Lightening over Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano Saturday, April 17, 2010. Source: Boston.com

For the last week, we've all heard lots about a volcano that no one can pronounce (I'll give you $20 if you can say it correctly - Eyjafjallajokull) in Iceland spewing ash into the stratosphere and seriously screwing up folks' vacations. Photos from the event are pretty cool, especially due to the massive clouds of ash making the sky look like Mt. Doom from Lord of The Rings.

Reflecting upon the fact that today's Earth Day, the volcano creates an interesting standard for us reflect on how our own CO2 emissions compare to nature's. Many climate skeptics will happily point out that natural CO2 emitted from volcanoes dwarf the amount of emissions that us human put out, thus rendering the crazy climate hypothesis that the earth is warming (or hoax, as they say) null and void. Well, after some digging around for numbers (most of which are USGS & EPA sourced) here's what I found:

^{(numbers are indicative of metric tons)}

All of the CO2 emitted by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano between April 14 and today is equal to approximately .0085% of all human-made CO2 emissions of 2009.