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Science

Mount St. Helens is WA state's No. 1 air polluter 93

Posted by timothy from the it's-number-one-it's-number-one dept.
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."
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Mount St. Helens is WA state's No. 1 air polluter More

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

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  • Gaia Watch Out! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The eco-terrorists are gonna be coming after you!

    • Re:Gaia Watch Out! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by StalinJoe ( 622511 )
      Now, I'm no tree-hugger. I am not an eco-terrorist. I drive an SUV.

      But isn't it a little disconcerting that it took an active spewing volcano over two months to get pingged for excessive emissions?

      Day after day of spewing tons of pollutants, and it takes OVER TWO MONTHS to pass up the status-quo industrial polluters?

      Hmmmmmm...

  • I've heard of web sites where they actually include links to the articles and you can go read them for yourself.
    • I've heard of web sites where they actually include links to the articles and you can go read them for yourself.

      The act of looking at the link then not reading the article was left as a mental exercise this time. This is /.

  • zerg (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @09:00PM (#11026939) Homepage
    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! (Score:4, Funny)

    by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @09:05PM (#11026987)
    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.
  • But nobody ever does anything about it.

    I think the federal government should step in with a grant or something.

    • I think we should follow Iceland's model. We need to find a way to control the weather with the power of the fiery magma beneath the earth's crust.

      This also has a secondary effect. Our use of geothermal power will bring all of the world's greatest mad scientists to the US. Mad scientists are naturally drawn to geothermal power like moths to flame. Sure, mad scientists may be unpredictable, but at least some of them will do spectacular things to benefit humanity and I think it's worth the risk of a cataclys
      • Mad scientists are naturally drawn to geothermal power like moths to flame.

        Yeah, bring em on, with lots of those cool Tesla coil thingeys, stickey out hair, and lab coats! That's the ticket! You know where you are with people like that!

        I think it's worth the risk of a cataclysm or two.

        I'm sure that the very tiny/big risk of a cataclysm is better than global warming.

    • The article actually focuses on Sulfur Dioxide production, not Carbon Dioxide. Volcanos do produce CO2, but the article states that one coal plant in Washington State produces 28 times more CO2 than does Mt. St. Helens.

    • Grants are well and good with industrial polution, because you can stop it. You can't throw money into a volcano and stop is from erupting (and if you could, should you? It's also producing some of the most fertile soil in the world at the same time). You can try to clean it up, but again, it's not that big of a polluter. I didn't RTFA this time, but on CNN last week, they were saying that Mt. St. Helens was producing twice the pollution of the rest of the state. However, in the history of industry (or for

  • Kyoto Accord? (Score:3, Funny)

    by TFGeditor ( 737839 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @09:31PM (#11027213) Homepage
    I wonder if the Kyoto Accord takes into account things like this.

  • Volcanic emissions compared to human output (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @09:58PM (#11027441) Journal
    Does anybody know overall how global volcanic emissions compare to human output?

    • Re:Volcanic emissions compared to human output (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A major event outside of rare caldera forming eruptions absolutely dwarfs human activity. The earth is big, and has a lot of heat capacity, mechanical energy and internal energy in the form compressed gases. We are very very small and tinker around insignificantly on the very outer layers of its skin. Ants are far bigger actors on a forest than we are on the earth. We're just better at measuring things.

    • Re:Volcanic emissions compared to human output (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think it would depend on which human to whom you are referring and also depend on what the human ate that particular day.
    • Bigger. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for instance, launched more stuff into the atmosphere than all human activity during the 19th and 20th centuries combined. It had the effect of reducing ozone levels in the tropics significantly, even creating a 20% reduction in the temperate region of the northern hemisphere.

      • Do you have any numbers to back that up? (Answer: No, but that's not going to stop you posting, of course)

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

          Anyway, the impact of Pinatubo was to cool the earth by about 0.5 deg C, an effect which lasted a few years. The effect is theorized to be due to the reflection of solar energy by the volcanic aerosol released into the stratosphere. However, warming of the stratosphere occurs in the tropics due to absorption of ground radiation. It's certainly not a simple phenomenon, but the scope of it w

          • Re:Volcanic emissions compared to human output (Score:5, Informative)

            by fluffy666 ( 582573 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @10:54AM (#11031789)

            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.. [usgs.gov]

            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 [uoregon.edu] 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.

          • He's not trolling. The offhanded comment at the end was curt, but not unjustified. If a poster is going to make a claim, s/he should cite a source. If I had to waste my time verifying every non-obvious statement - such as data regarding volcanic eruptions - made by non-experts, I'd never get anything done.

            Is Twirlip an expert on volcanic eruptions? I have no idea, so the answer for me is 'no'. I think that's the common answer for the Slashdot readership as well, as I doubt most of them know the guy.

            Did Tw

    • CO2: Neglectable [ec.gc.ca]

      B.4 Don't volcanoes naturally release far more CO2 into the atmosphere each year than humans?

      Response: No. On a global scale, volcanoes release less than 1% of human emissions of carbon dioxide and hence are a minor contributor to changes in its atmospheric concentrations. Furthermore, emissions from volcanoes have always been part of the natural cycle, [...].

      Or other concrete numbers [nodak.edu] e.g. SO2 : 79 Tg/a human-caused, 24 Tg/a due to natural processes, including volcanoes.

    • RTA:
      "On a global scale, the difference is even more dramatic, said Gerlach, who often gets calls from power-plant operators and oil-company executives who believe nature is just as responsible for global warming as man. His answer always disappoints them.

      'I tell them the amounts don't even come close and I usually never hear from them again.' "

    • When talking about pollution, what is important is the amount above baseline -- that is, the amount present due to natural processes. Clearly, volcanoes have been spewing CO2 and SO2 into the atmosphere throughout Earth's history, and so volcanic "pollution" is part of this baseline.

      It's important to consider the baseline because this is what our ecosystem evolved in, and what is it in equilibrium with. Carbon dioxide, for instance, is required by plants. Animals expel CO2 when they exhale, but this can't

  • Carbon Dioxide emissions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @10:00PM (#11027465)
    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.
    • By "organic" I assume you mean "crop-based". Except that it takes energy to grow crops. By some calculations, it takes more than you produce.
      • i'm told (yes, be skeptical) that the energy produced by ethanol does not equal the energy used to produce it. i'd imagine that's because we use a ton of petroleum fertilizer for corn production.

        that doesn't mean a closed carbon cycle fuel is DOA, it just means we chose the wrong crop. why did we choose corn when there are hundreds of other options? see: pork barrel [wikipedia.org] and ADM

        did you know an automobile can run on wood? you won't drive terribly fast (yay, says the cyclist!) but it works (link [gengas.nu] and link [ftlcomm.com])
        • d'oh! i forgot to add this link: http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm1296.04.h t ml#corp1 [multinationalmonitor.org] it's a reference to Archer Daniels Midland who are pretty fucking evil. i learned about them because they always sponsored PBS shows like nova. but then i learned more about them. they do some insane amounts of lobbying and fixed a bunch of prices on things that they produced. some call it smart business, i call it mother fucking.
        • You are really on the wrong track. Try sugar cane. Do the math again. No petroleum fertilizer.
          • uh, how did you draw the conclusion that i was endorsing corn as a fuel source? i'm saying that in america, we use corn as a source of ethanol. it's not efficient but the corn agribusiness gets propped up and ethanol users can think they are being conservationists.

            what i said was gassify wood.
            • I didn't. When I said "you", I meant "the US of A" (is on the wrong track by using corn ethanol). I'm writing from a country where 30-50% of all (street) vehicles are sugar-cane-ethanol powered. It's globally energy efficient (ie "green") but it's not really socially great (sugar cane takes a lot of unqualified workers, sugar/alcohol production facilities are in the hands of a very corrupt oligarchy)
        • Well yeah, artificially fertilized corn is not the best choice for growing fuel. I'm not sure what the alternatives are, but let's just assume for the moment that there exists a crop that doesn't need fertilizer and that consumes as much CO2 when you grow it as it produces when you burn it. You still have to plant, cultivate, harvest, process, and distribute it. Which takes energy. So a lot of the fuel you produce has to go right back into the system.

          I'm not an expert, but I find it hard to believe that

    • 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.

      Props to you, but a small nit. Since fossil fuels are organic compounds, the term I think you meant is renewable organic fuels (like corn alcohol). Fixating the carbon we cause to be released is the responsible thing to do IMO.
    • And that's why Kyoto should include population densities. How many tons of CO2 are nations like India or China putting out? Isn't that harming the fragil ecosystem as well?

    • 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 envirome

      • I think what he was saying was that if we used fuels made from plants grown in the present it would not have a net effect on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. That is, the carbon dioxide released on combustion would be equal to that taken up by the plants when they grew. On the other hand, when we burn fossil fuels we are releasing carbon that had been previously sequestered.

    • 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.

      I'm no scientician, but if you burn organic fuels, they release CO2 the same way fossil fuels do...the same way that burning wood or anything else releases CO2. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding...are you suggesting that the crops grown for fuel will pull in enough atmospheric carbon to offset the cost of burning it? I'm not sure that I'm inclined to believe that base

      • I'm no scientician, but if you burn organic fuels, they release CO2 the same way fossil fuels do...the same way that burning wood or anything else releases CO2. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding...are you suggesting that the crops grown for fuel will pull in enough atmospheric carbon to offset the cost of burning it? I'm not sure that I'm inclined to believe that based solely on antecdotal evidence. Can you post any links?

        Growing plants take their carbon from the air. If you burn one year's crops, you've re

      • are you suggesting that the crops grown for fuel will pull in enough atmospheric carbon to offset the cost of burning it?

        They give off exactly as much CO2 as they absorb from the atmosphere. Where else is all that carbon going to come from?
      • It's true, when you burn anything ORGANIC (the definition of organic is for the substance to contain Carbon) It will release CO2, including wood, corn alcohol, and etc. One of the biggest problem with coal is actually not CO2 but Sufur Dioxide SO4- another greenhouse and ozone gas (please correct me if I am wrong, it's been a while since my last chem course) Personally, I don't believe in any clean way of creating power. Hydropower energies damages wild life, solar energy sounds great but imagine the pollu
  • Don't they pollute with a lot of buggy crap software? The cumlative explatives incurred by their software has polluted much of the free world.
    Ok fine, I guess I'll give a VOLCANO the benefit of the doubt. MS is in second.
  • I have a simple solution...simly bulldoze Mt. St. Helens and put a giant mall in its place...surely this will produce less pollution.

  • Mount St. Helens is WA state's No. 1 air polluter (Score:3, Informative)

    by macdaddy357 ( 582412 ) <macdaddy357@hotmail.com> on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @10:32PM (#11027739)
    And global warming is caused by cows farting. [koshland-s...museum.org]

  • Who cares? (Score:2, Funny)

    by JhAgA ( 24929 )
    Dealing with it would surely cut out jobs, wouldn't it? Leave it be.

  • This is giving bush's admin fits (Score:3, Funny)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @10:55PM (#11027937) Journal
    Thye are still trying to figure out how to give MSH a tax break.

  • After due safety considerations, let there be a
    world-class engineering / contruction project
    to put an effective filter into place here. ;-)

  • Pollution? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by glapalom ( 522301 ) on Tuesday December 07, 2004 @11:25PM (#11028199) Homepage
    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?
    • I would say anything man does also is a part of earth, even if we scour the biosphere right off this old ball.

    • Re:Pollution? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheNarrator ( 200498 )
      You forget that humans did not land here from outer space. We are a product of the earth too. So how can naked apes like us burning fossil fuels, given that we are part of the earth just like the volcano, be any worse than what the volcano does? In the 19th century there were theories called "vitalism" that said that there was something about human life that was so fantastic that it was not understandable to science. The modern environmentalist movement has this same idea, that somehow humans are differ

      • Modern Environmentalism as it has come to be known regards man as a thing of naught. They seek to punish and torture humans in the name of "saving the Earth."

        I don't know if it's still like this, but I remember being indoctrinated in such things while going to Elementary School. I even once had a "Save the Planet" poster hanging in my room. Now I'm convinced that the planet doesn't need saving, it does a pretty good job of doing that itself.

        I'm not saying we should just trash the place up, but at the

      • In the 19th century there were theories called "vitalism" that said that there was something about human life that was so fantastic that it was not understandable to science. The modern environmentalist movement has this same idea, that somehow humans are different from the rest of nature.

        Actually, most religions believe that too. Souls are the ineffable quality that sets humans apart from the rest of creation.

        You can certainly take the view that anything humans do is as natural as anything else. We're

    • I think you might be missing the point of the article. I read it as being an interesting little ironic factoid, not something everyone needs to worry about. And as far as the term "pollution", I think they mean it to be something that is diffused (or dumped) into the environment that damages the ecosystem in the area. There's no inherent problem with that. The earth's ecosystem has evolved to recover from these events. The problem is that human pollution doesn't stop. It just keeps pumping away, day a

  • When environmentalists are rambling on about how man is destroying nature, how that compares to what nature does itself. Like, we may be causing global warming, and that might be causing extinctions, isn't there a semi-regular ice age cycle? Isn't nature taking out the week links all on its own? The ozone layer just didn't spontaneously form, wont the processes that put it there in the first place repair it? Im not advocating that we don't try to reduce what we do, but nature seems to be able to fuck itself

    • Well, when you're talking about nature repairing itself, you're talking about a very delicate balance. And we're altering the balance on both ends.

      We are not only adding tremendous amounts of man-made greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, we're also attacking the processes that soak up those gasses. Namely, we're cultivating large amounts of soil (greatly reducing its ability to soak up carbon) and chopping large swathes of forest (which are a huge "sink" and drain tons of carbon from the atmosphere).

      So,

    • Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheLink ( 130905 )
      Sure. The way I see it is: we have brains, the power to change things AND are already changing things whether voluntarily or not. There are 6 billion of us. The animals and plants directly under our control and responsibility number even more.

      So, we should be careful to pick the changes we want so that we have a decent time on this world (and possibly other worlds).

      Trying to minimize the number of species from going extinct just for the sake of that is silly. Trying to prevent any change to the environmen
      • If whales etc have to go extinct then it better be a well thought out choice, rather than "oops". [...] Sure, I'm cold and heartless, but if a species has to go extinct or suffer for the greater good of humankind, so be it.

        But it better be for the greater good!

        Whales are very large. Why, they're heavy enough to crush a child! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

        Ok, that takes care of the whale problem... next species?
        • "Whales are very large. Why, they're heavy enough to crush a child! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?"

          Yah, Michael Jackson will...
    • Like, we may be causing global warming, and that might be causing extinctions, isn't there a semi-regular ice age cycle?

      Yes, it is true that there is a natural ocurring cycle of global warming and cooling, but it appears that it as accelerated in the last 100 years. Do we really want to hasten it without fully understanding the consequences and allowing time to prepare for them?

      The ozone layer just didn't spontaneously form, wont the processes that put it there in the first place repair it?

      Again, that

  • Any Volenteers to give the angry volcano a ticket?

    OK, didn't think so.

    How about we sweeten the deal, we'll throw in cremation at no extra cost!

    Anyone?

    Bueller?

  • A Mr. Zeke Wilson of 221b Poplar lane is the #2 polluter in Washington.

    -

  • Not representative (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hak hak ( 640274 ) on Wednesday December 08, 2004 @02:28PM (#11034232)
    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.

  • On the sidebar where it says "related links", the first two are "John Patrick Luethe" and "has become the state's largest polluter."

    Congratulations, Mr. Luethe!

    [/joke]

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