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Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
Public information officer Theresa Mendoza walks on a ridge top as the Wallow Fire burns behind her outside of Eagar, Ariz., Wednesday, June 8, 2011.
At a glance, images of the forest fire raging in Arizona and the volcano erupting in Chile seem to suggest they are filling the atmosphere with gases and debris that will mess with the global climate, but experts say this week's events, in isolation, aren't much to worry about.
The Willow fire in Arizona has charred at least 336,000 acres so far, filling the atmosphere with smoke, soot, and the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It joins a string of fires that have raged elsewhere in the U.S., including Texas and Florida.
The amount of greenhouse gases from these types of fires "can be quite substantial," Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist at Northern Arizona University told me today.
To illustrate how substantial, he pointed to work led by Christine Wiedinmyer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, that shows forest fires in the U.S. between 2001 and 2008 accounted for six to eight percent of total annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
One fire alone, however, is a blip compared to the emissions from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal to power the global economy.
"A common misconception is that fire emissions are huge compared to fossil fuel emissions," Beverly Law, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University told me today. "They are not, really. Fossil fuel emissions trump everything."
Fire projections
But the fires burning in Arizona and elsewhere along the southern tier of U.S. do fit projections from models of global climate change that suggest the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cause the southwest, over the long term, to become drier, Law added.
"We just can't say there is a direct cause and effect right there," she said.
In fact, historical forest management decisions in Arizona play a major role in the severity of fires there, Hurteau said. In the ancient past, the ponderosa pine forests burned frequently and, as a result, were open and had a grassy understory. The grass, in turn, served as fuel for forest fires.
Beginning in the 1800s, pioneer settlers moved west and grazed the forests with their livestock, which reduced the fuels. Then, in the 1900s, a policy of fire suppression led to increased forest density. "Now we've got these really dense forests that are prone to this type of wildfire event," he said.
The effect of this management on forest fire ecology is independent of the climate signal. What's more, it is the weather on any given day that drives the severity of fire.
"To say that climate change is causing that weather on that day, we can't do that because climate is the longer term trend," Hurteau said.
Nevertheless, long term climate trends suggest the southwest will become drier, thus more prone to wildfire. More wildfire, in turn will put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which should lead to more changes in the global climate, he noted.
Ho / Reuters
A plume of light-coloured ash stretches along the edge of the Andes in this natural-colour satellite image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra on the morning of June 6, 2011, as the eruption at the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano chain continues.
Volcanoes and cooling
Volcanoes, on the other hand, can potentially cool the climate by spewing the gas sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere where it blocks sunlight from reaching Earth, thus causing cooling. The eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile, however, doesn’t appear to have done that.
"It wasn't a massive injection of SO2," Alan Robock, an environmental scientist who studies the connection between volcanoes and climate, told me today. "While it shut down air traffic over Argentina and Chile because of the ash, we won't be able to see the climate effect."
The last time a volcanic eruption cooled the climate was the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused global temperatures to cool by about half a degree Celsius for a couple of years.
The dramatic images of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle show a giant ash cloud. The particles will fall out quickly, creating havoc locally, but they don't have a long-term climate effect.
A cooling effect will eventually comes from an explosive eruption that puts sulfur into the stratosphere, Charles Stern, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder told me today.
"And that's good, we could use a little cooling right now," he said.
In fact, scientists have begun to discuss the idea of intentionally filling the stratosphere with sulfur to mimic the cooling effect of a Pinatubo-style eruption. Stern and Robock, though, said this geoengineering approach isn't a good idea due to the costs and other side effects.
"I think we are just going to have to wait for a volcano to do it," Stern said.
More stories on fires, volcanoes and climate change
- Photos: Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano eruption seen from space
- Photos: Raging Arizona fire continues to blaze
- Volcano could mean cooling, acid rain
- Could warming trigger volcanoes, quakes
- U.N.: Warming makes for bigger forest fires
- Forests in flames: Scientists see warming ties
John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).
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Just like the long term climate trends suggested less snow. Oops. There is still record snow piled up and hasn't melted yet. And they also suggested more and stronger hurricanes and tornadoes but during the last 30 years of warming the number of violent tornadoes and tropical cyclones went down. Oops. And of course then there is the long term drought for Australia that turned into flooding, the ever rising temperatures from CO2 that haven't gone up in over a decade. Oops.
Yes, this year there were finally more storms and more tornadoes but that has occurred during a La Nina like in 1974. Those are cooler Pacific waters not warmer. The same cooler water La Nina is the big factor in the drought in Texas.
The latest study claims that summers will get hotter and that it will start in the tropics. But for the last 20 years they were telling us that the poles were more sensitive and that warming would start at the poles.
Keep making it up and one of these days they might get something right.
economykiller
Warming started in the Arctic a long time ago and continues ahead of the rest of the planet.
Nobody EVER said less snow everywhere. More snow in some places is entirely consistent with global warming.
The claim that temperatures have not been going up in over a decade is an outright lie. The long-term trend continues unabated.
Hurricanes and tornadoes are inherently hard to predict.
CO2 is still a greenhouse gas, so we would predict future warming even if the temperature signal wasn't apparent yet.
Nine of the last ten years have been the hottest on record.
Since we started taking records. They haven't been the hottest though. During the Cretaceous era of our wonderful planet the temperature was about 40 degrees hotter then our hottest day in areas of the world. Way before smokestacks and tailpipes. I am not saying that we don't need to invest in renewable and effective and cleaner energy, because we do, until we invent colonization of other worlds. This is the only planet we have but the way the Econuts out there (that make a killing off of people trying to help the environment; google the self bought carbon coupons that companies sell to get rich off of people) have a lot of people convinced the world is going to end the day after tomorrow by flooding and other natural disasters (that have been occurring since this planet started and it makes you wonder if it is happening so fast why did Al Gore buy a coastline mansion) that some people want to shut everything down now to stop the changes.
BobB
Carbon Dioxide was also extremely high during the Cretaceous. Yes, before smokestacks and tailpipes.
This is so because, at present, the only viable theory for Hothouse climates is that they come about as a result of elevated CO2 concentrations, which in turn are due to long term changes in the Earth’s carbon cycle. The CO2 theory has many problems, some of which I’ll discuss below, but no theory without elevated CO2 has been able to even come close to accounting for the Hothouse states. These climates would be just dandy as a natural test of the Earth’s sensitivity to long lived greenhouse gas concentrations were it not for one nasty fact: it is very, very difficult to get an accurate idea of how high the CO2 concentrations were so far back in time (see Crowley and Berner or Broadly Misleading on RC). For example, estimates for the Eocene range from values similar to modern CO2 concentrations all the way up to 15 times pre-industrial CO2. This unpleasantly large range represents uncertainties in the proxies used to estimate CO2 in the distant past. Various general circulation models can achieve largely ice-free polar conditions with CO2 between 4 and 8 times present concentrations, though even at those levels there are difficulties in accounting for the mildness of the winters. And up until recently it was thought that the tropical temperatures in such simulations were far warmer than reality — but more about that anon.
According to the theories it was the same or up to 15 times what it is currently. If it was the same then we should be roasting right now. The problem is that we are an eyeblink at best in the history of the Earth. We know a little about that history but there is quite a bit we don't know or understand yet. Do I agree that we need to find viable long term solutions to our energy needs? Most definitely. Do I think we need to kill what we do have right now before we find those solutions? Most definitely not. All that would do is drive our species backwards. Preaching doom is going to get us as a species no where. Finding viable solutions would do much more to solve our problems then screaming from the top of our lungs "Do what I tell you because I made a movie about!" Even Al Gore bought an ocean front mansion. If he was truly worried about sea levels rising to disastrous levels in the extremely near future wouldn't that seem moronic at best?
" Finding viable solutions would do much more to solve our problems then screaming from the top of our lungs"
The point is that we are not finding viable solutions fast enough because there is an entire industry devoted to denying there is a problem. We won't find viable solutions fast enough until we incentivize the market to do so, and that requires putting a price on carbon. There is no other way.
"The point is that we are not finding viable solutions fast enough because there is an entire industry devoted to denying there is a problem."
This is a ridiculous conclusion. In a world with several billion people, you don't need a single soul from this "industry" to find solutions. The solutions are not available because no one has found anything that can work on a global scale.
Is it possible that fossil fuel is responsible for climate changes? Sure. Do we understand climate change? Not at all, because the "scientists" are as corrupt as the "industry" you claim is out to prove them idiots. How can I say this? Many "climate scientists" are looking for a particular conclusion, and are funded in large part by people wanting a particular outcome. This is just as fraudulent as any corporation funding research to prove their own products are the best.
Fact is we are not going to agree until those so angry with progress are willing to stop overstating facts, and work towards progress on a cleaner environment, because that seems to be in everyone's interest whether or not it affects the climate.
This is all driven by ignorance, arrogance- and a strong desire for the short-term profit. Denial of global warming was one of the biggest growth industries of the last decade, and what fanciful changes it has undergone.
Remember all the morons claiming volcanic activity put more carbon dioxide into the air than our use of fossil fuels did? As this article mentions, SULFUR dioxide gas emitted from volcanoes has a cooling effect- CARBON dioxide is the result of a combustion process, not a geological process. Worldwide, volcanoes do emit about 200 million tons of CO2 over an average year- but fossil fuel carbon emission tops 26.8 BILLION tons over the same period.
For volcanoes to emit matching levels of CARBON dioxide would require a rather impressive mass sacrifice: hundreds of thousands of bodies, if not millions, dumped into lakes of lava in the biggest hominid roast of all time. If we actually have to engage in this horrid activity to make the reality match the wild exaggerations of morons... let's start with all the shills of Big Oil willing to sacrifice the future of humanity on the alter of greed.
The thing is though is that if you want to reduce CO2 levels you can plant more trees and other types of plants. Instead in order to produce ethanol so we can "reduce" emissions we are cutting down one of the biggest CO2 scrubbers on the planet to make room to grow corn. Both sides are trying to keep the income coming in for their particular side instead of actually focusing on long term effects. When you go to walk a mile it isn't smart to walk backwards for a half a mile before you go walk that mile. If you think that the Global Warming people aren't out to make a buck look up Al Gore and Carbon Coupons and you will see it is just as much a cash grab on that side as it is on the side of fossil fuels.
Like I said before the best and most responsible action is to start looking for long term solutions instead of picking something that shows some promise and then dumping all our resources towards it and then finding out that it is doing more harm then good. Don't get me wrong the fossil fuel side can do a lot more towards protecting this planet as well but when the climate change side is saying ethanol is the way to go lets cut down the rain forest to plant more there is a problem.
Toba is stirring.....happy dreams.
You have the cause and effect backwards. Global warming caused climate change and drought causes more fires. It is the 50 years of smoke stacks and tailpipes that have cause the warming.
You have it backwards. IN the greenhouse effect more energy photons causes more warming. Just like more sun photons causes warming in the morning, and less photons causes cooling at night,. Also at night fewer photons means more GHGs are no longer in use & so we get more GHGs while we get cooling.
Then there is the FACT that there is an excess of GHGs over the number of photons at any time. This is why the ocean of water & CO2, all GHGs does not vaporize. THere is not enough energy photons to vaporize it. Which is WHY there is NO SUCH thing as man caused feedback. THere is no excess energy to be absorbed. THe IPCC statement that "More GHGs means more warming " is factually incorrect. We spew out GHGs at night but the temperature goes down. The IPCC mantra is proven wrong every night.
What actually causes warming is an increase in the available number of energy photons. Whenever a planet or the moon gets closer, then the gravity & photons increases, the potential energy decreases & is turned into kinetic energy or temperature. PLanetary eccentricity causes variability Just like a closer moon causes larger tidal energy.
Blaming CO2 for what energy photons do is a waste of money.
See www.scribd.com for the paper "Gravity causes climate Change" for more info.
Sorry, but my monkey could put together those same sound bytes and make more sense.
" THe IPCC statement that "More GHGs means more warming " is factually incorrect."
It is not the IPCC that came up with this. It is physics, and it has been known for 150 years. In fact it is true by definiton, since greenhouse gasses (GHGs) warm the atmosphere BY DEFINITION. It has been known for over a century that the natural greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor and carboin dioxide, so if you increase either of these, the greenhouse effect will increase, and the climate will warm. There is no way for that NOT to be true.
do not take volcano's for granted. for example alot of people are keeping their eyes on our own super volcano [yellowstone]. if it should erupt it will be a mass extinction event. thus the human race as we know it will be drastically changed forever. there will only be a few species left to survive on this planet earth. and they will be of the insect variety. no more mammalian life.
Fires and volcanoes spew particulates and can change weather, but nothing like climate change from decades of tailpipes and smokestacks spewing billions of tons into the air.
You mean like the millions of years that fires and volcanoes have been spewing stuff into our atmosphere?
Particulates fall out of the atmosphere in a few years. CO2 accumulates.
Plants feed off of CO2 and turn it into O2. They love that Carbon.
DUST: There is always a thin layer of dust circling the Earth in the upper reaches of the
atmosphere. Beautifully colored sunsets are clues, especially after a volcano eruption.
Thousands of tons of dust are blown off Earth’s deserts each year. Dust is one of the regulators of Earth’s
temperatures. Water vapors, which cannot occur in the atmosphere without dust particles, are the main players in climate control. In fact every drop of participation, rain, snow or ice, must have a speck of dust around which to form. Without dust the humidity below 300% will not condense. Above 300%
humidity water will condense on objects including humans.
Let’s look at the record storms of 2011 that occurred in the south and Midwest of the
USA. The thousands of wild fires burning in the southwestern part of the USA produced many tons of dust into the atmosphere. This dust contributed to the volatility of these storms. No weather
model used in forecasting nor did the meteorologist presenting these forecast mention in their interpretation of conditions the possible quantity impact that dust, as an input, from these wild fires had any effect upon what was happening weather wise.
Without dust from the Sahara Desert the Atlantic hurricane season would not exist. The Caribbean Islands would consist of grey rock without dust from the Sahara, which produced the Island’s layers of top
soil.
Dust may turn out to be the most important thermal climate regulator of all the culprits that science has assigned that roll.
Everything on Earth, alive or not, is in a constant state of entropy, thus turning into dust. The millions of tons released into the atmosphere each year have an enormous effect upon Earth climates, from
participation to becoming filament to absorb and retain calories/heat.
Read: Holmes, Hannah, “The Secret Life of Dust”, John Wiley & Sons, 2001
Science needs to determine the "cause & effects" of Nature not of the "world" that we have created!
Isn't it ironic that environmentalists who caused timbering to cease in Arizonia because of the owl, which resulted in an over growth in the forest producing an abundance of fuel for the fires have, as a result of their action, made the biggest contribution to Earth's climate heating up than the use of fossil fuels. Also ALL the owls were roasted!
Isn't the lack of scientific knowledge wounderful for the special interest?
No, you confuse timbering with allowing a natural fire regime. If you think that commercial timbering is a good way for nice humans to manage the forest ecosystem, you have no clue. What is causing these massive fires is a combination of deep drought, and fire suppression by humans for a century so that fuel has built up on the floor of the forest, and in open grasslands. Sooner or later a big fire will spread anyway, and now we reap the benefits of a stupid management policy that only benefited the timber corporations.
In some wierd philosophical way you're partly on the right track. The natural fire way is best I agree, however fires need fuel therefore the more trees the bigger the fire. The kindling temperatures to start a pine to burn are very low compared to a hardwood forest so the drought plays a small part in the detonation. Commerical timbering is bad when clear cutting is the result but propertly managed clearing has proven effective in the past.
I don't know how this lack of burning only helps the timber industrie since most of use live in fine homes built of wood! If I had to chose between some critter habitat or the house to raise my kids guess who will win. My 40 year career has proven that what we chose to protect are not, in most cases, unique! Just a local causes. What come to mind are Earth's many local climates that are defined or interpreted as global.
The forest management is another example of a federal bueaucratic program not managed very well. The list is long.
So here we should separate the "cause" from the "science"?
Carbon dioxide:
This gas is heavier than the air column therefore will not rise to the upper
atmosphere period. A side bar: A half bottle of champagne is best stored in a
refrigerator with the cork out. Research
has proven that the carbon dioxide will not escape from the open bottle!
Anyone can observe the vapors from dry ice (CO2), at
room temperature, as they fill up a container and fall over the edge like a
water fall. Since CO2 (390 ppm[1]) resides in the upper atmosphere, many researchers
have searched for the mechanism which could lift CO2, a gas heavier than the atmospheric gases, to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. One solution comes from the observation of data collected from the "Deep Impact" spacecraft[2] as it flew within 435 miles of Comet Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. Observations from this close encounter showed chunks of water ice being expelled from the comet in jets of CO2. This is the first time CO2 jets have been observed coming from a comet.
Research shows that the breakup of another "snowball[3]" comet,
Comet LINEAR[4], was likely made up of water with the same isotopic composition as water found
here on Earth. The finding supports a controversial idea that comet impacts billions of years ago could have provided most of the water in Earth's oceans.
"The smaller comets from Jupiter's region impacted Earth relatively gently, shattering high in the atmosphere and delivering most of their organic molecules intact"[5].
There are two questions that need to be defined before we assess how the CO2 got to the upper atmosphere: (1) What part of the infamous "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide", graph depicting the measurement at Mauna
Loa, HI, is caused from entropy resulting from activities on Earth and/or
comets? And (2) could not the heavier than air CO2 been deposited by a comet and settled through the atmosphere to the lower reaches? (The latter being the most likely scenario.)
While flying for the military, I have, on occasion, observed
a clear path with unlimited visibility created from the precipitation from a
thunder storm as it passed through a hazy air layer in the lower atmosphere
that had a visibility of less than one mile.
Precipitation appears to be the cleansing agent for the lower air
column. Thus, any gas produced on Earth
that has a density higher than the atmosphere will not go beyond the influence
of the hydrologic cycle[6]
which produces all of Earth's precipitation.
[1] parts per million
[2]
The Epoxi mission (www.nasa.gov/mission pages/epoxi/)
[3] Comets from deep space formed in an extremely cold
region thus are called "ice bergs" while comets formed in the Jupiter region, a
more moderate cold, are referred to as "snowballs".
[4] August 2000
[5] The Science and Technology Directorate at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, May 18, 2001
[6] Water exists on earth naturally as a solid (ice), liquid or gas
(water vapor). Oceans, rivers, clouds, and rain, all of which contain water,
are in a frequent state of change (surface water evaporates, cloud water
precipitates, rainfall infiltrates the ground, etc.). However, the total amount
of the earth's water does not change. The circulation and conservation of
earth's water is called the "hydrologic cycle".
Conservatives believe people should work for a living and be responsible for their actions and liberals believe we are all victims of the conservatives and the government should destroy them and support everyone. The only problem is that liberals cannot exist without those dirty , greedy capitalist conservatives who strive for that dirty word called PROFIT!
And that ,friends, is what this is all about!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
During 9/11 air traffic was shut down for 3 days. During that time climate researchers in the US had theorized that contrails from jets affected temperatures by creating man made high level cloud. You can see satellite pics of contrails covering vast areas of the US which led them to this idea. The researchers obtained temperature data before and during that 3 day period and recorded a significant higher difference between max. and min. temps for those 3 days when contrails were non-existant.
"We found that the change in temperature range during those three days was just over one degrees C. And you have to realise that from a layman's perspective that doesn't sound like much, but from a climate perspective that is huge."
So, the idea was, if you remove particles in the atmosphere, you see a significant warming. Global warming that is if you extend the idea globally. The atmosphere is retaining heat.