Comments on: Nature on stunning new climate feedback: Beetle tree kill releases more carbon than fires

By: Sorghum Crow

Sorghum Crow — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:40:53 +0000

And don’t forget that the beetle-killed trees are excellent fuel for forest fires. I was in Idaho last summer and some of the forests provided a perfect air-fuel mix for enormous fires. This summer may be a bad one for fires and CO2.

By: Mauri Pelto

Mauri Pelto — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:48:44 +0000

I have hiked the same trails in the North Cascades of Washington to reach the glaciers we measure, every year for 25 years. After the warmth of 2003-2005 bark beetles have moved in and devastated the trees in one of the valleys, they will I suppose eat their way through the system, but in the meantime the forest is dying, and then forest fire danger will go up etc. I have a hard time seeing a silver lining to this. The unprecedented size of this outbreak, according to a seventy year resident of the valley, is in step with the rapid glacier loss in the same valley. Not as photogenic as some global warming impacts, but faster.

By: Pahbs

Pahbs — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:03:39 +0000

I been examining this damage in B.C. with satellite data from 2000-2006. The amount of damaged forest and the spread is starting and occurs across a regional scale. We are talking around 9-10 million hectares of insect damaged/destroyed trees.

By: tidal

tidal — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:43:35 +0000

Joe said: “This catastrophic climate change impact and its carbon-cycle feedback were not foreseen even a decade ago — which suggests future climate impacts will bring other equally unpleasant surprises, especially if we don’t reverse our emissions path immediately.”

Kind of reminds one of “unknown unknowns”… and, grimly, they don’t seem to be symmetrically balanced in terms of good news/bad news surprises…

And of course, there was this from last year:
“Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged 320 million large trees in Gulf Coast forests, which weakened the role the forests play in storing carbon from the atmosphere. The damage has led to these forests releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. ”
http://www.nasa.gov/ mission_pages/ hurricanes/ archives/ 2007/ katrina_carbon.html
“trees killed by Katrina will release about as much global warming pollution into the air as all the trees across the nation soak in over the course of one year, according to a study by Jeff Chambers, a Tulane University biology professor.” http://www.npr.org/ templates/ story/ story.php?storyId=17814049

By: greg

greg — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:03:16 +0000

And what of the CO2 emmissions from the inevitable fires? I wonder at the possibility that while large fires will indeed release a pulse of CO2, the long term impacts might be less clear. fire will open up some of these now dead forests and release a mighty amount of nutrients; the natural outcome will be millions fo acres of rapidly growing, carbon fixing saplings. While the entire saga will likely still be a net atmospheric CO2 contributor, we ought not assume that the long term impacts of the fire itself will augment this problem. In fact, there is large likelihood that fire suppression is a part of the problem here. natural, uninterupted fire cycles might have created a greater patchwork of forest ages that could have slowed the beetles’ progression.

My point: don’t let’s get all down on fire.

In fact, even the beetles are a great regulator of landscape level diversity. Clearly the problem is a climate change mediated population explosion that is scary is hell, but the beetles themselves ain’t all bad (I am not suggesting this post says otherwise; I just feel compelled to defend the little critters: this is OUR fault).

By: David B. Benson

David B. Benson — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:11:46 +0000

Source of biomass for bio-energy?

By: paulm

paulm — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:31:09 +0000

I think we are on the other side of a tipping point here. see …

http://uk.reuters.com/ article/ environmentNews/ idUKL1629341920080417

Basically we are now hot enough that forest are going to be burning out of control from now on with dire consequences (Beetle or not).

By: HumansFirst - EarthSecond

HumansFirst - EarthSecond — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:29:48 +0000

What you are descibing is the perfect script for another science fiction movie. Maybe Al Gore could direct.

The earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age. There is nothing unusual about the earth’s current temperatures. It has been warmer in the recent past. This is just more speculative hand-wringing alarmism with a big dab of science fiction; fear mongering at its worst.

I guess it helps sell books, huh Joe?

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:05:46 +0000

HumansLast: The Earth is now overshooting any recent temperatures. And T is rising much faster than it has before.

Helps sell books, HumansLast? Who knew you were a comedian?

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:05:05 +0000

270MT is not good news, but is small beer compared to the 8000MT of fossil fuel we burn each year.

The situation in Indonesia is worse.

http://www.wetlands.org/ publication.aspx?id=51a80e5f-4479-4200-9be0-66f1aa9f9ca9

**************************************************************
It was found that current likely CO2 emissions of drained peatlands caused by decomposition only, amounts to 632 Mt/y (between 355 and 874 Mt/y). This emission will increase in coming decades unless land management practices and peatland development plans are changed, and will continue well beyond the 21st century.
In addition, over 1997-2006 an estimated average of 1400 Mt/y in CO2 emissions was caused by peatland fires that are also associated with drainage and degradation. The current total peatland CO2 emission of 2000 Mt/y equals almost 8% of global emissions from fossil fuel burning. These emissions have been rapidly increasing since 1985 and will further increase unless action is taken. Over 90% of this emission originates from Indonesia, which puts the country in 3rd place (after the USA and China) in the global CO2 emission ranking.
**************************************************************

By: HumansFirst EarthSecond

HumansFirst EarthSecond — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:20:09 +0000

Joe,

I’m not quitting my day job.

So I take that to mean book sales are not in the “robust” catagory? Try a different topic next time. Maybe a survivalist cookbook, with a chapter on cannibalistic delicacies? (Ted Turner could assist with some recipes)

What about Holocene Maximum? Medieval warm period?

Astrophysicists are predicting another “little ice age” soon.

By: Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:35:25 +0000

Every bit helps or hurts. You can see this with the fisking that Joe Romm’s wedge proposals met. Yes we might need more, we also might need less, but to refuse to do anything because we need to wait for the perfect proposal is to guarantee failure. It is not unreasonable to suspect the motives for these demands are to avoid taking any action. We need to start taking action now.

By: David B. Benson

David B. Benson — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:05:52 +0000

HumansFirst EarthSecond wrote “Astrophysicists are predicting another “little ice age” soon.”

I don’t believe you.

By: Ludwig

Ludwig — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:31:42 +0000

David B. Benson: The Livingston and Penn paper (National Solar Observatory in Tucson) entitled: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″ is suggesting that another “litttle ice age” could happen soon.

By: Bill McEwen

Bill McEwen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:44:51 +0000

25 million acres in Canada. 1.5 million acres in Colorado. .5 million acres
in S. CA. This is just part of the toll on the western North American continent because of these climate-forced, temperature driven bark beetle
infestations. And who is going to guarantee these ecosystems are going to
return when we’re changing the whole climate system that made them possible in the first place?
In the Colorado Rockies, the bark beetle infestations are already impacting
key watersheds that feed water to millions of Westerners. How soon will
these catastrophic beetle infestations devastate the California Sierra’s, our
other key watershed? What will this very abrupt, non-linear series of events mean for already decreasing snowpack, and streamflow? These
bark beetle infestations, and the other FOREST DISTURBANCE REGIMES
such as drought and fire are striking at the very heart of our civilization.
Water is life, so they say. What do we do when the watersheds have all
been destroyed?

By: Jay Alt

Jay Alt — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:08:27 +0000

June in Estes Park. Photos 66 - 72. retching
http://picasaweb.google.com/ ethniegroves/ EstesParkJune2008#5217487469192550642