...and help protect the Earth's vast and vulnerable boreal forests?
Boreal owl with mouse. Numbers on image relate to: (1) World War one (2) World War two
(3) Mount Pinatubo eruption (4) 1997, warmest year on record.
Measurement of the mean
annual temperature of the Earth shows an increase of about 0.5 degrees Celsius in the
last 50 years. Note the "hot" peaks associated with WWI and WWII and the two-year cold
"dip" caused by massive amounts of radiation deflecting sulphates blown high into the
atmospher during the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991.
WCWC File Photo
Protected, the world's great boreal forests can absorb and store huge amounts of CO2 and help slow global warming. If they are clearcut it will make the climate crisis worse.
By Gray Jones
As I write this article, Edmonton is covered in a blanket of acrid smoke generated by 37 forest fires burning out of control hundreds of kilometres from Edmonton, in Alberta's boreal forest. The fires are currently consuming 170,000 hectares of wild forest land. A major Edmonton newspaper features the headline "Alberta Burns". This is only the beginning of May and, based on historic climatic conditions, this should not be happening. The moisture rating should be high and the spring fire hazard low. Year by year for the past 30 years the incidence of wild fires in the boreal forest has increased.
Most climatologists agree that the root cause is global warming. Since 1976, the annual area burned by wild fires in Canada's boreal forest has soared to six times the century's average, a massive increase of 600 percent!
Although the tonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere by industrial and automobile emissions are currently the primary culprits in global warming, clearcutting vast tracts of boreal forests is a major contributor as well. Dr.Bill Pruitt, an ecologist from the University of Manitoba, estimates that about one-half of the atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1860 has resulted from forest clearing. NASA estimates that approximately 7.6 billion tonnes of carbon are currently released into the atmosphere each year: 6 billion tonnes from fossil fuels and an estimated 1.6 billion tonnes from deforestation.
The gradual, natural cyclical variations in the amount of summer sunlight radiation and changes in the volume of Earth's year-round ice show this general relationship: more ice when radiation decreases; less ice when radiation increases. The recent melt back of glaciers and polar ice caps is bucking this trend. (See also graph on page 4-5.) Most scientists believe the recent rise in the Earth's mean annual temperature is primarily due to an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide, which is being released as a byproduct of human industrial activities. (See graph with article "Binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions reached at recent summit meeting in Kyoto will not significantly slow climate change")
Clearcutting Cannada's boreal forest immediately releases carbon into the atmosphere through the rotting of branches and other organic matter left after logging. It also causes ecological changes that contribute to global warming, including the drying up of boreal bogs (which releases methane) and the northward expansion of grasslands which are taking over the wetter boreal forest "carbon sink". This is because clearcutting changes the forest micro-climate, causing increases in temperature, decreases in moisture, and increases in the extremes of soil temperature.
Clearcutting, forest fires and other carbon emitters put boreal forests under stress, leading to increases in insect infestations and disease. Thousands of hectares of aspen forest in Alberta are sick and dying. Their leaves turn from green to red: an indication that the trees are drying out and becoming prime candidates for wild fires.
Current logging practices are aggravating forest decline by decreasing the ability of the boreal forest to withstand disturbances.
An immediate 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed to stabilize Earth's atmosphere at today's carbon dioxide (CO2) level. Less radical measures simply mean global warming accelerates and the harmful effects of climate change continue to mount.
Boreal scientists from around the world have utilized field data and computer modelling to predict that global warming, causing drier weather, wild fires, and outbreaks of insect infestations and disease, will cause millions of hectares of boreal forest to revert to grasslands. It is predicted that between 50 and 90 percent of the existing boreal forests are likely to disappear if the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses double. This doubling of greenhouse gasses is expected to occur by the end of the next century unless a global conservation effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is successful.
The billions of trees in the boreal forest, which store vast amounts of carbon, together with the network of peat bogs, which cover approximately 30 percent of the boreal forest, are the greatest terrestrial living storehouses of carbon on Earth. Not only do they absorb and store carbon, they produce prodigious quantities of oxygen as a by-product leading people to call the boreal "the northern lungs of the Earth."
The Earth's great boreal forest may very well be one of the final bastions between us and runaway global warming. We have a planetary responsibility to our children to protect the ecology and the life-giving properties of the boreal forest. We have to radically reduce logging in the boreal forest and protect the peat bog carbon sinks by establishing a network of protected interconnected wilderness areas.
Protecting vast boreal forest wilderness will also protect species like the endangered woodland caribou and the tiny tropical migrant Cape May wood warbler, and also, more directly than we probably realize, our own species survival.
