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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Boreal Forests Face Burning Threat from Global Warming

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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org

http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Portal

http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation

12/19/00

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

The world's forests face a greater risk of catastrophic fires - as a

result of global warming, fragmentation, overly intensive management

and human carelessness and neglect - than ever before. The following

article highlights the growing realization that Canada, Alaska and

Russia's boreal forests are "burning like never before". Boreal

ecosystems thus join the ranks of Brazil and Indonesia's rainforests

in terms of unprecedented rates of burning. Large scale change in

the World's remaining major intact terrestrial habitats are

indicative of the extent to which the global ecological system has

been impacted upon by humankind, and the degree to which ecological

decline is worsening, cascading and spinning out of control. There

is so much uncertainty regarding how forests - both old-growth and

plantations - will react to climate change, that it is irresponsible

and possibly planet-threatening to propose that we depend upon forest

sinks as a policy alternative to cutting emissions.

g.b.

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Title: Cold Northern Forests Face Burning Threat/Global warming

blamed for huge fires

Source: Copyright 2000 San Francisco Chronicle

Date: December 18, 2000

Byline: Keay Davidson

Environmentalists wail as tropical rainforests go up in smoke, while

largely ignoring another blazing ecosystem: the "boreal" forests of

cold northern lands.

The caribou-haunted forests of Canada, Alaska and the former Soviet

Union including Siberia are apparently burning like never before,

experts said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San

Francisco yesterday.

The likely reason: Global warming is drying out northern timber and

brush. As a result, lightning bolts spark infernos of colossal

extent. Boiling orange shrouds spread over millions of snow-streaked

acres, some so remote that the sole witnesses may be wolves, lynxes

and snow hares.

In Alaska and Canada's boreal forests, fire consumed an average of

more than 7 million acres a year in the 1990s. That's a sharp rise

from the average of 3 million acres per year in the 1960s, scientists

said on the third day of the conference at Moscone Center.

The fate of boreal forests is an important factor in climate change:

They store 30 percent of the carbon in the terrestrial ecosystem,

said researcher David V. Sandberg.

He explained that if all boreal trees and vegetation burned, they

would gush tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the

atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the most infamous "greenhouse" gas: It

traps infrared radiation, warming the atmosphere.

Also, the loss of boreal forests would eliminate one of Earth's prime

"carbon sinks," which slow global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide

from the air. (Another important "sink" is the ocean.)

The threat to boreal forests is far worse than the general public

appreciates, said Sandberg, a team leader at the Fire and

Environmental Research Applications division at the U.S. Department

of Agriculture in Corvallis, Ore.

"It's underrepresented in the public consciousness and in the

scientific attention it has gotten," Sandberg charged at a press

conference.

Such fires are so gigantic, and in such unsettled terrains, that

firefighters can do little if anything to control them. Some of the

worst

fires devour boreal forests of the former Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Soviet officials kept unreliable records of the

severity and extent of forest fires, said Eric S. Kasischke, a

professor in the department of geography at the University of

Maryland-College Park.

Back then, Western researchers underestimated the extent of fires in

remote Arctic and sub-Arctic lands, partly because of the lack of

trustworthy Soviet data, said Brian J. Stocks, a forest fire

researcher with the Canadian Forest Service. They weren't even sure

how bad fires were in isolated parts of northern North America

because of inadequate satellite coverage, he added.

In January, Kasischke received a $250,000 grant from NASA to analyze

satellite photos of Soviet forests as far back as 1980. By counting

images of fires, and measuring their extent, he hopes to learn how

much they've burned over the last two decades. He's conducting the

study with a Russian colleague, Anatoly Sukhinin of the Russian

Academy of Sciences, Siberian branch.

Ecologically speaking, boreal blazes are "a cause for concern,"

Kasischke said. "I wasn't convinced it was a problem until recently."

In a related development, scientists reported the latest evidence

that humans are at least substantially responsible for global

warming. Just as burning forests unleash carbon dioxide, so do

factories and cars as they consume fossil fuels.

"When I got started on this (research), I wasn't sure whether climate

warming had begun or not," acknowledged Thomas J. Crowley, an

oceanography professor at Texas A&M University. But now, he believes

it almost certainly has.

"If it acts like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, do

you say it's a duck?" Crowley asked. "Well, this is a '95 percent

duck.' " The annual American Geophysical Union meeting has attracted

some 9,000 Earth and space scientists from around the world. The

gathering concludes tomorrow.

E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.

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