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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"
I know I'm going to get flamed for this. But we Human beings are part of the ecosystem. As opposed to watching over it. If we were to pollute the earth and kill ourself off. In a millennia or so the ecosystem would cylcle and bring forth a whole plethora of new species. I'm not saying we should do as we want. But I do think peopel should just admit we are protecting our own posterity and not "mother earth" As george carlin used to say all the earth has to do is shake us off like flees. Balancing our use of resources so that it doesn't affect the environment is more to protect us.
So while "Saving the Planet" is a noble cause...maybe people would be more responsive if they realized they are saving themselves, their loved ones, their children and their grandchildren.
The question isn't whether we'd destroy the planets enviroment completely (unlikely) but whether we could damage it enough to make the current human population unsustainable (very likely) due to drowned land , drought and/or flodding causing food crops to fail. The asteroid that supposed to have hit the earth 65 million years ago wasn't a big deal to the planet as a whole but it didn't do the dinosaurs any favours did it?
Europe and the United states went through their own industrial ages where lots of forests were cleared, lots of pollution was injected into the environment. We know more about the devastating effects of pollution now, but what right do we have to tell developing nations that they should not grow as quickly? Rather, I believe we should make every effort to assist them in growing quickly in an environmentally conscious manner.
It's arrogant to think that we can destroy the planet. We can make it inhospitable to humans (destruction of arable farmland, poisoning of waters). We can make it more expensive (increased cooling costs, increased food costs, deleterious effects on health leading to increased medical costs, etc.). But if all humans die out then other species will take our place. Maybe it'll be armadillos. Maybe cockroaches.
There's a need to balance environmental responsibility with progress and the economy and the current lifestyles. Lots of people talk about being environmentally conscious but don't want to give up their six computers, SUVs, air conditioning, etc.. Think globally, act locally... Many debates seem entirely polarized around the two camps with few people taking the middle ground. The arguments often go along the lines that choosing the middle ground is akin to joining one of the camps or that the other camp is so extremist that it forces extremism in this camp. Blah blah blah.
I was surprised to learn that burning coal seams in China contribute nearly as much greenhouse gases as all of the cars in the US. (http://www.discover.com/oct_99/break.html).
Has anyone considered that the most probable ecological disaster is an Ice Age?? Our global environment has been in fluctuation between warm and cold for 900,000 years!
Maybe the CO2 will save us from the next one! Maybe we're just delaying it. Who knows how much environmental change is natural vs. mankind? I'm not sure we have enough of an observational timeline to say that we have caused any of it.
My point is that the global climate is dynamic. Maybe we should stop flipping out about every tiny variation. It's obvious that pretty extreme fluctuations occur normally!
Here is a timeline of past ice ages.
Cronus
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.