Canadian Researchers - Climate Breakdown Powering Bigger Forest Fires

[hatrack]

BROOKLIN, Canada, Mar 8 (IPS) - "New Canadian research shows that forest fires are becoming larger and more intense due to the effects of climate change and are adding enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Fires in the northern hemisphere's boreal forest and peatlands are of particular concern because the region holds 40 percent of the planet's terrestrial carbon. That's almost twice the amount in the world's tropical forests. The boreal region forms a circumpolar band throughout the northern hemisphere, extending through Russia, Northern Europe, Canada, and Alaska. It is already warmer due to climate change and parts are also getting drier, researchers report.

Significant burning of the boreal forest and peat could produce a positive feedback loop leading to hotter and drier conditions and more area burned, says Brian Stocks, a senior fire research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service (CFS). ”Forests are a wild card” about how fast and how far global temperatures will rise, Stocks said in an interview. ”There could be a big disaster ahead.”
Fires in Indonesia that raged for months in the late 1990s released an estimated 2.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, or the equivalent of about 40 percent of world industrial emissions in a year.

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Eric Kasischke, a fire ecologist at the University of Maryland, agrees that the size of the fires and their intensity has dramatically increased in North America's northern forests. ”Fires in recent years have been two or three times as large as anything ever seen,” Kasischke, who has been studying Alaska wildfires for more than 20 years, told IPS. The fires are outpacing regrowth, and their intensity means that not only the trees are burning but also the understory vegetation and, most importantly of all, the organic matter in the soil. There is nearly ten times more carbon in the boreal region soil than in the plants and trees above. By contrast, tropical forest soils have one-third the amount of carbon. ”Bad fires in the boreal area consume everything right down to the underlying rock,” the ecologist said."

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http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27778

"Positive feedback loop" - learn to love that phrase. We're going to be hearing it a lot.

[bullimiami]

1. i thought the were because we werent "managing" the forests well

ie not cutting down enough of those pesky trees that keep getting in the way.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. There's a more potent oxidative mechanism at work NOW

Once-frozen peat and other organic compounds are warm enough in the Summer to support a huge mass of metabolically active microbes. They release quite a bit of carbon, mainly as methane and carbon dioxide, through both respiration and putrefaction.

Whether as combustion or respiration, the carbon is oxidized into the atmosphere, with more carbon following the the wake of other chemical and "mechanical" changes that come along with fire and breath. The carbon, as greenhouse gasses, must then be "sunk", but that process isn't happening as fast or as vigorously as the carbon is being "sourced".

Last Summer was hot enough in the Arctic to push temperatures far above normal. The Canadian provincial government of Nunavut warned people not to poke at the flying yellow-and-black insects because they were hornets, and some people would be allergic to their stings. Permafrost has been thawing, leading to significant damage to buildings in the cities and towns of Alaska, the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and Nunavut.

Without a doubt, these climatologists understand the process in full; every few months, though, they are confronted with another finding that makes it clear just how big the overall problem is.

My fear is that the oceanic pH will change in the direction of releasing carbon, not sinking it, which it does now. If the oceans begin to give up their carbon as methane or CO2, all bets will be off. If/When that happens, we will only be saved by an ice age; a runaway greenhouse climate with a temperature increase of as little as a single Kelvin (one degree Celsius) per decade would make the Earth uninhabitable to people within 300 years -- and sterilize it within 800.

And keep in mind that kind of temperature increase (0.1K/yr) would be unrealistically slow in a runaway greenhouse climate. The conversion into a second Venus would probably take a couple thousand years since the Earth has a lot of water to boil off.

The climate disaster is happening now.

--p!