Burning wood contra fossil fuels (Australian Wildfires)

[SirAlanClive]

I'm very troubled by people's ignorance of the difference between burning wood and burning oil or coal. This is not a debate about global warming and I don't want it to become one. It's about a serious misconception which affects how we all make choices like what energy source to use etc.
Today I can read the BBC's environment correspondent Matt McGrath letting this pass in his article:

This time, some Australian politicians have been scornful (...of the global warming connection), suggesting that more carbon would be released by the current fires consuming trees that there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades to come.

He may know the difference but by not commenting on it he gives the impression that there is no difference.

All the carbon in the biosphere (that is all the CO2, all the organic material, live or dead including us, Australian forests and all the pencils ) is part of a dynamic carbon cycle. All the trees were made by extracting CO2 from the air by photosynthesis and when they die it will return to the atmosphere. It doesn't really make any difference if it burns or if it rots. The carbon is for all intents and purposes already in the atmosphere but the trees have borrowed it for a while.
The carbon in oil and coal on the other hand, is not in the biosphere. It has been sequestered by geological processes which took millions of years to remove it. Burning it adds it back into the carbon cycle increasing the levels of biospheric carbon permanently (on our timescale).

When I see that even Australian politicians can say things like this I feel the need to make this thread in the hope that people will wisen up.

Burning wood is ok. Burning oil, gas or coal has a price attached.
Volcanoes are a bummer but we can't do much about that.
Wildfires do not increase global carbon levels. Your car does.

Hope I made somebody feel enlightened.

Thanks for listening.

Alan

 

[Barra333]

There is nothing in the article linked out of that quote that mentions the carbon output of the bushfires. It talks about climate change and such, but in a pretty vague way, then goes on to talk about our opposition leader in his role as a volunteer firefighter.
Where did Matt McGrath get his info?

 

[SirAlanClive]

Yes, the quote I posted comes straight out of that article, which I don't really give any import. It's the misconception of the Australian politicians quoted above which riles me, but don't get me wrong, it's not a jibe at Australians, just at people in power being ignorant.

 

[Barra333]

I realise it was nothing personal against Australians, but as one, I went digging in the article to see if I could find out who was quoted, but there are none. Carbon emission isn't even mentioned in the liked article.

 

[SirAlanClive]

Sorry, I get it. I hadn't checked the link to smh.com.au before now and I have to agree with you.

 

[Grayfox]

Australia gets bush fires every year.

Sure the smoke from them adds a lot of CO2 in the air but it has been happening for so long that it is natural.

When that Icelandic volcano erupted how much CO2 was released?

Regardless, since it is a natural event the planet can deal with it.

The amount of CO2 released by industry is way more than the bush fires.

 

[SirAlanClive]

My point is that all the carbon already here with us, be it trees or CO2, is part of our ecosystem. The carbon atoms in the trees have been in trees and in CO2 molecules many times as they move through the carbon cycle. When trees die and rot, all the carbon gets released back to the atmosphere as CO2. Same amount as when they burn. All the carbon in trees comes from atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis. Plants do not get carbon from their roots. And all the carbon in us came from plants who got it from the atmosphere.
Burning trees might temporarily increase atmospheric CO2 but it does not increase the total amount of carbon in our biosphere.
Burning fossil fuels increases the total amount of carbon in the biosphere by reintroducing carbon which had been removed from the carbon cycle and buried. This will produce more CO2 (and more trees eventually).
This is high school environmental science but me having to explain it at length, both here and in other comments frightens me. No one seems to get the simple math involved here. When you try to decide whether to use oil or wood to heat your house, if most people believe both do the same thing to the environment then we lose. The same with plant oils contra mineral oil for fuel. Plants just took that CO2 out of the air and we made ethanol with it. We drive our car and it gets put back into the air. No net change. Use mineral oil and we add new carbon to the mix. Net gain.
I'm not advocating climate change. I just love math, reason and truth.
And as I said in the OP, volcanoes are beyond us.

 

[Encyclopedia]

Isn't the release of CO2 from burning trees countered by the CO2 that the trees absorb in their lifetime?

 

[homeforsummer]

Isn't the release of CO2 from burning trees countered by the CO2 that the trees absorb in their lifetime?

That's the idea. CO2 is released through natural processes, CO2 is absorbed through natural processes. It's a fairly balanced cycle.

The general argument for anthropogenic global warming is that there is no "absorption" stage for the CO2 released when burning fossil fuels (that, and humankind has a tendency to cut down the trees and plantlife that would generally go some way to absorbing it), so there's a net increase.

Whether this is a problem or not tends to depend on your political outlook more than it does any evidence for or against.

 

[niky]

The answer, obviously, is to cut down all the trees before they can burn down, reduce them to wood chips, and dump that lot down the bore holes of empty oil wells. Problem. Solved.

 

[homeforsummer]

The answer, obviously, is to cut down all the trees before they can burn down, reduce them to wood chips, and dump that lot down the bore holes of empty oil wells. Problem. Solved.

http://[domain blocked due to malware]/instances/400x/29780926.jpg

 

[BobK]

But the carbon in coal and oil also came from the atmosphere. It just gets "stored" in coal over a longer timespan than it does in trees.

The answer, obviously, is to cut down all the trees before they can burn down, reduce them to wood chips, and dump that lot down the bore holes of empty oil wells. Problem. Solved.

lol

 

[niky]

The argument is that over millions of years, the CO2 level had fallen down to pre-industrial levels as more and more carbon was sequestered underground as coal, oil, peat, etcetera. And pre-industrial levels of CO2 are associated with the world we're used to.

Re-releasing all of that carbon at once raises some issues. CO2 hasn't been this high for a long time. Historically (as in ancient history), low CO2 has been linked to ice ages and very low ocean levels. High CO2 has been linked to high temperatures and very high ocean levels.

The only question is how much of it is directly due to carbon, as at least some of it is, and how bad the feedback loops are.