Canadian Forests May Have Crossed Line From Net Carbon Sink To Net Source - Hartford Courant

[hatrack]

EDIT

In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada's precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

Worse yet, the experts predict that Canada's forests will remain net carbon sources, as opposed to carbon storage "sinks," until at least 2022, and possibly much longer. "We are seeing a significant distortion of the natural trend," said Werner Kurz, senior research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service and the leading expert on carbon cycles in the nation's forests. "Since 1999, and especially in the last five years, the forests have shifted from being a carbon sink to a carbon source."

Translation: Earth's lungs have come down with emphysema. Canada's forests are no longer our friends. So serious is the problem that Canada's federal government effectively wrote off the nation's forests in 2007 as officials submitted their plans to abide by the international Kyoto Protocol, which obligates participating governments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the Kyoto agreement, governments are permitted to count forest lands as credits, or offsets, when calculating their national carbon emissions. But Canadian officials, aware of the scientific studies showing that their forests actually are emitting excess carbon, quietly omitted the forest lands from their Kyoto compliance calculations. "The forecast analysis prepared for the government ... indicates there is a probability that forests would constitute a net source of greenhouse gas emissions," a Canadian Environment Ministry spokesman told the Montreal Gazette.

EDIT

http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/chi-canada-trees_wittjan02,0,431604.story

[pansypoo53219]

1. my cousin's PHd thesis was about that

uh oh. we're fucked. might need a big volcano to help on cooling, but....

[Canuckistanian]

2. There's no excuse now

Some Conservatives were saying that we could count all of our forests as a net carbon sink and therefore we needed to do NOTHING for Kyoto.

That argument has now officially been eliminated.

[Gregorian]

3. Oh my goodness.

I am suddenly flashing on Cool Hand Luke. You know, we can do this comfortably, or we can do this kicking and screaming. And if you witness the posts regarding car use and birthing rights, you'll see that we don't dare even mention the subjects, let alone attempt to restrain them.

I left Oregon two years ago. I left it because I couldn't tolerate watching the logging. One morning I woke up at 5am to chainsaws in the mountains of the neighbor's property. Now I can see it on Google earth. He must have cut a square mile. Furthermore, if you go to Google earth and just scan the coastal mountains you'll see that around half of the forests are simply gone. And the same goes on wherever there are trees. I'm even preparing for more logging where I have recently moved. In the State Forest. Yep, they log our public lands.

If the trees were in equilibrium before cars and industry, then it almost goes without any study that we've been forcing them afterward. And so now we come to our Cool Hand Luke moments.

The really unknown part of this whole mess is just how far over the line we currently are. This to me is the big question. Because it means how much we have to go backward in order to come back into some kind of alignment with equilibrium. Carbon emissions are a summation of population and petroleum use. It will take altering both of these factors before we even begin to see a stemming of the disaster that is now taking place.