The Great Green North is Burning

I am going to unashamedly plagiarize Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “The Sixth Extinction”. As you know I have affection for forests. Perhaps because of her in-depth research she has even more affection based on her deeper understanding. At a minimum she is far more articulate so you might consider reading her book.

The earth is big. When I went to work on the other side of the world it was a trip I dreaded. It took twenty-four hours, and sometimes , in cramped accommodations to cross the massive Atlantic or even bigger Pacific ocean. Crossing the ocean on our MSC ships took over a week running 24 hours a day.

When ferrying helicopters from Alaska to Texas it would take three full days of pushing the aircraft along as fast as it would go. Most of this was spent traversing the great Canadian Boreal Forest.

Ms Kolbert takes us on an imaginary trip from the North Pole to Peru. She entertainingly describes the different forest regions on the way.

Even though I have worked in the arctic and have flown over the north pole, I did not realize how vast the polar region is. Or, how far you must travel from the North Pole to get to something we might recognize as a tree. From the North Pole to a tree is 2,250 miles. This area of ice, snow and tundra is the fastest warming region on earth.

Then comes the steadily warming boreal forest. The Canadians are custodians of one quarter of the world’s remaining intact forest ecosystems. It is a vast, green solitude. When attempting to navigate the sea of green, from one fuel cache to the next, a pilot spends many minutes straining his eyes and fending off low fuel anxiety.

Recently the Canadian Press released a science article on their Canadian Boreal Forest. Here is an excerpt, “Bigger, hotter, wildfires are turning Canada’s vast boreal forest into a significant new source of climate changing greenhouse gasses…”

Forest fires in the boreal forests of Alaska, Canada, and Russia have been raging the last few years. I figured the cause for concern was simple. In a fire we lose a tree capable of capturing carbon. While it burns it emits carbon dioxide. But it is not that simple. It is the soil.

Boreal forest soil holds up to 75 kilograms of carbon per cubic meter of soil. It can be thousands of years old. It is called legacy carbon. With repeated fires, the carbon in this legacy soil is released into the atmosphere. This means more CO2 in the air, more trapped heat, more forest fires and so it repeats itself. It lends credence to the assertion modern society, is leading a “Torched Earth Campaign”.

One common way to describe this phenomenon is to call these action-reactions, “self-perpetuating feedback loops.” Scientists years ago, shortened this concept to, “Tipping Points”.  Right wing pundits accused the scientific community of being alarmists. Because these tipping points were just beginning scientists could not prove, with absolute confidence, it was happening. They did not want to deal with the well-funded right-wing protests so they dropped the term, until now.

Science researchers and their students have completed studies, published in Nature Magazine, of charred boreal landscape and the loss of legacy carbon. They are claiming if we do not aggressively address the primary cause of global warming, the burning of coal, oil and gas, plus address the loss of boreal forest, we have reached the tipping point.

Society has forgotten the role of science is to sound the alarm when they identify hazards. Scientists are not alarmists. Paul Revere was not an alarmist, and neither are these scientists. The forests are burning and along with them so too is the legacy soil. And so too is our legacy if we do not stand up.