ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ADVISORY -- the California wildfires
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ADVISORY -- the California wildfires
by Scott Jordan
Some quick googling results in an estimation of on the order of 10-12 tons of fuel per acre of chaparral such as that burning in California; see, for example, http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/rogue-siskiyou/biscuit-fire/feis/46-appendix-b1-fire-behavior-fuel-model-descriptions.pdf and http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_rp486.pdf.
The latter link provides some nice measures of CO2 emissions when this stuff burns: around 3200 pounds of CO2 per ton, varying with burn intensity and so forth.
So when an acre burns, it produces on the order of 38,000 pounds of CO2.
About 500,000 acres of California have burned according to the latest news reports on http://news.google.com.
That means about 19,200,000,000 pounds of CO2 have been pumped into the atmosphere during these tragic conflagrations.
Now, a large SUV emits about 700 grams of CO2 per mile, per http://www.sacbee.com/107/v-print/story/427690.html --that's about 1.5 pounds. Driven a typical 12,000 miles per year, that's 18,000 pounds of CO2 annually.
So the CO2 emitted by the California fires is about the equivalent of roughly 1.1 millions large SUVs being driven for a year.
An important point is that that brush and chaparral has an annual life cycle that causes it to die off every year. The dead grass decomposes. That is, bacteria eat it, exhaling CO2, because that's what living things do. In fact, the amount of CO2 exhaled would be roughly commensurate.
So if we really wanted to be environmentally friendly and prevent global warming, we'd take all the burned areas, pave them, and drive SUVs around on them all the time.
This concludes your Environmental Protection advisory. Have a good day.
by Scott Jordan
Some quick googling results in an estimation of on the order of 10-12 tons of fuel per acre of chaparral such as that burning in California; see, for example, http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/rogue-siskiyou/biscuit-fire/feis/46-appendix-b1-fire-behavior-fuel-model-descriptions.pdf and http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_rp486.pdf.
The latter link provides some nice measures of CO2 emissions when this stuff burns: around 3200 pounds of CO2 per ton, varying with burn intensity and so forth.
So when an acre burns, it produces on the order of 38,000 pounds of CO2.
About 500,000 acres of California have burned according to the latest news reports on http://news.google.com.
That means about 19,200,000,000 pounds of CO2 have been pumped into the atmosphere during these tragic conflagrations.
Now, a large SUV emits about 700 grams of CO2 per mile, per http://www.sacbee.com/107/v-print/story/427690.html --that's about 1.5 pounds. Driven a typical 12,000 miles per year, that's 18,000 pounds of CO2 annually.
So the CO2 emitted by the California fires is about the equivalent of roughly 1.1 millions large SUVs being driven for a year.
An important point is that that brush and chaparral has an annual life cycle that causes it to die off every year. The dead grass decomposes. That is, bacteria eat it, exhaling CO2, because that's what living things do. In fact, the amount of CO2 exhaled would be roughly commensurate.
So if we really wanted to be environmentally friendly and prevent global warming, we'd take all the burned areas, pave them, and drive SUVs around on them all the time.
This concludes your Environmental Protection advisory. Have a good day.
posted by Scott Jordan at
10:29 PM
