Study: Fires fuel global warming record
By Peter Dykstra
CNN
(CNN) -- Massive wildfires that plagued Indonesia five years ago helped lead to the biggest annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions in recorded history, researchers have announced.
Researcher Susan Page and her colleagues at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom estimate that the Indonesian fires launched enough carbon into the atmosphere to completely offset a year's worth of the planet's ability to control greenhouse emissions.
The fires made a dramatic boost to what most scientists believe is largely a manmade problem, the researchers said. Most of the impact came not from burning forests, but from peat -- decayed plant matter on the forest floor that is sometimes several feet deep in Indonesian forests.
In some areas, the researchers say, the peat smoldered to a depth of nearly three feet. Page estimated that the three-foot depth of the peat, which burned in a few months, had taken 500 years to accumulate.
The 1997-98 fires, instigated by severe drought as a result of the El Nino weather phenomenon, scorched millions of acres of Indonesian forest, destroying villages on several islands and darkening skies throughout Southeast Asia. On the island of Borneo, 12 million acres burned, sharply reducing the world's largest surviving population of endangered orangutans.
The fires contributed much more than what nature could absorb, an estimated 2.6 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, according to Page and her colleagues. In comparison, human activities contributed about 6 billion tons of carbon per year during the 1990s, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A layer of insulation?
The Earth has many natural mechanisms to absorb carbon, and to regulate the impact of greenhouse gases on potential climate change. Forests, grasslands, and oceans all absorb carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, helping accelerate the so-called "greenhouse effect."
But carbon dioxide, methane, and other so-called greenhouse gases are believed to be creating a layer of insulation in the Earth's atmosphere. Most, but not all, climate scientists believe that this may lead to substantial changes in temperature, climate, storms and droughts, and sea level in the next century.
The Leicester research was published in Thursday's edition of the journal "Nature." It is corroborated by similar findings by an Australian research team, who published their data in the journal "Global Bioeochemical Cycles."
