The leading environmental-themed comic strip in the United States, Mark Trail, is apparently written by a climate-change denier.
The strip’s expanded Sunday editions are intended to be educational, and this week’s (1/3/16) featured a lesson about sulfur dioxide. “Sulfur dioxide is a major cause of acid rain!” the title character, a naturalist, exclaims. He notes that it’s “a byproduct of large-scale farms, power plants and other industries,” as well as “the burning of fossil fuels by large transportation vehicles.”
Trail strikes a positive note, highlighting the importance of environmental awareness: “Fortunately, levels of manmade sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere have been declining for the past two and a half decades as more people have become aware of the issue!”
But then the strip takes an odd turn, suggesting that the big threat to nature from sulfur dioxide comes from nature itself:
Recently, an enormous eruption from the volcano Bardarbunga in Iceland released at least 120,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day—eight times higher than the levels produced by all manmade sources in the entire continent of Europe each day.
When the eruption ended…it had produced enough lava to cover an area the size of Manhattan—having a tremendous negative impact on air quality.
The information in the strip, which appears to come from a UPI story (9/24/15), gives a misleading impression of the environmental impact of the volcano: The 11 million metric tonnes of sulfur dioxide it released into the atmosphere (BBC, 4/15/15) is roughly a tenth of the amount humans release each year, and overall about 99 percent of SO2 in the atmosphere was put there by people.
But that misleading impression—that nature’s impact on air pollution far outweighs humanity’s—is precisely what the strip’s author, James Allen, was seemingly trying to convey. As he explained to readers on the strips’ Facebook group (1/3/16):
Today’s Mark Trail—folks I try not to get political over here, but I can admit to you that today’s strip is a little dose of “get real” to people that think mankind is ruining the planet by creating global warming! We are so tiny compared to this planet and what it can do (and recover from).
The idea that humans are too insignificant to affect the climate is a common trope of global warming deniers. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Since 1750, humans have added to the atmosphere nearly 900 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, creating a marked change in the rate at which the planet absorbs heat. To use Allen’s volcanic comparison, the US Geological Survey notes that “all studies to date of global volcanic carbon dioxide emissions indicate that present-day subaerial and submarine volcanoes release less than a percent of the carbon dioxide released currently by human activities.”
Source: Skeptical Science
Mark Trail is syndicated by Hearst‘s King Features to some 175 newspapers. Allen took over the strip in 2014 after the retirement of Jack Elrod, who had been working on it since 1950. Under Elrod’s leadership, the strip was recognized for its contribution to environmental education, including by the US Forest Service, which named part of Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest the Mark Trail Wilderness in 1991.
If Allen doesn’t want to squander that legacy, he should educate himself about the reality of catastrophic climate change—and humans’ contribution to it.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
Messages to King Features can be sent here (or via Twitter @KingFeatures). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Fairness in Reporting!
How about mentioning science never agreed a CO2 hell was as real as they agree smoking causes cancer?
How about the last 35 years of climate action failure, debate and global disbelief being “certain” and unstoppable?
Comic relief of responsibility
What does a comic retraction look like?
Hay they are working hard to correct the situation, by adding the Fog of Conservatives to the mix. If you say “Climate is not real” three times and click your heels together, the Wozzle of Oss will send you home to 1,000,000 BC.
Sadly the fog is tinged brown and smells of month old Beans and Eggs from the by-product end of cows. “Another fine steaming pile of Conservative outlook” produced by the Lame Stream Snooze Media.
DavidNutzuki: I’m trying to figure out what you mean in your last sentence. Do you (1) mean that there has been a failure to take action during the last 35 years or (2) the actions taken have failed? The rest of the sentence is not clear to me either.Was hoping that you can clarify your meaning.
For me, anyone that denies the science behind global warming, climate change and radiation should be denied healthcare and tech devises.
I can’t believe the level of dishonesty you stoop to with that CO2 graph. You can’t cut/paste together data sets, as they show different things. If you were to continue the graph in only the blue line (Taylor Dome) to modern times, it would remain flat.
I can’t believe the dishonesty in claiming that if you extrapolate the Taylor Dome line to modern times it would indicate that atmospheric CO2 concentrations would remain flat, thus suggesting that there has been no change in CO2 levels. You can’t extrapolate to modern times. C’mon, you know the reason why. Tell us. No? Because these ice samples are deep core, and the air they trapped–along with CO2–was deposited long ago. More recent samples are not valid sources. Now, you knew that, didn’t you?
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