Australian Bushfires Pump Out Millions of Tons of Carbon

[babylonsister]

Australian Bushfires Pump Out Millions of Tons of Carbon

by Alok Jha


The deadly bush fires in Australia have released millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equivalent to more than a third of the country's CO2 emissions for a whole year, according to scientists.


A Boeing 737 flies by a massive smoke plume over Kinglake. (Photograph: S McEvoy/Newspix/Rex Features)

The blazes in Victoria have so far claimed more than 180 lives and destroyed more than 750 homes. To make matters worse, the climate costs will also be dire because of the type of forest that burned, according to Mark Adams of the University of Sydney. "Once you burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amounts of carbon," he told The Australian newspaper.

Australia's total emissions per year are around 330m tons of CO2. Adams's previous research has shown that the bush fires in 2003 and 2006-07 had put up to 105m tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because they burned up land carrying 50 to 80 tons of carbon per hectare.

This time, however, the forests being destroyed are even more carbon-rich, with more than 100 tons of above-ground carbon per hectare. The affected area is more than twice the size of London and takes in more than 20 towns north of Melbourne, so the CO2 emissions from this year's disaster could be far larger than previous fires.

"The world's forests are crucial to the long-term future of the planet as they lock away millions of tons of carbon dioxide," said Robin Webster, a climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth. "More must be done to protect them - deforestation is having a devastating effect and as climate change takes hold, forest fires like those in Australia are likely to become more frequent."

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/02/14-1

[kestrel91316]

1. Sigh. Makes our puny efforts to cut our carbon footprint seem utterly pointless......

[thunder rising]

2. Morans ... whatcha gonna do ... it's new fuel being recycled. If it's brush it's only one year old

Remember that little theory of conservation of mass and energy?

[GliderGuider]

3. That's a good point.

The release of long-sequestered carbon, by burning fossil fuels or melting the Siberian tundra, has a much greater impact on the global carbon cycle than burning live vegetation. It's like the difference between melting ancient ice caps vs. melting first-year sea ice.

[Barrett808]

4. It's whole forests burning...

...in addition, a net carbon sink becomes a net carbon source.

http://desdemonadespair.blogspot.com/search/label/forest%20fire

This event is globally disastrous.

[GliderGuider]

5. How are these fires globally disastrous?

I would agree that the climate change that's facilitating these fires is globally disastrous, but the fires themselves released less CO2 than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. If these fires released 150 Mt of CO2, that's a bit over half of one percent of the CO2 we release from fossil fuels in a year. Now, that half percent increase might be a concern because we're so close to the edges of our carbon sinks -- we've saturated the oceans, and at least some of the forests we've left standing are now net carbon sources rather than sinks, but in the global scheme of things, a half percent increase in CO2 doesn't seem like a game-changer.

The fires are certainly a human calamity, a local ecological catastrophe and they are very troubling as climate change coal-mine canaries.

[Barrett808]

6. Fair enough -- maybe I can rephrase:

These fires are part of a globally disastrous trend: changing climate makes forests vulnerable to fires, mega-fires follow, and forested land is finally replaced by savannah.