No, I did not fail to paste that.
It was on the first reply, last message on previous page.
And yeah, climate is always changing. But humans do play a part in it too, no matter if we like it or not. And lately its become a large part of the change.
And frankly, if were so stupid that we cause our own extinction, well, good riddance to us. Life will still be all around the existing universe(s), just without humans. Whose loss will that be if not ours?
Im talking about stuff like this:
http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0022-fires_indonesia.html
New fire record for Borneo, Sumatra shows dramatic increase in rainforest destruction
The authors found that Sumatra has suffered from large fires since the at least 1960s, but Indonesian Borneo — where industrial conversion of forests was delayed by geography and politics — didn't begin to experience massive fires until 1982.
The fires associated with the 1997-1998 el Niño released more than 2 billion tons of C02 into the atmosphere and caused billions of dollars to the regional economy. Undaunted by these impacts, last week Indonesia announced it will press ahead with a plan to convert millions of hectares of peatlands across Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua. Environmentalists and scientists say the move will trigger massive emissions and increase Indonesia's susceptibility to fires like those documented in the Nature Geoscience study.
"The extent of large-scale oil palm plantations is projected to increase, partly to meet growing demand for biofuels," write the authors. "As droughts are inevitable and may become more severe, Indonesia's future fire regime depends strongly on the extent of these types of human activity."
(
people I know have been doing research there)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Rice_Project_(Kalimantan)
(look at the pic especially!)
The Mega Rice Project was initiated in 1996 in the southern sections of Kalimantan, the Indonesian section of Borneo. The goal was to turn one million hectares of unproductive and sparsely populated peat swamp forest into rice paddies in an effort to allieviate Indonesia's growing food shortage. The government made a large investment in constructing irrigation canals and removing trees. The project did not suceeed, and was eventually abandoned after causing considerable damage to the environment.
Overview
The peat swamp forest in the south of Kalimantan is an unusual ecology that is home to many unique or rare species such as Orang Utans, as well as to slow-growing but valuable trees. The peat swamp forest is a dual ecosystem, with diverse tropical trees standing on a 10m - 12m layer of peat - partly decayed and waterlogged plant material - which in turn covers relatively infertile soil. Peat is a major store of carbon. If broken down and burned it contributes to CO2 emissions, considered a source of global warming.[1]. Unlike northern forests, which regenerate in 10-30 years even after clear-cut felling, the peat swamp forest may take several centuries to regenerate.
The peat swamp forests of Kalimantan were being slowly cleared for small scale farming and plantations before 1997, but most of the original cover remained. In 1996 the Indonesian government initiated the Mega Rice Project (MRP),
which aimed to convert one million hectares of peat swamp forest to rice paddies. Between 1996 and 1998, more than 4,000 km of drainage and irrigation channels were dug, and deforestation started in part through legal forestry and in part through burning. The water channels, and the roads and railways built for legal forestry, opened up the region to illegal forestry. In the MRP area, forest cover dropped from 64.8% in 1991 to 45.7% in 2000, and clearance has continued since then. It appears that almost all the marketable trees have now been removed from the areas covered by the MRP.
It turned out that the channels drained the peat forests rather than irrigating them. Where the forests had often flooded up to 2m deep in the rainy season, now their surface is dry at all times of the year. The government has therefore abandoned the MRP,
but the drying peat is vulnerable to fires which continue to break out on a massive scale[2].
Peat forest destruction is causing
sulphuric acid pollution of the rivers. In the rainy seasons, the canals are discharging acidic water with a high ratio of pyritic sulphate into rivers up to 150 km upstream from the river mouth. This may be a factor contributing to lower fish catches[3].
(
Thats 10 000 square kilometers)
http://www.reuters.com/article/environm ... 6220070604
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia is among the world's top three greenhouse gas emitters because of deforestation, peatland degradation and forest fires, a report sponsored by the World Bank and Britain's development arm said.
An increase of global temperatures has already resulted in prolonged drought, heavy rainfall leading to floods and tidal waves in Indonesia, putting the archipelago's rich biodiversity at risk, said the report, released on Monday.
"Emissions resulting from deforestation and forest fires are five times those from non-forestry emissions. Emissions from energy and industrial sectors are relatively small, but are growing very rapidly," it added.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Forests- ... 4927.shtml
Under normal conditions, forests around the world are able to absorb approximately 20 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted by humans from burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and natural gas. This amounts to a massive 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 each year, an extremely large quantity that would otherwise be left in the atmosphere, further accelerating the global warming process. Over the last years, an additional carbon sink has been found to exist in Africa, one that has the potential to attract roughly 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon all by itself.
In a study published yesterday in the journal Nature, a 40 year-long research reveals that rain forests in Africa, which make up for a third of the total amount of forests in the world, have attracted at least 0.6 tonnes per year per hectare over the past decades. This is a very important find, as it illuminates scientists as to another mechanism that is involved in the complicated circuit that carbon undergoes after it's released by either humans or volcanoes.
http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=108
Recent world forest loss
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html
Summary map of vegetation cover at 8,000 14C years BP. By 8,000 14C y.a., the Earth was under a full interglacial climate, with conditions warmer and moister than present in many parts of the world. Tropical forest in Africa (and probably also Asia) was expanded in area, and the areas of desert in Africa and Asia were much reduced.
http://www.mongabay.com/deforestation.htm
Worldwide deforestation rates (look at the "Change %" column)
http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/media/a ... 12/detail/
(good pic of the same info basically, forest loss during last few centuries)
http://www.policyalmanac.org/environmen ... tion.shtml
The clearing of tropical forests across the Earth has been occurring on a large scale basis for many centuries. This process, known as deforestation, involves the cutting down, burning, and damaging of forests. The loss of tropical rain forest is more profound than merely destruction of beautiful areas. If the current rate of deforestation continues, the world's rain forests will vanish
within 100 years-causing unknown effects on global climate and
eliminating the majority of plant and animal species on the planet.
And at the same time, in Siberia:
http://www.terranature.org/methaneSiberia.htm
Melting permafrost methane emissions: The other threat to climate change
15 September 2006
A frozen peat bog covering the entire sub-Arctic area of Western Siberia, the size of France and Germany, contains billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas that is melting for the first time since it was sequestered more than 11,000 years ago before the end of the last ice age.
Researchers Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk State University in Siberia, and Judith Marquand of Oxford University first reported in 2005 that one million square kilometres of permafrost had started to melt.
Such an unprecedented thaw could dramatically increase the rate of global warming.
A study published in the September 7th issue of Nature authored by Katey Walter of the University of Alaska, and Jeff Chanton of Florida State University reports that greenhouse gas is escaping into the atmosphere at a frightening rate.
When Siberian permafrost melts, carbon
buried since the Pleistocene era is bubbling to the surface of lakes, and dissipating into the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
(the same has been noted in Finland also, and in the Arctic sea areas, N2O has also started to bubble to the surface)
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We can of course do nothing about these trends and go on like we have until now. But if we do, we can blame no one but ourselves for causing our own extinction. And that is, natural, of course. Earth will rectify the situation, and purge us from fooling around on her surface. Do we want that?
