CO ₂ emissions from fires multiply the greenhouse effect

July was the warmest month on record. No one can be surprised that in parallel to this new record, a wave of fires has spread around the world from Arctic to tropical regions. The connection between global warming and the increase in the intensity and extent of fires is credited by the scientific community. Also its entry “in traditionally fire-free areas, such as Scandinavia, Greenland and Siberia”, as stated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The problem for the planet as a whole is that these flames fanned by the climate crisis contribute in turn to aggravate it by emitting enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (_CO2), in a hellish vicious circle. As an example, the WMO estimated that the fires that devastated some three million hectares of rainforest in Indonesia for two months in 2015 released a third more CO into the atmosphere daily.₂ than the burning of fossil fuels (industry and gasoline) throughout the European Union.

But you don’t need to go back so far in time. The office of the environmental organization Greenpeace in Moscow, which has carried out a close monitoring of this summer’s fires in Siberia, has estimated the release of 200 million tons of carbon, more than half of Spain’s annual emissions. The same fire in the tundra can last three or four months, during which the peatlands burn, formed by decaying plant material of enormous carbon richness.

Carbon dioxide sink

Where fires are a most serious threat to humanity is in the Amazon basin. The rainforest absorbs like a gigantic sponge huge amounts of _CO2 that are fixed in the vegetation. It acts as what is technically called a carbon dioxide sink, but if this repository burns, it releases its contents back into the atmosphere.

“Emissions caused by fires and deforestation already exceed the amount of _CO2 in Brazil that are able to absorb intact areas, the balance of a country that should be the lung of humanity is already deficient”, laments José Manuel Moreno, professor of Ecology at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and one of the Spanish scientists who has participated in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, for its acronym in English).

The effect of deforestation in Brazil will be even more devastating if the threshold of no return is crossed, from which the green lung of humanity as a whole can become a huge savannah. “We are still far away but we should not get any closer. We can’t afford it,” Moreno warns.

Among other effects, the total destruction of the Amazon rainforest would have very serious effects on the rainfall of the surrounding countries. “The rich agricultural areas of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay that border the forest would become water scarcity that would put their livelihoods at risk,” adds Miguel Ángel Soto, head of Greenpeace Spain’s Forests campaign.

Source: The Newspaper