Carbon Releases in Asia

ninthwave writes "After previous discussions on global warning, I thought I would post some interesting research in the affects of forest fires and drought in Asia on carbon output. The Guardian has this article. More detailed information can be found in these articles from Leicester University and the BBC"

Comments

Link to "All Things Considered" story about this

[Montag2k]

Wow, I heard a clip about this the other day when I was listening to NPR. It's a really interesting audio segment that explains the problem and how it might happen again soon due to an El Nino condition this year. The link to the page that has the audio story is here. Note: This is in RealAudio format.

Regards, Montag

Re:Responsibility

[Jeremy Erwin]

The Indonesian fires were started for land clearance purposes (slash and burn agriculture). Because of the heat, (El nino), the fires spread out of control. Much of the fire was fueled not by forests, but by peat. The natural state of peat bog forests is rather swampy-- but humans drained these swamps.

The carbon release estimates, btw, vary from 0.81 to 2.57 billion (I'm not sure if that's a british billion) tonnes. The low estimate corresponds to 13 percent of annual fossil fuel consumption, the high to 40%.

The reverse is also true

[NutMan]

You can offset the increase in CO2 production by planting woody plants for agriculture rather than annual grains. Check out these articles by Phil Rutter of Badgersett Research Farms:

Reducing Greenhouse CO2 Through Shifting Staples Production To Woody Plants

Woody Agriculture: Increased Carbon Fixation and Co-Production Of Food and Fuel

Re:Responsibility? It's people.

[Bob Violence]

To amplify on the previous poster's comments a bit--the fires were started by humans, both to clear land for small farmers (traditional slash-and-burn agriculture) and to clear land for large-scale plantation farming (mostly for the production of palm oil). It sounds like the larger commercial operations are mostly responsible for setting the fires.

That season (1997/1998), the fires spread because the forests were unusually dry. This was partly because it was an El Niño year, which caused severe drought.

But human activity was probably a more important factor--in the mid '90s large drainage canals were cut in the peat forests (as part of the Mega Rice Project), which dried out large areas of peat; and large areas of the forest have been damaged by other activities, especially logging. So the fires spread along the banks of the drainage canals (see this article from the Guardian), along logging roads, and in general, areas where humans had damaged the forest--pristine areas were far less affected by the fire, even when they did burn. (See Satellite shows how logging makes forest more flammable, which is based on an article in the Nov 22 2001 issue of Nature.)

So, yeah, I'd blame humans for this fire--they started the fires, human use of the forest made the fires both larger and more damaging than they would have been otherwise. El Niño was a huge factor in the spread of the fires, but humans made it way worse.

While the carbon released by the fires is something to worry about, these fires also caused a big loss of biodiversity. Borneo is one of the few places where orangutans are found in the wild, along with other endangered primates. The fires are thought to have killed thousands of orangutans and destroyed much of their habitat. This wouldn't be such a huge problem--forest can grow back, after all--except that Borneo is being heavily deforested, because of (largely illegal) logging, conversion to farmland, and so on. At current rates of deforestation, some think that Borneo's forest might be essentially gone in two decades, driving orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and other species to extinction.

Incidently, since these fires were burning in peat, some of them never really stopped--the peat has just been smoldering for years. It's an El Niño year right now (much weaker than '97/98), and there are fires on Borneo again (or at least there were, as of August--it's hard to find current information, though you can look at the Global Fire Monitoring Center's webpage for southeast Asia). Another chance to take measurements of carbon emissions, I guess.

Global Cooling

[fritz_269]

If it hasn't been posted before:
www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
(Article from Newsweek April 28, 1975)

In the early seventies, the world's climate scientists were paranoid about global cooling. Has the system really changed that much in 30 years due solely to human intervention? I would think the climate would have more inertia than that; are we just reading signals in the noise?

A quote from the article:

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972. To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age" conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.