Modest blaze. Firefighters may be contributing to global warming by fighting small fires.
Credit: Katrina Tepper/AP
Posted on 07/29/2008 9:38:26 PM PDT by neverdem
Modest blaze. Firefighters may be contributing to global warming by fighting small fires.
Credit: Katrina Tepper/AP
Scientists have long believed that preventing or dousing forest fires helps combat global warming by saving trees and thus allowing forests to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But surprising new data on hundreds of California forest sites suggest the opposite. The work could help quantify the role of forests in the global carbon cycle and shape U.S. federal fire policy.
Lightning-caused fires serve a natural mechanism within forests. They destroy small trees and underbrush while often allowing large trees to remain standing and flourish. But since roughly 1910, U.S. forest managers have sought to fight as many small forest fires as possible. That policy has allowed more shrubs and small trees to grow than in the past. The increasing quantity of vegetation, scientists calculated recently using tree measurements and other data, sucks 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year--roughly 14% of the total amount of carbon pulled in by U.S. forests. However, historical data on tree sizes weren't available to allow scientists to confirm that the forests had absorbed that much carbon over the past century.
To do that, ecologist Michael Goulden of the University of California, Irvine, and a grad student used previously overlooked forest inventory measurements taken in the 1930s on 269 California forest wilderness plots. They then compared these data with measurements taken in the 1990s on 260 plots in the same general vicinity. The number of trees per hectare across all plots rose by 4% in 60 years, an increase the scientists attributed to the federal policy on suppressing fires. Yet the total amount of carbon held by trees declined by 34% over the same period, the researchers report this week in Geophysical Research Letters.
The scientists conclude that the large trees in the plots had to compete with the growing population of small trees, making the big trees more susceptible to drought, wind, and insect attack than they would have been without the crowding. Because the large trees died, they didn't absorb as much carbon dioxide. "It's counterintuitive," says Goulden.
"I was really tickled by this finding," says ecologist Richard Houghton of Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. "Nobody thought these little trees would have an effect on the larger ones." But forest scientist Eric Kasischke of the University of Maryland, College Park, argues that some of the older trees might be dying simply "due to the aging process.” Goulden responds that the issue would be important only if the trees in the forest plots were generally the same age, which they weren't.
The results could affect U.S. federal firefighting policy, says Department of the Interior biogeographer Peter Teensma. It's not the practice now, but one way that federal land managers can give large trees space to grow in the wilderness is by thinning out brush and undergrowth with small preemptive fires. The new paper "may make the case we should be doing thinning in some ways in the wilderness lands," he says. U.S. agencies will consider the issue, say federal officials, as they prepare a new forest fires policy for publication next year.
Just because they have educations doesn't mean they are educated.
aka “How I Spent My Global Warming Grant Money” by ecologist Michael Goulden of the University of California, Irvine
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
It’s like the old joke:
A man was flying in an airplane,
Unfortunately, he fell out.
Fortunately, he had a parachute.
Unfortunately, it didn’t open.
Fortunately, there was a haystack below him.
Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork in the haystack.
Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork.
Unfortunately, he missed the haystack.
All the global warming logic seems to follow this pattern, starting with the historical reception of Arrenhius’s paper on the subject and the subsequent revisions of its logic.
It is strange, and revealing, that global warming advocates are “tickled” by these sorts of reversals. I would think that anyone with an emotional stake in rational understanding would be disturbed by them.
Let’s retire Smokey...How much more weight does Al Gore need to gain to be the size of Smokey? He would be an acceptable replacement.
Not Smokey the Bear.
Smokey is awesome; he's part of the longest running public service campaign in history. He has his own zip code (20252, iirc).
NO it’s THE....THE THE THE... his middle name is THE.. smokey THE bear..
I have copies of my old smokey THE bear comic book and my old smokey THE bear official song.
“Smokey THE Bear, Smokey THE Bear, prowlin and a growlin and a sniffin the air, he can smell a fire, before it starts to flame, that’s why they call him Smokey that is how he got his name.”
so there.
I remember seeing Smokey Bear at the National Zoo in Washington when I was a kid. He was a quiet, sweet black bear.
The study fails to take into consideration the carbon and other emissions released by fire. According to a study on greenhouse gas emissions from fire, the Angora fire was estimated to have emitted 46.2 tons of greenhouse gases per acre. (http://www.calforestfoundation.org/pdf/FCEM-2.pdf ) The study also indicated that if thinning, reduction of ladder and other fuels had been done in the forests where the Angora fires occurred, emissions could have been dropped to 12 tons per acre, instead of 46.2.
It makes more sense to thin forests and to utilize biomass, which will ofset costs of fuel reduction, than to prescribe burn, which produces noxious air pollution and greenhouse gases.
In 2006, the State of California passed AB 32, which requires the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to develop regulations and marketing mechanisms to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Mandatory caps on emissions from industry and other sources will begin in 2012. A draft scoping plan for actions is available now at http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/cc.htm (Comments are due shortly.) Among proposed actions is the implementation of “smart growth” to discourage sprawl and encourage concentrated development where rapid transit is available. It would seem to me that a comprehensive and aggressive strategy to reduce fuels on our National Forests would not only protect the health and safety of forest communities, cost less in the long run in comparison to fire suppression, but make substantial strides in accomplishing greenhouse emission reduction goals under AB 32.
In 1994 the Feminists were pushing the Federlal Glass Ceiling Report - to "prove" discrimination against females. A married couple with a practice in family counseling obtained the statistic used in making the Glass Ceiling Report and found the authors of the report had performed mega-sleight-of-hands in skewing the stats.
The feminists have done the same with the "Math" issue. Huzzah! again to Heather MacDonald, and to you for pinging me to this.
Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve.
NO! - TO THE BATTLEMENTS! We will never surrender you renamer of my childhood heroes.
You shall wither under our fire. We will never stop apposing you.
Give up now.
Smokey The Bear forever.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
