 3,000 tons of SO2 per day during its months-long active period. And many more add to the release of SO2.
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Sure. And when there's a big eruption such as those I mentioned, the cooling effect lasts for months or years. (An effect which is accurately predicted by climate models.) The point is that there's an ongoing and fairly constant level of natural SO2 emission, which is part of the "Goldilocks effect" that keeps the present climate in its natural range. Add a big pulse of SO2 from a volcano, and you get extra cooling. Dump in a lot more SO2 over many years from fossil-fuel emissions, and you might get enough cooling to set off an Ice Age. Which is one reason we have emissions regulations on power plants, and low-sulfur diesel.
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To make matters more interesting, SO2 is one of the man contributors to the cooling of the troposphere, so wouldn't SO2 actually mitigate global warming?
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Of course, and that's one of the proposed geoengineering schemes for mitigating GW. The problem is that SO2 has lots of other nasty effects, like acid rain. In addition, unlike CO2 it has an atmospheric residence time of only months to a few years, so you'd have to keep adding more.