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There Will Be Fire: The 'Carbon Bomb' 'Waiting to Be Ignited'
Scientist: With climate change fires will become more frequent, more intense and harder to stop.
“We are going to see more fire in (the) future, that’s the bottom line.” “A warmer world’s going to see more fire.”
This eery warning comes from Mike Flannigan, a senior research scientist with Natural Resources Canada and professor at the University of Alberta, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He says that fires will become more frequent, more intense and harder to stop.
photo: John McColgan of the Alaskan Type I Incident Management Team (Bureau of Land Management, Alaska Fire Service)
Flannigan's "conservative estimate" states there would be two to three times more fire activity in the northern hemisphere by the end of the century.
“If a fire is intense, aerial suppression is no longer effective, so even modern fire management agencies, like Canada, the United States and Australia — among the best in the world — will be extremely challenged,” he said.
“I would argue that the standard way of doing fire management will no longer be effective in the future. And that doesn’t even begin to address many parts of the globe where they have traditional fire-suppression approaches, which will be completely overwhelmed."
“So the risk to life and infrastructure is only going to increase under climate change.”
Flannigan added that peat fires are also expected to dramatically raise greenhouse gas emissions, Postmedia News reports:
If more wildfires were not bad enough, Flannigan said the warming climate means peat lands, which contain vast stores of carbon, are also more likely to ignite and release greenhouse gas emissions. The emissions could in turn “feed” more warming and more fire.
A 1997 fire in Indonesia ignited peat lands that smouldered for months. By the time it was over, Flannigan said the peat fire had released greenhouse gases equal to 20 to 40 per cent of the total worldwide emissions that year from fossil fuels.
Peat fires in the boreal could have the potential to release far more greenhouse gases. “Our peat reserves in Canada, Russia and Alaska dwarf anything in Indonesia,” he said in an interview.
Inter Press Service reports that one researcher referred to the northern forest as a “carbon bomb” "waiting to be ignited:"
When the increased fire from global warming was first detected in 2006, Johann Goldammer of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at Germany’s Freiburg University called the northern forest a “carbon bomb”.
“It’s sitting there waiting to be ignited, and there is already ignition going on,” Goldammer said according to media reports in 2006.
Inter Press Service continues:
About half the world’s soil carbon is locked in northern permafrost and peatland soils, said Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at Canada’s University of Guelph. This carbon has been accumulating for thousands of years, but fires can release much of this into the atmosphere rapidly, Turetsky said in a release.
Over the past 10 years, fires are burning far more boreal forest than ever before. Longer snow-free seasons, melting permafrost and rising temperatures are large-scale changes underway in the north, Turetsky and colleagues have found.
Other researchers have shown that the average size of forest fires in the boreal zone of western Canada has tripled since the 1980s. Much of Canada’s vast forest region is approaching a tipping point, warned researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Germany’s largest research organisation.
This “drastic change” in normal fire pattern has occurred with a only a small increase in temperatures relative to future temperatures, the German researchers concluded in a study published in the December 2011 issue of The American Naturalist.
67 Comments so far
Show AllI am not a religious person, but I do see this as punishment for stupidity and greed. We have dishonored God, which to me is the gift of the life-giving planet earth and the ability of people to act with intelligence and love. Sadly, as always, it is the innocent people and creatures who will suffer the most. To me, the most important thing we can do is to cut down on fossil fuels IMMEDIATELY. That will mean confronting the corporations who are so heavily invested in this and drastically revising what we think we need. I truly do not see any other path for the viability of most life on earth.
You, you're waiting for God to light a fire under you?
The truth about animal husbandry and eating meat is,,, it causes less than 7% of Co2 and methane releasing due to AGW... Burning fossil fuels however is almost 60 % and burning the coal is by far the worst.
Raising crops, and especially rice is far worse for emitting Co2 and methane than animal husbandry... However; we can live with raising crops and cattle, we cannot continue to burn coal and survive. We either stop burning coal or we humans are history and time to stop is now very short.
In the UK, it has been at least L1.35($2.30)/liter or about $8.70/gallon. Once again, the economy in the UK is doing OK.
Well our economy is not Okay PJ and with gas at $4.50 to 5 bucks (a gallon) it will likely collapse.. Most people just cannot afford to even go to work at that price.
Now in the UK they have exellent public transportation and their vehicles on average get lots better mileage than we do and most people in the more heavily populated areas of the UK seldon drive their vehicles and many don't own a vehicle
The European countries are mostly smaller than many of our states. And don't forget the trucks which supply most of our necessities and have to pay more than 5 bucks for a gallon of diesel... The price of everything goes up. The United States is not the UK or Europe. And as to their economy? All countries are now in trouble economically.
And this is off topic so let's drop it.
Disneyland will look so pretty while it burns...
"As winters grow warmer and summers drier, the West’s evergreen forests are being eaten alive. And the infestation is not showing any signs of slowing.
"The most disturbing part? Halter puts the blame squarely on climate change, of which the infestations are not only a symptom but a cause – a feedback loop. “The beetles have taken a crucial terrestrial system that absorbs carbon dioxide (CO2) – what’s known in biological parlance as a ‘carbon sink’ – and turned it into a ‘carbon source,’” Halter writes. “Over the next decade, the beetle-killed BC forests will emit 250 million metric tons of CO2 – the equivalent of five years of car and light truck emissions in Canada.”
Here in Oregon, our lodge pole pines are forecasted to become extinct by 2080, eaten to death.
Definition - Human: An extinct ape descendant subject to extreme mental illness, given to extremes of self-aggrandizement, hubris and stupidity. No loss when they died off due to self-engineered environmental destruction.
Thanks for reminding CD folks that it is more than just climate change that is causing the pine beetle epidemic.
There was nothing more beautiful than the dark cool shade of the massive 500 year-old hemlocks by a stream in summer with the ethereal song of an always unseen thrush or veery breaking the forest quiet. Thoreau said this about the wood thrush:
"Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him."
This is all gone now - at least from the southern 3/4 of the Appalachians.
PaulK, I hadn't heard about the maples. Bad news. I'm going to start keeping an eye on the ones around here. They promised to be the last trees standing.
For some years now ash trees all over the country are dying. Minnesota alone is expected to lose 1 billion ash trees to the emerald ash borer. The oaks have been weakened and are less resistant to oak wilt and striped beetle and are being hard hit. Dutch elm disease is still killing American elms. Butternuts are nearly extinct, as is the American chestnut. I've read that as the Douglas fir are wiped out the beetles are moving to other species. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but as I drive around the country, I seem to see more twig wilt on spruces and junipers and also more gall. As a kid I don't remember aspens having so many black leaves as they do now, but maybe I just didn't notice.
From what you say, I guess we can add hemlocks to the list.
But while bark beetle kills the trees, the trees stay standing for years and their roots continue to prevent erosion. Forest fires destroy the trees and after the fire rains wash away the soil and you get a real disaster.
The centerpiece of Virginia's Shenandoah National Park/Skyline Drive was the Limberlost Grove, a large pure stand of virgin Hemlocks some over 160 feet in height - the closest thing in the eastern US to redwoods or old-growth douglas firs. When they were all killed they took no chances of someone getting hurt - down they all came - with most of the logs apparently hauled out. Now the area is a decidedly unscenic area of brush hiding the big stumps. Not a single sign or park guide explains what happened here. Most visitors don't have a clue what was there.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so
---------- placid and self-contain'd,
---- I'd stand and look at them long and long.
---- They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
---- They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
---- They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
---- Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania
--------- of owning things,
---- Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
--------- thousands of years ago,
---- Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
------------ Walt Whitman
Trylon
1. Spend more on firefighting equipment and people. Put the initial fires out faster. Travel preemptively to where forecasters say the danger is going to be. We already put extra electric crews on the road days before a hurricane strikes.
2. Take the time to preempt the megafires before they get started. In the U.S. we regularly clear fire lines. Some people are clearing the firelines with herds of goats -- an organic method of fire prevention. If megafires are a clear and present danger to our civilization, then we need to clear more fire lines.
3. Stop thinking of forests and peat bogs as automatic carbon sinks. We may need to carefully manage many types of forests and peat bogs to increase carbon sequestration. Baking agricultural waste or forest slash in a solar oven creates charcoal, which is a relatively stable compound for sequestering carbon for thousands of years.
Always make practical suggestions as alternatives to scary scenarios. If you don't every politician afterwards can say "I was scared like everybody else". If you do, they have free will and rarely will do the right thing. Otherwise, you can always mock your local politicians' stupidity in the face of danger.
Practical suggestions:
- Overthrow the established corporate oligarchy.
- Stop ALL fossil fuel extraction.
- Live in harmony with the natural systems of the Earth, or die trying.
- Take care of each other as the three rules of Permaculture state: Care for the Earth; Care for the People; Share the Surplus.
Impractical suggestion:
- Work on symptoms without addressing the causes.
1. It is not clear more money, fire fighters, and equipment are called for, or are even a possibility. On any given day between June 1 and October 1 there are over 100 forest fires and occasionally as many as 1000, burning in the Canadian shield and Alaskan interior. It is my understanding that only about 1% of these fires ever merits attention due to the fact the majority never threaten any population. The fire bombers typically have to fly around 1000km to get from their bases to where the fires are so if every fire were to be addressed the budgetary and equipment requirements would be on a scale that no-one is prepared to pay.
Additionally I have also read a study that suggested that our meddling in the fires and stopping their natural course is in part responsible for their increased damage. Typically these fires, when they happen every 30 years (approximately the cycle that the spruce trees require) clean up the detritus on the forest floor, decrease the oxygen concentration in the forest as well as open up the acorns so the seeds can plant the next generation. When we constantly interfere, in certain areas, the detritus builds up like a massive amount of tinder, oxygen content increases, and WHAM, a lightning strike and we now get a fire that almost immediately hits massive proportions, burns hotter and faster and destroys the seeds rather than prepares them to be the next generation. For example, one fire that happened near the town of Fort McMurray (where the oilsands are) had a perimeter of over 300 miles. It took weeks to get that under control with extensive and immediate action and the only road in or out of town was completely blocked off. There are some specialists in the field that therefore recommend letting the fires burn.
2. Again, the majority of fires are happening far away from any human population. Remember the Boreal Forest is an area around a third the size of the lower 48 states and a population of maybe 500,000 people living in it. Intervention is simply not possible. The same is true of the interior of Alaska.
Naturally a forest fire gets much hotter then the petty arson of a curious boy is able to obtain though. The density of the tarsand is that it takes 2 tons of tarsand to contain a barrel of oil (approx 40 gallons). The vast majority of the tarsand is in a layer about 60 feet in height and 100+ feet down. Near the rivers you get some nearer to the surface and along the river banks but otherwise it is generally covered with a layer of "overburden", which is to say, muskeg (northern swamp), clay, trees, etc. Where they are mining it there is an abundance of earth moving equipment, as you can well imagine, and if the oil plants were threatened they would undoubtedly erect a massive berm in no time.
So my inclination is to say that because they are low, generally without oxygen and mixed with lots of sand, that their ability to influence a fire would be marginal.
Why don't they tell it like it actually is? __ Just once.
By 2020,,, or sooner,,, not in 88 more years,,, not in a 100 years,,, not by the "end of the century",,, but very, very soon, unless we take sensible, srong, immediate and even painful action to reverse what we have done to our atmosphere.
I very seriously doubt any of "us" will be alive by the end of the century unless strong action is intiiated now... "Us" is everybody, almost all life .
Two summers ago there were more than 800 major forest fires in Russia and Siberia, all at the same time... There would have been more last summer but most of the forests were already burned up... "By the end of the century,,, the end of the century,"... Yeah! __ We'll see.
Just look at what happend in just three US states and Northern Mexico last summer. Massive amounts or (record setting) forest fires in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
This past year we were 10 inches short of rainfall and we only average 12 inches a year and we have ben in a ten year drought period... Dry? Oh wow, dryer than a ten day old road kill... We will most likely see massive brush, grass and forest fires once again.
It won't be by the __ "end of the century"__, it will be NOW, and every year from now on. all over the world... We'll see... That is "reality".
The most dangerous human created poison known to exist in the universe, second only to atomic waste, is Dioxin... Dioxin is 600,000 times more potent as a poison than arsenic.
I disagree with both.... I believe the most dangerous poison known to exist in the entire universe, is humans who refuse to accept reality.
Intelligent people Ignoring reality is the deadliest poison... Greed by the few who control the elected and all of us is a different poison, amost as bad.
You see, greed makes them ignore reality... The reality is, we are very quickly running out of time to reverse what we have done to the atmosphere and oceans... Unless we soon reverse it, we humans are history... That is reality.