From the Department of Obvious Science and the USDA Forest Service – Pacific Northwest Research Station, comes this shocking headline:
Washington’s forests will lose stored carbon as area burned by wildfire increases
Even small increases in area burned could have significant impacts on carbon storage
Forests in the Pacific Northwest store more carbon than any other region in the United States, but our warming climate may undermine their storage potential.
A new study conducted by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington has found that, by 2040, parts of Washington State could lose as much as a third of their carbon stores, as an increasing area of the state’s forests is projected to be burned by wildfire. The study—published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Ecological Applications—is the first to use statistical models and publicly available Forest Inventory and Analysis data to estimate the effects of a warming climate on carbon storage and fluxes on Washington’s forests.
“When considering the use of forests to store carbon, it will be critical to consider the increasing risk of wildfire,” said Crystal Raymond, a research biologist based at the station’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory and lead author of the study. “Especially in the West, where climate-induced changes in fire are expected to be a key agent of change.”
Trees remove and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide, acting as important stores, or “sinks,” of carbon that help to offset its accumulation in the atmosphere. When trees and other woody material in the forest are burned by fire, they release carbon back to the atmosphere, mostly as carbon dioxide, where it may once again act as a greenhouse gas that promotes warming. This land-atmosphere exchange of carbon is increasingly of interest to land managers seeking ways to actively manage forests to store carbon and help mitigate greenhouse gases.
To explore what effect climate-driven changes in wildfire might have on the ability of Washington’s forests to act as carbon sinks, Raymond and station research ecologist Don McKenzie used a novel approach. They combined published forest-inventory data, fire-history data, and statistical models of area burned to estimate historical and future carbon carrying capacity of three regions in Washington—the Western Cascades, the Eastern Cascades, and the Okanogan Highlands—based on potential forest productivity and projections of 21st century area burned.
“Forests on both the eastern and western slopes of the Cascade Range will lose carbon stored in live biomass because area burned across the state is expected to increase,” Raymond said. “Even small increases in area burned can have large consequences for carbon stored in living and dead biomass.”
The researchers looked at live biomass, which includes living trees and vegetation, as well as nonliving biomass in the form of coarse woody debris, which includes dead standing trees and downed logs. Both contribute to the carbon cycle, but in different ways—living biomass removes carbon from the atmosphere as vegetation grows, and coarse woody debris releases carbon over time as the material decomposes.
Raymond and McKenzie projected forests of the Western Cascades to be most sensitive to climate-driven increases in fire, losing anywhere from 24 to 37 percent of their live biomass and from 15 to 25 percent of their coarse woody debris biomass by 2040. These forests store significant carbon and typically burn with high severity, killing many trees and consuming coarse woody debris.
On the other side of the mountains, the researchers also projected a decrease in live biomass by 2040—of anywhere between 17 and 26 percent in the Eastern Cascades and in the Okanogan Highlands—but no change in coarse woody debris biomass, or possibly even an increase, because coarse woody debris biomass increases as trees are killed by fire and subsequent low-severity fires burn only a small portion of it.
“Changes in fire regimes in a warming climate can limit our potential to use forests in the Pacific Northwest to store additional carbon and to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Raymond said.
Understanding the possible effects of more area burned by fire can help managers decide whether forests need to be actively managed for their fire potential to minimize carbon loss.
To read more about the study, visit http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-1851.1.
The Pacific Northwest Research Station is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. It has 11 laboratories and centers located in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington and about 425 employees.
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From SOS Forests:
Data are from the National Interagency Fire Center.
There are some evident trends.
1. Total acres burned has increased from the 1960’s to this Century, from an average of 4.6 million acres per year to 6.8 million acres per year.
2. Average acres per fire has also increased, from a low in the 1970’s of 21 acres per fire to 83 acres per fire in this Century.
3. Number of fires per year has decreased from a high (1975-1984) of nearly 190,000 fires per year to 83,000 fires per year this Century.
Fewer but larger fires this Century, and more acres burned in total.
To me this suggests a legacy of poor fuel management rather than “global warming”.
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Thankfully, the atmosphere, ocean and biosphere will take up every bit of it.
crosspatch wrote:
“Only partially true. The fires actually SEQUESTERED more carbon than would otherwise be the case. Yes, the burning caused the release of carbon stored as wood. But that carbon would have all been released anyway as those trees died. The only thing that changed was the timing of it and the coming years will actually see a reduction in carbon release because there will be fewer trees decaying now that they have burned. It evens out. BUT! The charcoal that is left is very stable, will be covered with debris and buried. This carbon will remain out of the system for thousands, perhaps millions of years. You can dig today and find charcoal from fires thousands of years ago. That is carbon that was sequestered by nature and never released to the atmosphere by decay.”
Very interesting. I looked around to see if anyone had done peer reviewed studies.
Holocene Climate and Carbon Sequestration via Black Carbon Burial in Sediments
http://thescholarship.ecu.edu/handle/10342/3731
…such wildfires may also have led to CO2 sequestration by formation of pyrogenic black carbon (BC) followed by its subsequent burial. In this manner, climate-driven wildfire occurrence and corresponding BC formation and burial is a negative feedback loop in the carbon cycle.
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Their results were inconclusive but these guys fared better.
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A Holocene record of climate-driven shifts in coastal carbon sequestration
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008GL036875.shtml
A sediment core collected in the mesohaline portion of Chesapeake Bay was found to contain periods of increased delivery of refractory black carbon (BC) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The BC was most likely produced by biomass combustion during four centennial-scale dry periods as indicated by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), beginning in the late Medieval Warm Period of 1100 CE. In contrast, wetter periods were associated with increased non-BC organic matter influx into the bay … The finding that carbon sequestration in the coastal zone responds to climate fluctuations at both centennial and millennial scales through fire occurrence and nutrient delivery has implications for past and future climate predictions. Drought-induced fires may lead, on longer timescales, to greater carbon sequestration and, therefore, represent a negative climate feedback.
Related studies
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2010NE/finalprogram/abstract_168807.htm
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2009SE/finalprogram/abstract_154941.htm
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But these guys argue that soil type affects the likelihood of charcoal being burnt in subsequent fires.
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Biomass burning in boreal forests and peatlands: Effects on ecosystem carbon losses and soil carbon stabilization as black carbon
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011AGUFMGC34C..04T
Our studies of combustion severity and black carbon concentrations in boreal soils show a negative relationship between concentrations of black carbon and organic carbon in soils post-fire.
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Biochar (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
Switching from slash and burn to slash and char techniques in Brazil can decrease both deforestation of the Amazon basin and carbon dioxide emission, as well as increase crop yields. Slash and burn leaves only 3% of the carbon from the organic material in the soil.[37]
Slash and char can sequester up to 50% of the carbon in a highly stable form.[38] Returning the biochar into the soil rather than removing it all for energy production reduces the need for nitrogen fertilizers, thereby reducing cost and emissions from fertilizer production and transport.[39] Additionally, by improving the soil tilth, fertility, and productivity, biochar – enhanced soils can indefinitely sustain agricultural production, whereas non-amended soils quickly become depleted of nutrients, forcing farmers to abandon the fields. This produces a continuous slash and burn cycle and the continued loss of tropical rainforest. Using pyrolysis to produce bio-energy also has the added benefit of not requiring infrastructure changes the way processing biomass for cellulosic ethanol does. Additionally, the biochar produced can be applied by the currently used tillage machinery or equipment used to apply fertilizer.[40]
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Of all the carbon capture schemes I’ve read about bio-char looks like one of the most promising. But I think better forestry management with planned burns is better than some of the industrial processes being proposed.
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‘Biochar’ goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/charcoal-carbon
Giant microwave ovens that can “cook” wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist.
Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years. The technique could take out billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.
Fast-growing trees such as pine could be “farmed” to act specifically as carbon traps — microwaved, buried and replaced with a fresh crop to do the same thing again.
Turney has built a 5m-long prototype of his microwave, which produces a tonne of CO2 for $65. He plans to launch his company, Carbonscape, in the UK this month to build the next generation of the machine, which he hopes will process more wood and cut costs further.
He is not alone in touting the benefits of this type of charcoal, known as biochar or biocharcoal. The Gaia theorist, James Lovelock, and Nasa’s James Hansen have both been outspoken about the potential benefits of biochar, arguing that it is one of the most powerful potential solutions to climate change.
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You gotta love the name of one of the directors -Mike Ashburn.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
July 24, 2012 at 3:42 pm
When I was a kid we lived in Ibadan, Nigeria. We furriners spoke of this ‘forest fire’ thing and people asked us to explain what it was. “The forest catches fire and it all burns!”
They laughed at us at the thought of such a thing. Nothing was more impossible than the burning of a jungle. “What a silly idea! Ha ha!”
Hi Crispin, I was a geologist with the Geol. Survey of Nigeria in the 60s working up in Northern Nigeria.dry savannah. Global warm was already a fact of life with temps in the 40s in the dry season. During the short rainy season, if you saw a drop of rain fall and you were 20 metres from shelter you were soaked in seconds and could barely see the shelter. I made the mistake of bringing temperate country clinical thermometers with me, They blew up on the first day I was there! The trees in the scattered trees in savannah grassland (called orchard bush because of the spacing) were fireproof! Now why do you suppose that is?
The word “impact” always gets lots of use when alarmists publish stories on warming/climate change, so that the story has more impact.
Chris says:
“Cut down the trees and make them into houses. Carbon sequestered.”
Yep, but not just houses. Glulam is made from strips of wood glued together to make beams larger than any tree the wood came from. You’ve probably seen it used in kitchen tables and worktops (it is very resistant to warping), or in the roof of your local swimming pool (chlorine attacks steel beams).
Large section wood is not the fire hazard you might think. In a fire the outer layer becomes charred and insulates the interior (which is why people chop firewood into small pieces). In the past wood has been used because of its fire resistance. They were called “slow burning mills” (i.e. they burned but didn’t collapse).
Or instead of recycling paper, (which uses lots of chemicals to bleach it and which cannot be done indefinitely as the fibres become shorter each time), turn it into a slurry and pump it into abandoned coal mines. Harvest any methane and leave the rest. Laying down the carbon economy of the next interglacial 🙂
A forest fire will prevent methane emissions from decaying organic material.
Methanogenesis or biomethanation is the formation of methane by microbes known as methanogens. Organisms capable of producing methane have been identified only from the domain Archaea, a group phylogenetically distinct from both eukaryotes and bacteria, although many live in close association with anaerobic bacteria. The production of methane is an important and widespread form of microbial metabolism. In most environments, it is the final step in the decomposition of biomass.
Any study of forest fires and GHGs that doesn’t include methane is junk IMO.
Local forestry officials are more honest, blaming a lack of logging and an increase in insects.
Lack of logging is partly caused by the murderous “Endangered Species” tyranny and partly by the murderous “Free Trade” tyranny.
Bugs are partly caused by the murderous EPA’s insane insecticide rules and partly by wind turbines slaughtering bats in order to increase consumption of coal and natural gas.
In other words, the problem is caused by a multi-flank multi-decade genocidal siege by giant corporations and stock speculators, all aimed at enriching themselves and starving the poor.
You know what else is released in a hydrocarbon inferno? Water! The most deadly substance on Earth.
We all agree that buildup of C02 is dangerous for the planet. The problem is that few have come up with a viable solution that will be adopted by enough nations. The US can cut back on burning coal and oil but our efforts will amount to little if China and India and others continue to increase their C02 emissions. There is one solution that everyone can agree on: convert the world’s deserts to forest and grassland. There is a great proposal at http://www.adamsmithtoday.com : “How to reduce C02 in the air by 8 billion tons per year”. It provides a workable solution that will actually generate a return and be accepted by both developed and underdeveloped nations.
[Moderator’s Note: Let’s be real clear here: you are NOT Arthur Hughes, the author of the article you link to. You are a student at Western Connecticut State University who has no clue as to what we all agree to and apparently has no clue about the issues. If you wish to continue to comment here, get up to speed and be honest. If this is a drive-by…. well don’t let the door hit on your way out. -REP]
“Washington’s forests will lose stored carbon as area burned by wildfire increases”
Well, where did you park your squad car, Dick Tracey? I would have never figured that out if not your insights gleamed from grant money.
Before blaming ‘global warming’ for fires, maybe these ‘experts’ should look at what has actually been happening in the Pacific Northwest–gradual cooling, not warming, for the past 14 years. So does this mean we should blame global cooling for the change in fires?
Another factor is the killing of significant acreage of trees by bark beatles, making for larger, hotter fires.
Also, the largest forest fires occurred about a century ago–huge areas burned because there weren’t enough people to put them out. A number of years ago, the forest service adopted a policy of letting many firest burn, rather than putting them out, on the crazy idea that it cleaned out the underbrush and made future fires less likely.
Steve says:
July 24, 2012 at 2:30 pm
Wild fires never happened before 1960???
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They weren’t our fault till then, that is, nobody figured out a way to tax us for them till then.
Gunga Din –
speaking of taxes:
24 July: Forbes: Larry Bell: Carbon Taxomania: Bipartisan Stupidity On Steroids
If it wasn’t bad enough to impose an Obamacare tax on the right to breathe, some, including certain very misguided conservatives, now propose a new tactic to tax the air. This isn’t the first time that contrived climate alarmism premised upon human CO2 causation has was attempted using a doomed cap-and-tax plan, followed by draconian EPA regulatory attacks on fossil energy under cover of its Clean Air Act. The latest gambit is to add a carbon tax to the anti-fossil assault arsenal. And this time, it isn’t only left-wing lunacy.
On July 11, the usually conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) co-hosted a hushed-up meeting with the liberal Climate Crisis Coalition (CCC) to discuss how to enact a carbon tax in a lame duck Congressional session either this fall or in the 113th Congress. That was the fifth meeting they have sponsored on this subject. While the most recent gathering, the “Price Carbon Campaign/Lame Duck Initiative: A Carbon Pollution Tax in Fiscal and Tax Reform”, was represented by Washington Examiner sources as simply some economists brainstorming, the meeting’s discussion topics suggest a very clear agenda. The first session addressed “Detoxifying climate policy for conservatives”. Session II was titled “Framing and selling a carbon pollution tax.”AEI’s director of economic policy studies, Kevin Hassett, a free-market economist and regular National Review contributor, defended his organization’s role in hosting the carbon tax meeting, stating: ”In recent years, AEI has been accused of being both in the pocket of energy companies and organizing to advocate a carbon tax. Neither is true. AEI has been, and will continue to be, an intellectually curious place where products aren’t influenced by interested parties, and ideas are welcome in seeking solutions for difficult public policy problems.”.
Yet the participation and messaging certainly wasn’t dominated by curious, idea-probing conservatives. Representatives were present from numerous liberal groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, Public Citizen, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Brookings Institute, the Climate Action Network and Clean Air-Cooled Planet…
Earlier that same week, former South Carolina GOP Congressman Bob Ingliss, launched a new organization to promote carbon taxes, the Energy and Enterprise Initiative. The non-profit was funded by the decidedly left-tilting Rockefeller Family Fund and the Energy Foundation. Ingliss, who no longer has anything to lose, had previously proposed a carbon tax bill in the last Congress. He was subsequently defeated in a primary contest by a stronger conservative, now-Representative Trey Gowdy…
First, there is no proven climate crisis, not one caused by human CO2 emissions…not by anything else we have influence over…not any pending catastrophe at all. At least not until the next in a regularly scheduled series of Ice Ages arrives. All the really scary stuff that gets dutifully trumpeted in the “mainstream media” is based totally upon theoretical general circulation computer models that have no predictive capability whatsoever.
As an e-mail comment expressed by one of the climate modelers in connection with the notorious ClimateGate scandal candidly observes: “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Another admits: “…clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.”.
Despite a lack of any empirical evidence that a global warming crisis exists, much less one caused by human carbon emissions, our government has pumped many billions of research dollars and has imposed many billions more in regulatory costs purportedly intended to address this “problem”…
The hard fact is that there is no viable alternative energy source which can even seriously begin to replace dependence upon fossil energy, either for electrical power or for automotive fuel. There are certainly none that can compete in free markets, not even with massive subsidies…
In light of these unjustifiable costs, arguments that a carbon tax makes more sense than any other device which imposes horrendously expensive restrictions upon a fundamental atmospheric agricultural nutrient are completely air-brained.
Penalizing free and natural plant food as a “pollutant” is blooming idiocy!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/24/carbon-taxomania-bipartisan-stupidity-on-steroids/
From what we are told, de-forestation is considerable, though by no means recent. Serengeti used to be forest, yet, since trees store carbon naturally, we are told, their loss means more aerial c02. However, the paradox is that there are more trees than 100 years ago, and even in the USA (according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation). According to them, By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.” The greatest gains have been seen on the East Coast (with average volumes of wood per acre almost doubling since the ’50s) which was the area most heavily logged by European settlers beginning in the 1600s, soon after their arrival, Today, the preservation of national parks and planting more trees than are harvested, so it looks like in the USA there will be more trees and forests than hitherto, and therefore, according to the logic of this study, by inference, there should have been more c02 100 years ago. At least 500ppm.
since this is not the case, the study is somewhat spurious. By quite magnitiudes in fact
24 July: Reuters: Susanna Twidale/Stian Reklev Barclays sells carbon project developer Tricorona
Barclays BARCR.UL has sold Sweden-based carbon project developer Tricorona back to the company’s management, the UK-headquartered investment bank said on Tuesday, two years after it bought the firm for $159 million…
Barclays bought Tricorona in July 2010 for around $159 million, representing a 40 percent premium over the company’s shares before deal was announced.
Back then, the U.N.-backed carbon credits Tricorona originates and sells were priced around 13 euros each, a far cry from the record low of 2.82 euros plumbed by benchmark futures last week.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/24/us-barclays-tricorona-idINBRE86N0JN20120724
“To explore what effect climate-driven changes in wildfire might have on the ability of Washington’s forests to act as carbon sinks, Raymond and station research ecologist Don McKenzie used a novel approach.”
They sure did! You can find that novel in the environ-mental fiction section at your favorite book store. We have had very few days that met the average daily highs or daily average lows since the middle of January! We have been consistently running 5 – 10F cooler than ‘normal’ and have experienced continued higher levels of rain up to last weekend. I struggled to find a dry spot on the lawn for our 4th of July barbeque and celebration.. and we wore jackets when we were lighting fireworks off after dark! This week we are forecast to meet our average temps and have no rain. It is just dry enough now to proceed with excavation for a garage/shop foundation, a project that had to be repeatedly put off as it would have turned into ‘an ole pig wallow’ in short order!
MtK
“Raymond and McKenzie projected forests of the Western Cascades to be most sensitive to climate-driven increases in fire, losing anywhere from 24 to 37 percent of their live biomass and from 15 to 25 percent of their coarse woody debris biomass by 2040. ”
… so they pulled a 30% projected impact number out of a hat and… voila!! Their results show a 30% impact. wow. Stupid “normal science”.
I really hope we didn’t spend our tax dollars on this.
Next up: MacArthur Genius Grant to study if excessive eating may cause weight gain
Even if one accepted the premise that increasing temperatures will result in long term increases in fires (I am skeptical of this since total acres burned is poorly correlated with temperature), and neglecting sequestration due to char burial discussed above, the only way this would reduce net carbon sequestration would be if total live and debris biomass decreased. It seems quite implausible that warmer temperatures and higher CO2 concentrations that the authors appear to postulate (I say appear since the abstract does not state the underlying temperature, CO2 or precipitation assumptions and the paper is paywalled) would reduce total biomass.
On the positive side the projected changes in biomass by 2040 are testable and relatively near term as projections go. Does anyone have a reference for data on biomass and trend in the Pacific Northwest and other areas?
“…forests need to be actively managed for their fire potential to minimize carbon loss.”
Ummmm, how about managing them to minimise loss of human life?
[Moderator’s Comment: OK. I cheated a little… I said, I know where this person is, checked the IP and was right. I’ve got friends close by and they have stories to tell; I hope yours has as good an ending. The blunt, good sense that characterizes your people needs to re-assert itself. Best wishes. -REP]
Biochar is just one of those ideas that has the ring of truth to it, the process put carbon into the ground, provides a large surface area for beneficial microbial life to exist, and it’s absorbency moderates wide swing of nutrient levels in the soil. I’ve thought very seriously about trying it in my own garden on about half of it to see how it works out for me. There is enough conflicting reports in literature that it may well be a YMMV thing, even if it does make sense to me.
AGW protagonists aren’t interested in human life. They’re interested in their own dogma
my previous post:
“…forests need to be actively managed for their fire potential to minimize carbon loss.”
Ummmm, how about managing them to minimise loss of human life?
[Moderator’s Comment: OK. I cheated a little… I said, I know where this person is, checked the IP and was right. I’ve got friends close by and they have stories to tell; I hope yours has as good an ending. The blunt, good sense that characterizes your people needs to re-assert itself. Best wishes. -REP]
P Wilson has picked up the point I saw too. Didn’t mean to be out of line if I was. Even though I was aiming soley at what I perceived to be yet another example of the “humanity last” attitude of CAGW proponents, did I inadvertantly smear proper scientific inquiry in that sometimes science qua science sounds like that? Also, yes we have had some terrible bushfires in Victoria, Australia in recent years, just as you have had in California, so maybe my angle was subconsciously influenced by a raw nerve. And we will re-assert ourselves next election when we ditch our watermelon government and its crazy co2 tax. All strength to WUWT! You are a friend to Australian voters.
The idea of man made or controlled carbon sequestration is beyond stupid. It is stupid to the nth power.
So, basically the Environistas/Climonistas have caused the problem by stopping the culling of vegetation. Irony, in the end?
Am I wrong?
Think about it!