Huge Rise in Siberian Forest Fires Puts Planet at Risk, Scientists Warn

Huge rise in Siberian forest fires puts planet at risk, scientists warn

Tim Radford in Krasnoyarsk
Tuesday May 31, 2005
The Guardian

Fires in the Siberian forests - the largest in the world and vital to the planet's health - have increased tenfold in the last 20 years and could again rage out of control this summer, Russian scientists warn.

They say they have neither the money nor the equipment to control or extinguish the huge forests fires often started illegally and deliberately in the Russian far east by rogue timber firms who plan to sell cheap lumber to China.

In 2003, one of the hottest summers in Europe, 22m hectares of spruce, larch, fir, Scots pine and oak were destroyed, charred, scorched or in some way affected by fire. On one day in June that year, a US satellite recorded 157 fires across almost 11m hectares, sending a plume of smoke that reached Kyoto 5,000 kilometres (3,107 miles) away.

Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air and release oxygen. The world's forests are part of the calculations behind the Kyoto agreement, ratified by Russia, Britain and many other nations, but not the US or Australia, to control the greenhouse emissions that fuel global warming.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1495903,00.html

Karma karma karma... no longer a chameleon.


Forgot to add; boy, isn't it nice that yet another cruel misdeed against God was caused by mankind's greatest tool for evil: Money?

from nature and says "why the CO2 from industry is much lesser than that! The problem is forests. We need to grow huge amounts of algae in polluted waters everywhere..then they make shells which fall to the bottom and become limestone. Limestone doesn't burn. And it takes CO2 out of the system permanently!".

and eventually becomes petroleum, which will solve our energy problem.

We're fucked.

We become the ooze we've been siphoning up for the last 100 years.

:woohoo:

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