Confirmed — Deforestation Plays Critical Climate Change Role
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Dr. Pep Canadell, from the Global Carbon Project and CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, says today in the journal Science that tropical deforestation releases 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon each year into the atmosphere.
“Deforestation in the tropics accounts for nearly 20 per cent of carbon emissions due to human activities,” Dr. Canadell says. “This will release an estimated 87 to 130 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, which is greater than the amount of carbon that would be released by 13 years of global fossil fuel combustion. So maintaining forests as carbon sinks will make a significant contribution to stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.”
In the first study of its kind, Dr. Canadell joined an international team of experts from the US, UK, Brazil, and France to compare data from 11 climate-carbon computer models. The results show that tropical forests continue to accumulate carbon through to the end of the century, although they may become less efficient at higher temperatures.
“The new body of information shows considerable value in preserving tropical forests such as those in the Amazon and Indonesia as carbon sinks, that they do not release the carbon back into the atmosphere as has been suggested,” Dr. Canadell says. “However, it also demonstrates the need to avoid higher levels of global warming, which could slow the ability of forests to accumulate carbon.”
He says that while tropical deforestation will continue, slowing the amount of clearing will make significant impacts. “If by 2050 we slow deforestation by 50 per cent from current levels, with the aim of stopping deforestation when we have 50 per cent of the world’s tropical forests remaining, this would save the emission of 50 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. This 50/50/50 option would avoid the release of the equivalent of six years of global fossil fuel emissions.”
Reducing deforestation is just one of a portfolio of mitigation options needed to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
“Globally, we need a range of actions to reduce the build up of carbon in the atmosphere,” Dr. Canadell says. “This study ensures we have a sound scientific basis behind the consideration of deforestation reduction.”
[tags]climate change, global warming, deforestation, greenhouse gas[/tags]
2 Comments
George
May 14th, 2007
at 1:53pm
Another pile of crap research! I suppose trees are not renewable resources? I suppose that CO2 is not pulled down from the atmosphere into the oceans by microorganisms making their skeletons and so therefore all the carbonate rocks of Limestone and Dolostone are just figments of our imagination? I wonder where those sedimentary rocks came from in the past? Gee I wonder how much Co2 was produced by all of the volcanic activity that was on this Earth in the past? Do you think that there may be a balance in nature or is everything a straight line towards destruction on the myriads of useless Excel spreadsheet predictions and nonsensical computer models? I wonder if Dr.Canadell even understands the big picture?
Alex Abate
May 15th, 2007
at 12:06pm
The problem is not that CO2 cannot be integrated into the oceans or into sediments, eventually it will. The problem is that we are releasing CO2 at such high rates that we are overwhelming the natural capacity of the earth to absorb it. The earth will eventually deal with the extra CO2 somehow. It will go into plants or into sediments in the sea. While the earth processes all that CO2 the earth will warm and the weather will become much more erratic. We will be the ones who suffer by our own folly. The earth’s weather has changed drastically in the past and it will do so again. It usually takes thousands of years for it to switch back from either extreme. Our release of CO2 into the atmosphere is speeding up this process to our own detriment. Don’t pish posh the research or the conclusions, you are failing to recognize that the re-uptake of CO2 takes time and that time differential is going to make things very uncomfortable for us in the next hundred years.