by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 11, 2013 | Agriculture, Climate Change, Listening to the Land
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
In June 1988, climatologist and NASA scientist James Hansen stood before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the United States Senate. The temperature was a sweltering 98 degrees.
“The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements,” Hansen said. “The global warming now is large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect… Our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”
Hansen has authored some of the most influential scientific literature around climate change, and like the vast majority of climate scientists, has focused his work on the last 150 to 200 years – the period since the industrial revolution.
This period has been characterized by the widespread release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), and by the clearing of land on a massive scale – the plowing of grasslands and felling of forests for cities and agricultural crops.
Now, the world is on the brink of catastrophic climate change. Hansen and other scientists warn us that if civilization continues to burn fossil fuels and clear landscapes, natural cycles may be disrupted to the point of complete ecosystem breakdown – a condition in which the planet is too hot to support life. Hansen calls this the Venus Syndrome, named after the boiling planet enshrouded in clouds of greenhouse gases.
“If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale [low grade, high carbon fossil fuels], I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty,” Hansen has said.
If humanity wishes to have a chance of avoiding this fate, it is important that we understand global warming in detail. Why is it happening? When did it start? What fuels it? And, most importantly, what can stop it?
How old is global warming?
New studies are showing that the current episode of global warming may be a great deal older than previously believed – which may entirely change our strategy to stop it.
While fossil fuels have only been burned on a large scale for 200 years, land clearance has been a defining characteristic of civilizations – cultures based around cities and agriculture – since they first emerged around 8,000 years ago.
This land clearance has impacts on global climate. When a forest ecosystem is converted to agriculture, more than two thirds of the carbon that was stored in that forest is lost, and additional carbon stored in soils rich in organic materials will continue to be lost to the atmosphere as erosion accelerates.
Modern science may give us an idea of the magnitude of the climate impact of this pre-industrial land clearance. Over the past several decades of climate research, there has been an increasing focus on the impact of land clearance on modern global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in it’s 2004 report, attributed 17% of global emissions to cutting forests and destroying grasslands – a number which does not include the loss of future carbon storage or emissions directly related to this land clearance, such as methane released from rice paddies or fossil fuels burnt for heavy equipment.
Some studies show that 50% of the global warming in the United States can be attributed to land clearance – a number that reflects the inordinate impact that changes in land use can have on temperatures, primarily by reducing shade cover and evapotranspiration (the process whereby a good-sized tree puts out thousands of gallons of water into the atmosphere on a hot summer day – their equivalent to our sweating).
So if intensive land clearance has been going on for thousands of years, has it contributed to global warming? Is there a record of the impacts of civilization in the global climate itself?
10,000 years of Climate Change
According to author Lierre Keith, the answer is a resounding yes. Around 10,000 years ago, humans began to cultivate crops. This is the period referred to as the beginning of civilization, and, according to the Keith and other scholars such as David Montgomery, a soil scientist at the University of Washington, it marked the beginning of land clearance and soil erosion on a scale never before seen – and led to massive carbon emissions.
“In Lebanon (and then Greece, and then Italy) the story of civilization is laid bare as the rocky hills,” Keith writes. “Agriculture, hierarchy, deforestation, topsoil loss, militarism, and imperialism became an intensifying feedback loop that ended with the collapse of a bioregion [the Mediterranean basin] that will most likely not recover until after the next ice age.”
Montgomery writes, in his excellent book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, that the agriculture that followed logging and land clearance led to those rocky hills noted by Keith.
“It is my contention that the invention of [agriculture] fundamentally altered the balance between soil production and soil erosion – dramatically increasing soil erosion.
Other researchers, like Jed Kaplan and his team from the Avre Group at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, have affirmed that preindustrial land clearance has had a massive impact on the landscape.
“It is certain that the forests of many European countries were substantially cleared before the Industrial Revolution,” they write in a 2009 study.
Their data shows that forest cover declined from 35% to 0% in Ireland over the 2800 years before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The situation was similar in Norway, Finland, Iceland, where 100% of the arable land was cleared before 1850.
Similarly, the world’s grasslands have been largely destroyed: plowed under for fields of wheat and corn, or buried under spreading pavement. The grain belt, which stretches across the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, and across much of Eastern Europe, southern Russia, and northern China, has decimated the endless fields of constantly shifting native grasses.
The same process is moving inexorably towards its conclusion in the south, in the pampas of Argentina and in the Sahel in Africa. Thousands of species, each uniquely adapted to the grasslands that they call home, are being driven to extinction.
“Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable,” writes permaculture expert Toby Hemenway. “We can pass laws to stop some of the harm agriculture does, but these rules will reduce harvests. As soon as food gets tight, the laws will be repealed. There are no structural constraints on agriculture’s ecologically damaging tendencies.”
As Hemenway notes, the massive global population is essentially dependent on agriculture for survival, which makes political change a difficult proposition at best. The seriousness of this problem is not to be underestimated. Seven billion people are dependent on a food system – agricultural civilization – that is killing the planet.
The primary proponent of the hypothesis – that human impacts on climate are as old as civilization – has been Dr. William Ruddiman, a retired professor at the University of Virginia. The theory is often called Ruddiman’s Hypothesis, or, alternately, the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis.
Ruddiman’s research, which relies heavily on atmospheric data from gases trapped in thick ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, shows that around 11,000 years ago carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to decline as part of a natural cycle related to the end of the last Ice Age. This reflected a natural pattern that has been seen after previous ice ages.
This decline continued until around 8000 years ago, when the natural trend of declining carbon dioxide turned around, and greenhouse gases began to rise. This coincides with the spread of civilization across more territory in China, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and certain other regions.
Ruddiman’s data shows that deforestation over the next several thousand years released 350 Gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, an amount nearly equal to what has been released since the Industrial Revolution. The figure is corroborated by the research of Kaplan and his team.
Around 5000 years ago, cultures in East and Southeast Asia began to cultivate rice in paddies – irrigated fields constantly submerged in water. Like an artificial wetland, rice patties create an anaerobic environment, where bacteria metabolizing carbon-based substances (like dead plants) release methane instead of carbon dioxide and the byproduct of their consumption. Ruddiman points to a spike in atmospheric methane preserved in ice cores around 5000 years ago as further evidence of warming due to agriculture.
Some other researchers, like R. Max Holmes from the Woods Hole Research Institute and Andrew Bunn, a climate scientist from Western Washington University, believe that evidence is simply not conclusive. Data around the length of interglacial periods and the exact details of carbon dioxide and methane trends is not detailed enough to make a firm conclusion, they assert. Regardless, it is certain that the pre-industrial impact of civilized humans on the planet was substantial.
“Our data show very substantial amounts of human impact on the environment over thousands of years,” Kaplan said. “That impact really needs to be taken into account when we think about the carbon cycle and greenhouse gases.”
Restoring Grasslands: a strategy for survival
If the destruction of grasslands and forests signals the beginning of the end for the planet’s climate, some believe that the restoration of these natural communities could mean salvation.
Beyond their beauty and inherent worth, intact grasslands supply a great deal to humankind. Many pastoral cultures subsist entirely on the animal protein that is so abundant in healthy grasslands. In North America, the rangelands that once sustained more than 60 million Bison (and at least as many pronghorn antelope, along with large populations of elk, bear, deer, and many others) now support fewer than 45 million cattle – animals ill-adapted to the ecosystem, who damage their surroundings instead of contributing to them.
Healthy populations of herbivores also contribute to carbon sequestration in grassland soils by increasing nutrient recycling, a powerful effect that allows these natural communities to regulate world climate. They also encourage root growth, which sequesters more carbon in the soil.
Just as herbivores cannot survive without grass, grass cannot thrive without herbivores.
Grasslands are so potent in their ability to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that some believe restoring natural grasslands could be one of the most effective tools in the fight against runaway global warming.
“Grass is so good at building [carbon rich] soil that repairing 75 percent of the planet’s rangelands would bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in 15 years or less,” Lierre Keith writes.
The implications of this are immense. It means, quite simply, that one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is to move away from agriculture, which is based upon the destruction of forests and grasslands, and towards other means of subsistence. It means moving away from a way of life 10,000 years old. It means rethinking the entire structure of our food system – in some ways, the entire structure of our culture.
Some ambitious, visionary individuals are working in parallel with this strategy, racing against time to restore grasslands and to stabilize Earth’s climate.
In Russia, in the remote northeastern Siberian state of Yakutia, a scientist named Sergei Zimov has an ambitious plan to recreate a vast grassland – a landscape upon whom millions of herbivores such as mammoths, wild horses, reindeer, bison, and musk oxen fed and roamed until the end of the last ice age.
“In future, to preserve the permafrost, we only need to bring herbivores,” says Zimov. “Why is this useful? For one, the possibility to reconstruct a beautiful [grassland] ecosystem. It is important for climate stability. If the permafrost melts, a lot of greenhouse gases will be emitted from these soils.”
Zimov’s project is nicknamed “Pleistocene Park,” and stretches across a vast region of shrubs and mosses, low productivity communities called ‘Taiga’. But until 12,000 years ago, this landscape was highly productive pastures for a span of 35,000 years, hosting vast herds of grazers and their predators.
“Most small bones don’t survive because of the permafrost,” says Sergei Zimov. “[But] the density of skeletons in this sediment, here and all across these lowlands: 1,000 skeletons of mammoth, 20,000 skeletons of bison, 30,000 skeletons of horses, and about 85,000 skeletons of reindeer, 200 skeletons of musk-ox, and also tigers [per square kilometer].”
These herds of grazers not only supported predators, but also preserved the permafrost beneath their feet, soils that now contain 5 times as much carbon as all the rainforests of Earth. According to Zimov, the winter foraging behavior of these herbivores was the mechanism of preservation.
“In winter, everything is covered in snow,” Zimov says. “If there are 30 horses per square kilometer, they will trample the snow, which is a very good thermal insulator. If they trample in the snow, the permafrost will be much colder in wintertime. The introduction of herbivores can reduce the temperatures in the permafrost and slow down the thawing.”
In the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, a similar plan to restore the landscape and rewild the countryside has emerged. The brainchild of Deborah and Frank Popper, the plan calls for the gradual acquisition of rangelands and agricultural lands across the West and Midwest, with the eventual goal of creating a vast nature preserve called the Buffalo Commons, 10-20 million acres of wilderness, an area 10 times the size of the largest National Park in the United States (Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska).
In this proposed park, the Poppers envision a vast native grassland, with predators following wandering herds of American Bison and other grazers who follow the shifting grasses who follow the fickle rains. The shifting nature of the terrain in the Great Plains requires space, and this project would provide it in tracts not seen for hundreds of years.
In parts of Montana, the work has already begun. Many landowners have sold their farms to private conservation groups to fill in the gaps between isolated sections of large public lands. Many Indian tribes across the United States and Southern Canada are also working to restore Bison, who not only provide high quality, healthy, traditional food but also contribute to biodiversity and restore the health of the grasslands through behavior such a wallowing, which creates small wetlands.
Grasslands have the power to not only restore biodiversity and serve as a rich, nutrient-dense source of food, but also to stabilize global climate. The soils of the world cannot survive agricultural civilizations for much longer. If the plows continue their incessant work, this culture will eventually go the way of the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Greeks, the Macedonians, the Harrapans, or the Roman Empire – blowing in the wind, clouding the rivers. Our air is thick with the remnants of ancient soils, getting long overdue revenge for their past mistreatment.
The land does not want fields. It wants Bison back. It wants grasslands, forests, wetlands, birds. It wants humans back, humans who know how to live in a good way, in relationship with the soil and the land and all the others. The land wants balance, and we can help. We can tend the wild and move towards other means of feeding ourselves, as our old ancestors have done for long years. It is the only strategy that takes into account the needs of the natural world, the needs for a land free of plows and tractor-combines.
In time, with luck and hard work, that ancient carbon will be pulled from the atmosphere – slowly at first, but then with gathering speed. The metrics of success are clear: a calmed climate, rivers running free, biodiversity rebounding. The task of achieving that success is a great challenge, but guided by those who believe in restoring the soil, we can undo 8,000 years of mistakes, and finally begin to live again as a species like any other, nestled in our home, at peace and in balance, freed at last from the burdens of our ancestors’ mistakes.
Bibliography
Climate meddling dates back 8,000 years. By Alexandra Witze. April 23rd, 2011. Science News. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/71932/title/Climate_meddling_dates_back_8%2C000_years#video
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Global Emissions. Accessed June 23rd, 2012. http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html
The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe. By Kaplan et al. Avre Group, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Quaternary Science Reviews 28 (2009) 3016-3034.
‘Land Use as Climate Change Mitigation.’ Stone, Brian Jr. Environmental Science and Technology 43, 9052-9056. 11/2009.
‘Functional Aspects of Soil Animal Diversity in Agricultural Grasslands’ by Bardgett et al. Applied Soil Ecology, 10 (1998) 263-276.
Zimov, Sergei. Personal Interviews, June/July 2010.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 6, 2013 | Climate Change, Mining & Drilling
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
While global warming is a topic of conversation and news coverage every day around the world, the basic raw materials that drive the global economy are rarely discussed as being involved. But these materials play a key role in global environmental issues.
Where do plastics come from? How is paint made? How do simple electronics, like land line telephones, come to be? How does the electric grid itself come to be? And in a world that is being wracked by warming, how do these basic industrial technologies impact the climate?
This will be the first article in a series exploring these questions and more. This inaugural piece will focus on steel: a material so ubiquitous it is nearly invisible, a material that was the foundation of the industrial revolution, a material that even today is used a measure for the health of the global economy.
The foundation of an economy
Steel, alongside oil, is the basic raw material of the global industrial economy. The material is widely used in construction and almost all other industries. The amount of steel being consumed per capita is often used as a measure of economic progress: financial firms like the World Bank consider 700 pounds of steel consumption per person per year a basic measure of the economic development of a nation.
More than 1.3 billion tons of steel is produced every year.
What is steel made of?
Steel is an alloy composed mainly of iron mixed with smaller portions other material, most often carbon, but sometimes manganese, chromium, vanadium, or tungsten. These other substances act as hardening agents to strengthen the steel.
The first step in our journey along the path of steel production is the extraction of the basic materials. The largest iron ore mine in the world is the Carajás Mine in Northern Brazil. The facility produces more than 90 million tons of iron ore every year. The ore is transported nearly 900km (in the largest train in the world) along a single train track to the port city of Sao Luis.
The train line, called EFC, was shut down in October of 2012 by indigenous inhabitants of the region protesting a planned expansion of the mine.
The environmental impacts of the mine are numerous. Firstly, to reach the ore, the rainforest must be cleared. More than 6,000 square kilometers of forest around the Carajas mine are clearcut every year for charcoal alone. More forest is removed for direct mining operations. Mercury is used in the mining process, and contaminates 90 percent of fish downstream of the mine.
In addition to the environmental impacts, iron ore mining in the Amazon has displaced tens of thousands of indigenous people, decimated newly-contacted tribes through the spread of infectious diseases, and flooded remote areas with thousands of workers, networks of roads, and all the associated impacts.
Poverty, social conflict, and environmental devastation have been the wages of mining. As the World Wildlife Federation has noted, “Mining is one of the dirtiest industrial activities on the planet, in terms of both its immediate environmental impacts and its CO2 emissions.”
Smelting and steel production
Once the raw materials for steel production are gathered, they must be combined. The first step is the smelting of iron ore in a blast furnace. The heat to melt iron ore usually comes from burning natural gas, coal or, more often coke.
“Coke is the most important raw material fed into the blast furnace in terms of its effect on blast furnace operation and hot metal quality,” writes Hardarshan S. Valia, a scientist at Inland Steel (now ArcelorMittal).
Coking coal is a fuel and heat source that is essential to the production of steel. Coke, also known as metallurgical coal, is produced by baking coal in an airtight furnace at 2,000-3,000 °F. Generally, two tons of coal are baked to create one ton of coke. The process of creating coke toxifies large amounts of water, releases copious greenhouse gases and other toxic fumes, and requires large amounts of electricity.
“Air emissions such as coke oven gas, naphthalene, ammonium compounds, crude light oil, sulfur and coke dust are released from coke ovens,” notes the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, “[and] quenching water becomes contaminated with coke breezes and other compounds.”
At this stage of the process, ground up limestone or other carbon-rich rock is added to the molten iron ore to balance the acidity of coke and coal. This is called reduction. While a small portion of the carbon content of the limestone and coal or coke is adsorbed into the molten metal and adds strength to the steel, the bulk of this carbon is released to the atmosphere as CO2.
At current rates, around 1.9 metric tons of CO2 are released for every metric ton of steel production. Overall, the International Energy Agency estimates that 4-5% of global CO2 emissions come from the iron and steel industry.
Once the smelting process in the blast furnace is complete, the result is an intermediate stage in steel production called pig iron. This molten pig iron is now prepared for the next step, which involves processing in a basic oxygen furnace.
In the basic oxygen furnace, molten pig iron is poured into a large ladle and scraps of recycled steel are added. Impurities of silicon, phosphorous, and sulfur are removed by means of a chemical reaction, and high purities of oxygen are blown into the vessel at velocities greater than the speed of sound. This superheats the mixture and removes further impurities. The molten metal is now steel.
The basic oxygen furnace is only the most common method of steel production, used for 60% of global production with the process described above. This is called “primary steel production”. Secondary steel, which requires less energy input but is a lower quality product, is made entirely from scrap steel using an electric arc furnace. Steel production from recycled scrap accounts for nearly half of all steel production in developed countries.
What is steel used for?
As noted above, steel is critical to the global economy. It is considered one of the basic raw materials for industrial development, and is used for the production of cranes, ships, trucks, trailers, cars, jacking platforms, underwater cables, electrical transmission towers and lines, rail cars, girders for buildings and bridges, home appliances, pots and pans, bicycles, guard rails, scaffolding - the list goes on endlessly.
While the role of steel and other polluting substances in many of these products and industries has been examined thoroughly, the same rigor has generally not been applied to alternative energy technologies. Wind turbines, for example, use a great deal of steel. As has been noted by the World Steel Association, the global trade group for the industry: “every part of a wind turbine depends on iron and steel.”
Can steel be sustainable?
One of the most common wind turbines in the world today is a 1.5 megawatt design produced by General Electric. The nacelle - the portion of the turbine on top of the tower - weighs 56 tons, while the tower weighs in at 71 tons and the blades at 36 tons. A single turbine, at over 60 percent steel, requires over 100 tons of the material.
This 1.5 megawatt model is a smaller design by modern standards - the latest industrial turbines can require more than twice as much steel.
The production and installation of wind turbines also requires large amounts of concrete (more than 1,000 tons for a standard wind turbine anchor platform) and other materials such as copper, which is used for electrical cables and makes up some 35% of the generator. About half of all copper mined worldwide is used for electrical wires and transmission cables.
Copper production is a large source of pollution and waste, starting with the exploration and development process, where roads and facilities are built, and ending with the toxic byproducts of copper refining.
Impacts of copper mining mirror steel production, and include land clearance, soil removal, erosion of soil and mine waste, toxic tailings, acid mine drainage, contaminant leaching, water extraction and contamination, the release of dust and particulate matter, air pollution from vehicles and machinery, mercury and other heavy metal contamination, habitat loss and fragmentation, soil and groundwater contamination, and greenhouse gas emissions.
The Bingham Canyon Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, Utah, is the largest man-made excavation in the world, and a good example of the toxic nature of extraction and refining – the Salt Lake Valley periodically registers the worst air quality in the United States. The mine is visible from space with the naked eye.
Global Trade
Beyond the direct impacts of steel production, the process of creating wind turbines must be assessed in context; in this case, the context of global trade. Creating a wind turbine is a worldwide manufacturing operation, explains Brian Doughty of Puget Sound Energy, who manages a wind power installation in eastern Washington state.
“For this particular project,” Doughty notes, “these tower sections came from Vietnam, the nacelles and blades came from Denmark, everything was brought into the port of Vancouver WA, and brought up here [to eastern Washington] by truck.”
This global arrangement of shipping and transportation tangles wind turbines further in a vast, deadly net of fossil fuels, pollution, devastated ecosystems, “free trade” agreements, and decimated communities.
Steel: the past, not the future?
The World Steel Association and other global entities are convinced that steel is a key material for the future of civilization. But as should be clear from the information presented above, steel is an industrial material for an industrial world – dirty, polluting, energy intensive.
There are many options for the human species moving forward. Steel lies along the industrial path that we have trodden before, dirty and littered with the bodies of the collaterally damaged. Which path is taken remains to be seen, but one thing is sure: before we can make the right decisions, we must have the facts. And with steel, the facts are grim.
References
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Climate Change
By Stephen Leahy / Inter Press Service
Rising temperatures are drying out northern forests and peatlands, producing bigger and more intense fires. And this will only get much worse as the planet heats up from the use of ever larger amounts of fossil fuels, scientists warned last week at the end of a major science meeting in Vancouver.
“In a warmer world, there will be more fire. That’s a virtual certainty,” said Mike Flannigan, a forest researcher at the University of Alberta, Canada.
“I’d say a doubling or even tripling of fire events is a conservative estimate,” Flannigan told IPS.
While Flannigan’s research reveals forest fire risk may triple in future, a similar increase in peat fires will be far more dangerous. There are millions of square kilometres of tundra and peatlands in the northern hemisphere and they hold more than enough carbon to ramp up global temperatures high enough to render most of the planet uninhabitable if they burn.
A forest fire in Indonesia that ignited peatlands in 1997 smouldered for months, releasing the equivalent of 20 to 40 percent of the worldwide fossil fuel emissions for the entire year, he said.
“There is the potential for significant releases of carbon and other greenhouse gases (from future peat fires),” Flannigan said.
If peat fires release large amounts of carbon, then temperatures will rise faster and higher, leading to further drying of forests and peat, and increasing the likelihood of fires in what is called a positive feedback, he said.
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.
Flannigan’s research is based on climate projections for 2070 to 2090. Forests will be drier and there will be more lightning with rising temperatures. Around the world, most fires are caused by humans, except in remote regions like boreal forest and treeless tundra, he said.
Lightning sparked the 1,000-square-kilometre tundra fire fuelled by peat in Alaska’s Anaktuvuk River region in 2007. Lightning, once nearly unknown in the far north, is becoming more common as the region is now two to three degrees C warmer. Until the past decade, fire had largely been absent from the tundra over the past 12,000 years.
The Anaktuvuk River peat fire burned for nearly three months, releasing about two million tonnes of CO2 before it was extinguished by snow. That’s about half of the annual emissions of a country like Nepal or Uganda. Surprisingly, the severely burned tundra continued to release CO2 in the following years.
Peat can grow several metres deep beneath the ground. In fact, some peat fires burn right through winter, beneath the snow, then pick up again in the spring, said Flannigan.
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.
Worldwide, fires burn an estimated 350 to 450 million ha of forest and grasslands every year. That’s an area larger than the size of India.
The first-ever assessment of forest and bush fires’ impact on human health estimated that 339,000 people die per year from respiratory and other fire-related illness.
“I was surprised the number was this high,” said Fay Johnston, co-author and researcher at University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.
Half of the deaths were in Africa and 100,000 in Southeast Asia. Deforestation fires in the tropics are the worst when it comes to human health impacts, she said. Heavy smoke contains high volumes of tiny particles that are very damaging to the lungs and cardiovascular system and can produce heart attacks.
“It takes humans to burn a rainforest. This would be the easiest to stop compared to other fires,” Johnston told IPS.
Forest and bush fires result in many billions of dollars in material losses every year. Last year, fires in drought-stricken Texas resulted in at least five billion dollars in losses, while the Slave Lake, Alberta fire was Canada’s second worst disaster at 750 million dollars.
Future fires will be bigger and more intense and largely beyond our abilities to control or suppress, said Flannigan.
“Virtually all of Russia, Canada, the U.S.” will be impacted, he said.
From Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/02/warming-to-ignite-the-carbon-bomb/
