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El Nino Fires A Key Source Of Greenhouse Gases
core plexus writes "Science Daily has an interesting article suggesting that El Nino-related fires may be a significant source of 'Greenhouse Gases.' By combining satellite data and measurements of atmospheric gases, they have quantified for the first time the amount of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, emitted by these fires. In addition, the scientists determined that almost all of the increased levels of methane measured during 1997 and 1998 can be attributed to the worldwide fires at the time, underscoring the impact El Nino has on methane emissions."
Aren't the primary sources of greenhouse gases the automobile and airliner.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
I wonder how a key source of greenhouse gasses will be able to find other work after employment in such a negatively-viewed (currently) weather system as El Ni~no?
True, it wasnt always corrupt, but your average HR guy probably wants to stay as far away from the name "El Ni~no" as possible, at this point.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
There has to be some way that it is George W. Bush's fault...
Just goes to show that Kyoto isn't the solution, because it ignores emissions by "developing countries" regardless of origin.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
This research was made possible by a grant from GM, Chrysler, and Ford.
this could mean that cars and industrial waste aren't as big a problem as was thought. that's great, but it's still a problem, as the smog of LA isn't caused by forest fires, I'd say
more practically, tho, we still want to find a way to stop this. could it be caused by the human races continued mismanagement of the forests? after all, el nino has happened before. we seem to be becoming more and more prone to it.
I think modern forest-management needs to take a major turn, and it isn't the one usually advocated. stop stopping mild, natural fires. they clean out the undergrowth, and stop major forest fires like the one in BC this past summer (that caused the evacuation of about 150,000 ppl)
and in reference to some other posters comment, don't be silly. we can always blame this on gwb. that's what people do, after all
More commentary here.
The forests in question are in Indonesia, where peat bogs full of old trees are first cut for lumber and then partially drained and planted as plantations. Drying out the peat makes it very susceptible to fire, which releases huge amounts of trapped carbon.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
... to sign on to Kyoto. Jeez, what's so complicated?
Regards,
El Nin Con Poopo
GWB and the "good old boys" club. In tomorrow's study: how driving hummers cross-country actually helps the environment!
Slashdot really needs better unicode/international character support. An "n" is not the same as an "n" with a tilde or even "n~".
Slashdot doesn't let you enter the pound symbol. Imagine writing about prices where every time you wanted to say $, you had to spell out dollar in order for people to know what you were talking about.
Typographic symbols like dashes, quotes and elipses are all missing.
http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/
"All this talk about 'firing' the guy, I don't understand it," El Nino said. "It was a painful but ultimately amicable decision. He didn't want to change his diet, and we just couldn't take the smell."
Liberty uber alles.
GWB is promoting R&D into hydrogen fueled cars so GWB+driving can help the environment. ;-)
That's the conventional Republican wisdom in the USA, but the basic physics tells you that the basis of Kyoto is rock-solid absent solid evidence to contradict this chain of reasoning:
You can say that we don't know enough about the various feedback loops inherent in the system, such as the influence of clouds, to be able to quantify their effects. The thing you don't seem to grasp is that the basic physics places the burden of proof on the people claiming the absence of detrimental effects.
(And you make these implicit claims in a post with obvious errors of grammar and spelling. The irony is thick.)
Reality is that the environmental quality in places like the Tongass National Forest is quite high, except where it has been developed (clearcut). The environmental quality in cities and the like tends to be higher where the standard of living (and thus the demand and ability to pay for pollution-control technology) is higher, but your blanket statement is trivially false.
No regulations? You mean, let dirty plants dump pesticide byproducts and heavy metals into the rivers and lakes that other people use for drinking water? I believe they tried that in the Soviet Bloc, and it didn't work very well at all; they are still trying to recover from the damage.
Is that so? Tell me, did the regulations against the burning of coal in London after the Killer Fog cause the problem to get worse? How about the motor-vehicle pollution controls in California; did they make the Los Angeles smog worse? Or the ban on phosphates in detergents; did it make the eutrophication problem in Lake Erie worse?
I like people like you. You make it so easy to convince readers that you are wrong.
And for the record, I have nothing against corporations. Corporations are just like individuals, creatures looking for their own benefit. The way to keep them from doing harm is to prevent them from creating harm to others without having to pay for it; if everyone has to pay, the way to maxmize profit is to minimize such expenses and the problem solves itself. We get problems such as smog, algae-choked lakes and empty aquifers when people are permitted to take or dump without having to respect the limits of the resource they're using (whether the ability to create or the ability to absorb) and pay a market price for it.
The thing you have to argue against is the huge success which the Montreal Protocol has had in controlling stratospheric halogens; the polar ozone holes are already showing signs of recovery as the concentration of CFCs comes down. I agree with you that the demand of many watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) that any GHG control regime be turned into a welfare program for dysfuncti
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It's important to be clear that El Nino-induced fires can account for short-term variations (interannual, or so). However, the things that burn only have carbon to emit because they extracted it from the atmosphere, so this result has no effect on the interpretation of CO2 trends over longer time scales.
A great Chris Farley quote comes to mind from one of his skits on Saturday Night Live:
..... The Nino!"
" I am El Nino, and for those of you who dont 'habla espanol', El Nino is Spanish for
If I recall, Mao declared a certain sparrow a pest (the propaganda was that the bird was stealing valuable grain) so they embarked on a nationwide campaign to exterminate the bird. Little kids beat pans to drive birds away from their nesting sites, hunters used nets, rocks, etc. Of course, it turned out the sparrow was a needed predator, to control the insects that eventually ravaged their grain crops...
The question is, what does this have to do with El Nino?
It was supposed to be the start of a process. Why do you think everyone was so disappointed about the US? Because it showed it had no interest in wanting to confront the problem.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I don't have the skills for this so, engineers listen up: Find out what size Forest fire equals a 5.7 Liter engine running at avg 3400 RPM (perhaps a bit high, I know so tweak it) in greenhouse gas output for the same period of time. For example only: 1 acre of forest fire for 10 engines for the fist 30 mins etc.. Maybe this should be an "Ask Slashdot".
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www.fairtax.org
2. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
Yes, but isn't most of our heat coming in from space as opposed to going out and escaping? The earth isn't really all that good at self-heating to support life, unless you count volcanic regions, with the sun being the major source of heat input. Doesn't any gas doing one also do the other (trap or block heat in either direction?)
...there is a study showing that up to 25% of what hangs over LA is generated from the cooking of meat... think about it... rush hour, dinner time, all those restaurants firing up the grill... think about what you see come off of your grill when you cook, and compare that to what you see come out of your car's tailpipe... in the end, LA has problems because LA is fucking crowded. No matter how much of one problem you might solve, there will be another.
The carbon dioxide emitted by a forest fire was already there before the trees started growing. All green plants -- from mighty redwoods to tiny algae -- are made principally from carbon, which they get by taking carbon dioxide from the air, leaving behind oxygen for animals to breathe. There is carbon in soil, but not much of that ends up in plants {otherwise how do you explain hydroponics?} Most plants have a fairly short growing cycle {trees are a bit of an exception, but we get much more of our oxygen from short-life plants than from trees}. In any case, young and fast-growing plants use more carbon dioxide than established ones. It is actually beneficial for big, old trees to go on fire and make room for smaller, fast-growing trees and plants {which will greedily lap up the carbon dioxide left by their ancestors}. Over the lifetime of a tree, the levels of plant-sourced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere only fluctuate about a mean -- from a trough when it is growing, to a peak when it is burned.
Carbon dioxide originating from fossil fuels is another matter, since the carbon whence it came has been locked away underground for millions of years, and releasing it will increase the level in the atmosphere.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!