El Nino Fires A Key Source Of Greenhouse Gases 62
core plexus writes "Science Daily has an interesting article suggesting that El Nino-related fires may be a significant source of 'Greenhouse Gases.' By combining satellite data and measurements of atmospheric gases, they have quantified for the first time the amount of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, emitted by these fires. In addition, the scientists determined that almost all of the increased levels of methane measured during 1997 and 1998 can be attributed to the worldwide fires at the time, underscoring the impact El Nino has on methane emissions."
Re:More evidence on the pile (Score:3, Insightful)
don't stop worrying (Score:2, Insightful)
more practically, tho, we still want to find a way to stop this. could it be caused by the human races continued mismanagement of the forests? after all, el nino has happened before. we seem to be becoming more and more prone to it.
I think modern forest-management needs to take a major turn, and it isn't the one usually advocated. stop stopping mild, natural fires. they clean out the undergrowth, and stop major forest fires like the one in BC this past summer (that caused the evacuation of about 150,000 ppl)
and in reference to some other posters comment, don't be silly. we can always blame this on gwb. that's what people do, after all
Re:More evidence on the pile (Score:1, Insightful)
There is no solution. Things like Kyoto are just as foolish as Maos plan to have kids kill butterflies (or whatever it was).... incompetant ideas applied by people ignorant of basic science.
Reality is the environmental quality in an area is directly proportional to the economic development in an area. IT is only once people get beyond a certain standard of living that they start caring about the environment (cause tehy are no longer worrying about basic needs.)
Thus, the best way-- the only way-- to a cleaner environment is unregulated economic development.
A basic lack of understanding of economics is behind most environmental solutions (as well as the war on poverty, etc.) and thus they actually cause the problem to be worse, not better.
But then, they are never held accountable, and they always have someone to blame-- usually "corporations" which they only have to invoke, and never actualy articulate exactly how "corporations" are to blame. Cause in reality, corporations-- of their own accord-- have done far more to protect and enhance the environment than greenpeace has ever tried.
I'd like to see you support those assertions (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the conventional Republican wisdom in the USA, but the basic physics tells you that the basis of Kyoto is rock-solid absent solid evidence to contradict this chain of reasoning:
You can say that we don't know enough about the various feedback loops inherent in the system, such as the influence of clouds, to be able to quantify their effects. The thing you don't seem to grasp is that the basic physics places the burden of proof on the people claiming the absence of detrimental effects.
(And you make these implicit claims in a post with obvious errors of grammar and spelling. The irony is thick.)
Reality is that the environmental quality in places like the Tongass National Forest is quite high, except where it has been developed (clearcut). The environmental quality in cities and the like tends to be higher where the standard of living (and thus the demand and ability to pay for pollution-control technology) is higher, but your blanket statement is trivially false.
No regulations? You mean, let dirty plants dump pesticide byproducts and heavy metals into the rivers and lakes that other people use for drinking water? I believe they tried that in the Soviet Bloc, and it didn't work very well at all; they are still trying to recover from the damage.
Is that so? Tell me, did the regulations against the burning of coal in London after the Killer Fog cause the problem to get worse? How about the motor-vehicle pollution controls in California; did they make the Los Angeles smog worse? Or the ban on phosphates in detergents; did it make the eutrophication problem in Lake Erie worse?
I like people like you. You make it so easy to convince readers that you are wrong.
And for the record, I have nothing against corporations. Corporations are just like individuals, creatures looking for their own benefit. The way to keep them from doing harm is to prevent them from creating harm to others without having to pay for it; if everyone has to pay, the way to maxmize profit is to minimize such expenses and the problem solves itself. We get problems such as smog, algae-choked lakes and empty aquifers when people are permitted to take or dump without having to respect the limits of the resource they're using (whether the ability to create or the ability to absorb) and pay a market price for it.
The thing you have to argue against is the huge success which the Montreal Protocol has had in controlling stratospheric halogens; the polar ozone holes are already showing signs of recovery as the concentration of CFCs comes down. I agree with you that the demand of many watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) that any GHG control regime be turned into a welfare program for dysfuncti
Re:I'd like to see you support those assertions (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.
True.
2. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
True.
3. To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.
This requires a leap of faith -- namely some laws of thermodynamics. But the end result is also true. If the heat absorbed is different from the heat emitted, then the body will either cool off or heat up.
4. If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.
I agree. That is one way that we can help the earth cool off. But there are other ways.
We can boil some of the atmosphere away. This happens constantly and changes in temperature and pressure will change the rate at which out atmosphere boils away. Fortunately, the warmer the planet gets, the more atmosphere that boils away. Don't worry, we have a fresh atmosphere ready to supply us in the rocks below us. Otherwise we would've lost it a long time ago.
We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface. There may be a simple way to accelerate this process, should the temperature become extreme. By the way, the earth's crust is an excellent insulator.
We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds. There are chemical reactions that result in a lowering of the temperature of the medium the reaction occured in. Bonus points if the chemical reaction involves remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and deposits it safely on the earth's surface.
We can increase the amount of gasses that reflect solar radiation, increasing the albedo of the planet and reducing the amount of radiation absorbed. There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet. Increasing the amount of these gasses will make the atmosphere more like a mirror and reflect away all of the incoming heat.
You are looking at the problem as if there was only one solution. The bottom line is that there isn't only one solution. We are not even sure if the earth is warming up or cooling. And we know that any variation in the sun's emissions will result in changes that we can't control here on earth.
I understand that there are systems so extraordinarily complicated and chaotic that even with advanced supercomputers and the world's brightest minds we cannot understand them. The weather happens to be one of them. We cannot predict the weather reliably. We can barely predict the weather today or tomorrow. How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?
So I have decided long ago, that I will sit back and enjoy a cool refreshing drink from my refrigerator that uses CFCs as a refrigerant, delivered to me by trucks using gasoline as a propellant, and exhaling that sacred CO2 from my lungs with every breath I take. Worrying about something so grossly out of my control is counterproductive to my happiness.
Re:I'd like to see you support those assertions (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems logical, but the problem is that the atmosphere has so much CO2 in it that it is already mostly opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. Adding more CO2 doesn't make it much more opaque. Imagine trying to compare the opacity of a 1 mm sheet of foil to a 2 mm sheet of foil. Sure, 2 mm of foil blocks more light, but 1 mm will block nearly all the light shown on it.
The only thing that makes the theory kinda work is the spreading of the absorption spectrum of CO2. The idea is that the extreme ends of the curve still let enough LW radiation out that increasing CO2 will reduce this escape. The effect, though, is estimated to be very small. The effect is further reduced because the spectra of other greenhouse gases overlap with these etremes.
To enhance this small effect, the theory asserts a dramatic increase of water vapor. Most of the increase in warming, according to the theory, actually comes from water vapor acting as a greenhouse gas and not CO2.
So what happens to all that vapor? Does it just stay in the atmosphere or does it precipitate out? What about the effect of clouds? If there are more clouds, does less solar radiation come in?
The theory also assumes the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase exponentially. Can we really predict how much CO2 will be put into the atmosphere 40 years from now? What happens as oil becomes more and more expensive? Will things like nuclear power be much more in use?
Now I won't say the theory is complete bunk, but it is still much more speculative than is suggested in the press.
And what about Kyoto? Well, even it's supporters agree that it will delay warming by a modest 6 years or so.