Ft. McMurray Fire CO2 Output So Far +/- 85 Million Tons; About 10% Of Canada's Total 2014 Emissions
The Fort McMurray wildfire, which seems likely to be the costliest disaster in Canada’s history, continues to grow. According to the government of Alberta, as of Friday morning it had burned over 500,000 hectares of land, or more than 1.2 million acres. These are preliminary numbers, to be sure, and shouldn’t be taken as precise. They’re also likely to change. “There will be wet areas, boggy areas that don’t burn. But it’s not out yet, either, so . . . even without any major runs, by the time it is contained, it will likely grow some more,” said Steve Taylor, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
Taylor said the fire already ranks in the top six or seven largest fires seen in Canada in the satellite era, starting in 1970, when observations became most reliable. Especially since this is occurring in May, early in the wildfire season, that’s pretty incredible. And so is another detail about this fire — the amount of carbon that it is apparently pouring into the atmosphere.
Taylor’s colleague, Werner Kurz, is a senior research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service and heads its carbon accounting team. He said he generally estimates that for every hectare of forest land consumed in a fire like this one, about 170 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions — so dubbed because they actually include not only carbon dioxide but also methane and nitrous oxide, two other greenhouse gases — head into the atmosphere.
That would mean that this single fire has contributed — for a rough estimate — some 85 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions. The fire has also, at least temporarily, worsened the entire nation of Canada’s emissions of carbon dioxide. In 2014, the last year for which statistics are currently available, Canada emitted a net of 732 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere. This single wildfire thus may have given off enough carbon to account for over 10 percent of Canada’s total emissions.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/20/the-fort-mcmurray-fires-stunning-pulse-of-carbon-to-the-atmosphere/