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El Nino Fires A Key Source Of Greenhouse Gases

Posted by timothy on from the where-there's-smoke-there's-CO2 dept.

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."

15 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Dammit! by GypC · · Score: 4, Funny

    There has to be some way that it is George W. Bush's fault...

  2. More evidence on the pile by Spamalamadingdong · · Score: 5, Informative
    I recall reading some years ago that the forest/peat fires in Indonesia (which created a pall of smoke over much of the region and reduced visibility to a few feet over wide areas) dumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than all of the vehicles of Britain in the same year. Here's a paper which cites estimates of 0.6 to 3.5 gigatons from the 1994-5 fires and a similar figure for 1997-8.

    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
    1. Re:More evidence on the pile by krow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I wrote papers about this in graduate school. None of the facts in the article are new at all, we have been aware of these facts for over a decade.

      --
      You can't grep a dead tree.
    2. Re:More evidence on the pile by Phronesis · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The difference is that the plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere for several years, then return it to the atmosphere when they burn. It's a closed cycle with no net growth of atmospheric CO2.

      There is no corresponding cycle to balance burning fossil fuels over the short term, so the more fossil fuels we burn, the longer the residence time of CO2 molecules, and the greater the concentration.

      If you look at charts of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you see annual cycles, ENSO cycles, and other short term fluctuations, but these are all superimposed on a much larger trend, which is unmistakably due to human intervention.

      ENSO has been around for millennia, but somehow despite all these fires, the atmospheric CO2 concentration rose slowly over the past 10,000 years from around 270 parts per million at the end of the last ice age to 290 parts per million a century ago. Since then, it's climbed rapidly to around 360 parts per million---much greater than it's ever been in the 500,000 years for which we have reliable records.

      Is your snide comment about Kyoto supposed to indicate that El Nino did nothing drastic to CO2 for over 10,000 years and then just coincidentally happened to have a big effect that exactly correlated with human use of fossil fuels?

  3. funding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    This research was made possible by a grant from GM, Chrysler, and Ford.

  4. don't stop worrying by xilmaril · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  5. Just get this "El Nino" guy ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... to sign on to Kyoto. Jeez, what's so complicated?

    Regards,
    El Nin Con Poopo

  6. International Characters by capoccia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/

  7. El Nino Responds by msouth · · Score: 2, Funny

    "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.
  8. I'd like to see you support those assertions by Tau+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Things like Kyoto are just as foolish as Maos plan to have kids kill butterflies (or whatever it was).... incompetant ideas applied by people ignorant of basic science.

    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:

    1. Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.
    2. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
    3. To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.
    4. If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.

    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 the environmental quality in an area is directly proportional to the economic development in an area.

    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.

    Thus, the best way-- the only way-- to a cleaner environment is unregulated economic development.

    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.

    A basic lack of understanding of economics is behind most environmental solutions (as well as the war on poverty, etc.) and thus they actually cause the problem to be worse, not better.

    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.
    1. Re:I'd like to see you support those assertions by jgardn · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Let me refute your fourth claim.

      1. Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.

      True.

      2. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.

      True.

      3. To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.

      This requires a leap of faith -- namely some laws of thermodynamics. But the end result is also true. If the heat absorbed is different from the heat emitted, then the body will either cool off or heat up.

      4. If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.

      I agree. That is one way that we can help the earth cool off. But there are other ways.

      We can boil some of the atmosphere away. This happens constantly and changes in temperature and pressure will change the rate at which out atmosphere boils away. Fortunately, the warmer the planet gets, the more atmosphere that boils away. Don't worry, we have a fresh atmosphere ready to supply us in the rocks below us. Otherwise we would've lost it a long time ago.

      We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface. There may be a simple way to accelerate this process, should the temperature become extreme. By the way, the earth's crust is an excellent insulator.

      We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds. There are chemical reactions that result in a lowering of the temperature of the medium the reaction occured in. Bonus points if the chemical reaction involves remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and deposits it safely on the earth's surface.

      We can increase the amount of gasses that reflect solar radiation, increasing the albedo of the planet and reducing the amount of radiation absorbed. There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet. Increasing the amount of these gasses will make the atmosphere more like a mirror and reflect away all of the incoming heat.

      You are looking at the problem as if there was only one solution. The bottom line is that there isn't only one solution. We are not even sure if the earth is warming up or cooling. And we know that any variation in the sun's emissions will result in changes that we can't control here on earth.

      I understand that there are systems so extraordinarily complicated and chaotic that even with advanced supercomputers and the world's brightest minds we cannot understand them. The weather happens to be one of them. We cannot predict the weather reliably. We can barely predict the weather today or tomorrow. How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?

      So I have decided long ago, that I will sit back and enjoy a cool refreshing drink from my refrigerator that uses CFCs as a refrigerant, delivered to me by trucks using gasoline as a propellant, and exhaling that sacred CO2 from my lungs with every breath I take. Worrying about something so grossly out of my control is counterproductive to my happiness.

      --
      The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
    2. Re:I'd like to see you support those assertions by mc6809e · · Score: 2, Insightful
      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:


      2. Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.
      3. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
      4. To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.
      5. If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.



      Seems logical, but the problem is that the atmosphere has so much CO2 in it that it is already mostly opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. Adding more CO2 doesn't make it much more opaque. Imagine trying to compare the opacity of a 1 mm sheet of foil to a 2 mm sheet of foil. Sure, 2 mm of foil blocks more light, but 1 mm will block nearly all the light shown on it.

      The only thing that makes the theory kinda work is the spreading of the absorption spectrum of CO2. The idea is that the extreme ends of the curve still let enough LW radiation out that increasing CO2 will reduce this escape. The effect, though, is estimated to be very small. The effect is further reduced because the spectra of other greenhouse gases overlap with these etremes.

      To enhance this small effect, the theory asserts a dramatic increase of water vapor. Most of the increase in warming, according to the theory, actually comes from water vapor acting as a greenhouse gas and not CO2.

      So what happens to all that vapor? Does it just stay in the atmosphere or does it precipitate out? What about the effect of clouds? If there are more clouds, does less solar radiation come in?

      The theory also assumes the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase exponentially. Can we really predict how much CO2 will be put into the atmosphere 40 years from now? What happens as oil becomes more and more expensive? Will things like nuclear power be much more in use?

      Now I won't say the theory is complete bunk, but it is still much more speculative than is suggested in the press.

      And what about Kyoto? Well, even it's supporters agree that it will delay warming by a modest 6 years or so.

    3. Re:I'd like to see you support those assertions by fluffy666 · · Score: 2, Informative

      We can boil some of the atmosphere away.

      False. This does not happen naturally (at least for O2, N2 and CO2), and there is no 'new atmosphere' waiting in the rocks.

      We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface.

      False. The natural heat flux is out of the planet into the oceans/atmosphere.

      We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds.

      In order to do useful work (such as make molecular bonds as you describe) you need a (high temperature) source and a (low temperature) sink. If the atmosphere was your source, what would your sink be (Hint: the atmosphere is currently used as a sink for practically everything). Making hydrocarbons from CO2 and water is a trivial challenge compared to this!

      There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet.

      Any in particular, or are you just making more stuff up?

      How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?

      We're not trying to.

  9. Fluctuations vs. trends by Phronesis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. Mao and the tale of the many dead birds... by silentbozo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?