Posted by Kromey at 3:33pm Mar 17 '10This was something that occurred to me last summer during Alaska's fire season, when nearly 3 million acres of boreal forest burned.
I only recently found numbers for these two factors:
Carbon released into the atmosphere per acre of boreal forest burned: 4 tons.
Carbon sequestered per acre of boreal forest: 1.2 tons.
Add them up, and you get a carbon deficit of 5.2 tons per acre of boreal forest burned. Doing the math, that's 15.6 gigatons of carbon deficit just from Alaska's wildfires. That alone accounts for 0.2% of global carbon production; factor in the numbers from Canada and Russia, and you're now looking at 7%. 7% is significant, considering that humans are harped on for mere fractions of a percent.
It should be noted that these numbers include all carbon emissions/sequestration, not merely CO2. It should also be noted that I'm not drawing any conclusions yet - it was something that I wanted to find out about last summer, and only just recently (i.e. less than 45 minutes ago) found the numbers that finally enabled me to do the math. I'm not even forming a hypothesis yet - this is quite simply an exercise in curiosity that I thought I'd share with y'all, so please think of the carbon emissions and flame appropriately!
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AGUFM.A51I0216M
http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Sequest_Final.pdf
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
http://www.nifc.gov/fire_info/ytd_state_2009.htm
Incidentally, 2004 was Alaska's worst fire season, burning more than 6.6 million acres. That's 34.3 gigatons of carbon, or 0.5% of global carbon emissions, again just from Alaska.
I only recently found numbers for these two factors:
Carbon released into the atmosphere per acre of boreal forest burned: 4 tons.
Carbon sequestered per acre of boreal forest: 1.2 tons.
Add them up, and you get a carbon deficit of 5.2 tons per acre of boreal forest burned. Doing the math, that's 15.6 gigatons of carbon deficit just from Alaska's wildfires. That alone accounts for 0.2% of global carbon production; factor in the numbers from Canada and Russia, and you're now looking at 7%. 7% is significant, considering that humans are harped on for mere fractions of a percent.
It should be noted that these numbers include all carbon emissions/sequestration, not merely CO2. It should also be noted that I'm not drawing any conclusions yet - it was something that I wanted to find out about last summer, and only just recently (i.e. less than 45 minutes ago) found the numbers that finally enabled me to do the math. I'm not even forming a hypothesis yet - this is quite simply an exercise in curiosity that I thought I'd share with y'all, so please think of the carbon emissions and flame appropriately!
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AGUFM.A51I0216M
http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Sequest_Final.pdf
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
http://www.nifc.gov/fire_info/ytd_state_2009.htm
Incidentally, 2004 was Alaska's worst fire season, burning more than 6.6 million acres. That's 34.3 gigatons of carbon, or 0.5% of global carbon emissions, again just from Alaska.
Food for thought - Kromey