The dialogue regarding the climate crisis has never been more pressing, but, looking across the front pages of news media, no one would ever understand the urgency. Today's reality has been predicted and lectured and researched for decades by scientists around the world.
The scientists had the answer. The petroleum and coal industries portrayed all sorts of nightmare scenarios and politicians caved. The weakness of the political resolve to prevent disastrous outcomes has been a testament to the lack of strength of people to latch onto survival in the face of greed.
01 - 10 Dec. 1997
Third session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 3), December 1997
The COP 3 took place from 1 to 10 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.
By Matt Simon
...The figure above (to the right, click here)) shows statistics extracted from the CNFDB, and provides a comparison with those numbers reported annually to the National Forestry Database (NFD). This chart shows the high variability in both number of fires and area burned in Canada per year....
...In fact,(click here) over 100 wildfires are burning across Alberta, Canada, right now, forcing nearly 30,000 people from their homes—an “unprecedented situation” in the region. The annual area burned in Canada has doubled since the 1970s, says Mike Flannigan, a fire scientist at Thompson Rivers University. (He wasn't involved in either of the new studies.) “A warmer world means more fire,” he says. “As the temperature warms, the atmosphere gets very efficient at sucking moisture out of dead fuels. So it means more fuels available to burn, which leads to high-intensity fires, which are difficult to impossible to extinguish.”
Northern boreal forests are the largest land biomes on the planet. When they burn, they release greenhouse gases from both vegetation and carbon-rich soils, which the first new paper, released in March, quantified. In fact, burning boreal forests spew between 10 and 20 times more carbon than fires in other ecosystems. Typically, the blazes account for 10 percent of global fire CO2 emissions annually, but they contributed 23 percent in 2021, thanks to severe heat waves and drought.
“We are facing a dangerous positive feedback between climate and boreal fires,” says lead author Bo Zheng of China’s Tsinghua University. “The slow recovery of soil microbial communities in forests after extreme wildfires weakens carbon sinks, and makes it difficult for them to fully absorb the large amount of carbon dioxide released during combustion.” That, Zheng adds, “will increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and promote global warming, further increasing the likelihood of extreme wildfires.”...
Northern boreal forests are the largest land biomes on the planet. When they burn, they release greenhouse gases from both vegetation and carbon-rich soils, which the first new paper, released in March, quantified. In fact, burning boreal forests spew between 10 and 20 times more carbon than fires in other ecosystems. Typically, the blazes account for 10 percent of global fire CO2 emissions annually, but they contributed 23 percent in 2021, thanks to severe heat waves and drought.
“We are facing a dangerous positive feedback between climate and boreal fires,” says lead author Bo Zheng of China’s Tsinghua University. “The slow recovery of soil microbial communities in forests after extreme wildfires weakens carbon sinks, and makes it difficult for them to fully absorb the large amount of carbon dioxide released during combustion.” That, Zheng adds, “will increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and promote global warming, further increasing the likelihood of extreme wildfires.”...
