Australian bushfires pump out millions of tonnes of carbon.

[C4]

VICTORIA'S bushfires have released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - almost equal to Australia's industrial emission for an entire year.

Mark Adams, from the University of Sydney, said the emissions from bushfires were far beyond what could be contained through carbon capture and needed to be addressed in the next international agreement.

"Once you are starting to burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amounts of carbon," Professor Adams said.

In work for the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, he estimated the 2003 and 2006-07 bushfires could have put 20-30million tonnes of carbon (70-105 million tonnes of carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere.

"That is far, far more than we're ever going to be able to sequester from planting trees or promoting carbon capture," he said.

The 2003 and 2006-07 bushfires were burning land carrying 50 to 80 tonnes of carbon per hectare. "This time we are burning forests that are even more carbon-dense than last time, well over 100 tonnes above-ground carbon per hectare," he said.

Professor Adams said it was vital that more research was done into bushfires and carbon. "Not all of what is in the vegetation goes up, but you also lose much of the carbon in the litter and understorey and also some of the soil carbon," he said.

Carbon emissions from forest fires are not counted under the Kyoto Protocol. But he said he thought it likely they would be in future agreements.

"All informed scientific opinion suggests that whatever new protocol is signed (at the UN summit) in Copenhagen or elsewhere will include forest carbon, simply because to not do so would be to ignore one of the biggest threats to the global atmospheric pool of carbon dioxide, the release of carbon in fires."

Professor Adams said the counter argument had always been that new forests took up the carbon lost to the fire. "That is true to a point, but if the long-term fire regime changes -- we are now starting to have more fires -- we may completely change the carbon balance of the forest."

Carbon could also be sequestered in the soil as charcoal, and he said recent research had found most Australian soil carbon was actually charcoal.

"That really does change the way we think about soil carbon. We should be investigating the effects on fires in converting biomass into charcoal.

"One of the big unknowns is how fires interact with biomass carbon to produce charcoal and ash, and how long that charcoal and ash lives in the soil."

He argued it was more important to investigate bushfires and the carbon cycle than it was to study carbon capture from coal-fired power stations.

"I think we are ignoring critical areas of research in favour of a technological solution. In this case, we need to better understand the natural cycles."

Scientists had recorded steep increases in global carbon dioxide emissions as a result of bushfires in Indonesia and Siberia, he said.

Thanks for the enormous contribution to global warming.

Fucking Australlians. :disgust1:

 

[seX-Power]

Damn. The terrorists are killing us and the environment.

Btw, blame Victorians not Australians. :

 

[PeepShow]

Thanks for the report, Al.

 

[Kizza]

Global warming is a bunch of ass anyways.

Wanna whine? Tell America & China to cut their carbon emissions.

 

[Quintastic One]

I'd rather we blame all the little countries who don't actually have any sufficient technology while denying that America does any individual damage. lol

 

[Kizza]

If I remember correctly, unfortunately in year 8 we were clambered off to An Inconvenient Truth, and Australia has less then 1% of the carbon emissions, and America have something ridiculous like 20-30%.

Yeah.

 

[Quintastic One]

See what I mean? Totally blameless. ^_^

 

[Kizza]

It's all your fault something that is total bullcrap exists.

 

[C4]

Global Warming is not bullcrap.

 

[Kizza]

Yes it is.

 

[Kaptain KnicKy]

I'm still getting past the fact that some Yankee asshole comes on here, with what could almost be considered a clear fact, and bitches and whines about us contributing to global warming and shit, when we all know atop of this you're already a big contributer, but continue to ignore the fact that millions of dollars of damage has been done, many lives have been lost and a state in Australia has basically been torn apart by this tragedy.

How about you shut the fuck up

 

[C4]

Yes it is.

Do you have a better explanation for the melting glaciers of North America, Antartica and Greenland? No.

when we all know atop of this you're already a big contributer,

yea. sure.

I blame the Americans.

but continue to ignore the fact that millions of dollars of damage has been done, many lives have been lost and a state in Australia has basically been torn apart by this tragedy.

That doesn't affect me.

But Global Warming does.

 

[Quintastic One]

There's no such thing as global warming. Natural drastic climate change happens every couple of thousand years, this has been proven well....pretty convincingly. At the MOST you can say that greenhouse gas emissions have sped up the process of the next natural climate change, but this is by far not an apocalyptic event, and we are not all doomed as long as we can adapt. There is no fixing it, no reversing it. You can't just stop a natural occuring event from happening.

 

[Kaptain KnicKy]

C4 are you an Aussie or Yankee?

 

[Beer Money Army]

I'm still getting past the fact that some Yankee asshole comes on here, with what could almost be considered a clear fact, and bitches and whines about us contributing to global warming and shit, when we all know atop of this you're already a big contributer, but continue to ignore the fact that millions of dollars of damage has been done, many lives have been lost and a state in Australia has basically been torn apart by this tragedy.

How about you shut the fuck up

Knicky just read my mind there...

+rep added for that post

so C4 from the post there.. i am just assuming you couldnt care less about the peoples lives loss, not only that but house, estates, community...

G/warming pby won't happen until 100-1000 years...