The Fire This Time

Researchers quantify U.S. wildfire carbon emissions

Posted at 10:47 AM on 01 Nov 2007

The estimations are in on the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from Southern California's recent wildfires. And the winner is ... somewhere between about 6 million tons and 8 million tons. Which sounds like a lot, but on average, wildfires in the United States each year spew some 300 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to about 5 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Threat of wildfires is widely expected to increase in the United States as climate change worsens. Research from the University of Colorado at Boulder ranked U.S. states' forest-fire-related carbon emissions and declared that Alaska's wildfires by far contribute the most CO2; in the Lower 48 the top 10 are California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Louisiana, Montana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Texas. The study said "A striking implication of very large wildfires is that a severe fire season lasting only one or two months can release as much carbon as the annual emissions from the entire transportation or energy sector of an individual state." The authors estimate the California fires released more greenhouse gases than Vermont does in a year.

sources: Associated Press, Reuters, The Christian Science Monitor

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Comments: (2 comments)

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Carbon Crazy (apples and oranges)

Since wikipedia has proven that the world is innately good, I write this trusting that the cyber consensus will correct me if I'm missing something. Burning wildfires is a carbon neutral event since the biomass carbon was once atmospheric C02. Short term carbon cycle is a necessary natural process e.g.(When I die and am burned, I am not a pollutant. I am returning the carbon from the deer I ate last night which came from the grasses in the forest in my region which depend on wildfire to exist. Those grasses and trees take their carbon out of the atmosphere.) Short term carbon cycle should not be considered in discussion of the serious problems associated with instantaneous(100 years)release of carbon that was removed from the atmosphere and slowly locked away over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Life was able to adapt well to this rate of change and I may be on a limb here, but I suspect that climate change was a significant contributing force that helped mammals become successful and eventually led to human existence. My apologies to believers in the pasta monster theory... I think the carbon discussion should focus on the problems associated with the rate of anthropomorphic change caused by tinkering with the geologic scale carbon cycle by burning fossil fuels.

I have low tolerance for the isolation of the wrong variable which is prevalent in warming discussions as the world becomes carbon crazy. It seems like there is misunderstanding out there. Aren't we destroying our credibility in the fight to lessen the impacts of global warming when we arm the skeptics by allowing fear mongering and misinformation.

by spawningtrout at 10:06 AM on 02 Nov 2007

still crazy after all these years

As the late British anthropologist Mary Douglas is said to have said (though I suspect somebody else had said it first), "Dirt is only matter out of place." I.e., the same stuff has a different value, depending upon its context.

Same with carbon. Granted, there is a finite amount of carbon in the Earth, including its atmosphere. But it is certainly not a matter of no difference to the community of living creatures, whether a considerable bit of that carbon is more or less stable in, say, forests, or whether that carbon is suddenly released into the atmosphere.

In his conversation yesterday with Charlie Rose, Governor Mike Huckabee said something to the effect that strict believers in the theory of evolution ought not to be bothered at all by global warming, because such large-scale changes in living conditions are part of the way that living things evolve. He might be right, if moral relativism truly existed, and if people actually believed that one thing is as good as another, and there is no reason to prefer the one to the other. But of course, moral relativism does not truly exist, and Darwin-lovers do not contradict themselves at all by fearing the effects of global warming.

On the effect of climate and climate change on the evolution of mammals: Sure, climate has always been important. E.g., the diversification of hoofed mammals followed the appearance of grasslands, which must have happened because of some climatic factor. But climate has not necessarily been good to mammals as a Class. The first mammals appeared in the Late Triassic, around the same time as the first dinosaurs. According to the British paleontologist David Norman, the hot, arid climate of Pangaea, the tectonic arrangement at that time of all the continents into one super-continent, favored animals with sauropsid (i.e. classic reptilian) metabolisms. Hence, at the starting line of the competition, the dinosaurs had a great advantage over mammals, and for the rest of the Mesozoic -- most of the history of mammals -- , dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates, and no mammal seems to have grown larger than a big rabbit, or a wolverine.

Nor could mammals replace dinosaurs, despite many climate changes throughout the Mesozoic, until the radical shake-up at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. And that very interesting and well-studied mass extinction event seems to have been effected by precisely the kind of relatively short-term climate change that biologists are so worried about, when they consider the current biodiversity crisis to be leading to a mass extinction event comparable to any other in Earth's history.

So, is not a little alarm in order?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 11:52 AM on 02 Nov 2007

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