INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Julie Cart
Contributor
Share on Twitter
Julie Cart is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
who writes for CALmatters, a nonprofit, non-partisan media venture explaining California policies and politics
As crews across California battle more than a dozen wildfires — including the largest in state history — the blazes are spewing
enough carbon into the air to undo some of the good done by the state climate policies.
What even worse: Climate-warming compounds that will
be released by the charred forests long after the fires are extinguished may do more to warm up the planet than the immediate harm from
smoky air.
Scientists say that only about 15 percent of a forest store of carbon is expelled during burns
The remainder is released slowly over the coming years and decades, as trees decay.That second hit of carbon, experts say, contains
compounds that do more to accelerate climate change than those from the original fire
And future fires over previously burned ground could make climate prospects even more bleak.
The worst possible situation is the fire that
comes through and kills everything,& said Nic Enstice, regional science coordinator for the Sierra Nevada Conservancy
&Then, 10 or 15 years later, another fire comes through and releases all the carbon left in the trees on the ground
That really bad.
It a scenario that could explode at any time
Enstice cited a research paper published this year that laid out a chilling tableau: California has more than a 120 million dead trees
strewn around its mountain ranges, with the southern Sierra hardest hit.
When fires hit those downed trees, the state will begin to
experience &mass fires& spewing plumes of carbon
The resulting conflagrations, according to the researcher, will be almost unimaginable.
The emissions from those fires will be unlike
anything we will have ever seen,& Enstice said
&And you won''t be able put it out.
Computing the carbon released from the fires so far this year will not happen soon
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration flies planes through smoke plumes, gathering data, but air traffic over wildfires is
Scientific research is not a top priority when fires are threatening towns.
But some preliminary data is available now.
One method uses
inventories of existing forests — surveying how many trees and which type
Those records are updated every 10 years
Researchers then overlay infrared images captured from satellites that show what burning and at what intensity
From that, predictions can be made about carbon emissions on any given day
Scientists say that emissions from burned forests are one of the most virulent types, called black carbon.
According to the most recent
accounting from the state Air Resources Board, California annual black carbon discharge — excluding wildfires — are equal to emissions
from about 8 million passenger vehicles driven for one year
But when the state calculates the same annual average of black carbon coming solely from wildfires, it the equivalent of nearly 19 million
additional cars on the road.
With year-round fire seasons and fire intensity off the charts, state officials admit that wildfires could set
back California myriad policies to offset the impacts of climate change
&It significant,& Enstice said
&We don''t have a lot of data to measure yet, we&re still using primitive tools
But everyone is gearing up to study this.
This article is republished courtesy of CALMatters.
