Unprecedented Fires Around The Globe Another Tipping Point

What is not being expressed by the media with sufficient emphasis is the escalating climate change fires that are now burning around the world and getting larger every year. The fires are indeed another tipping point that will cause the planet's temperatures to rise significantly on top of the escalation currently underway with fossil fuels. I am not sure that these fires and other tipping points such as CO2 emission from decaying plastics or CO2 releases from permafrost were ever in the models used by scientist to calculate the 1.5 or 2-degree estimate. However without these tipping points, we are on a trajectory to blow past 2 degrees at the moment, and there may well be a host of tipping points that have not yet been considered.
What I don't understand is why the media both public and private is still talking in such careful tones. They should be, given what is going on, ringing alarm bells and headlining these issue one after another every evening as the significants of this is far higher than most of the political controversies that are going at the moment. These stories are not really about the weather or whose house burned down it is about the planet burning down.

California Fire Impact on Climate

The fires burning around the globe represent another tipping point that will accelerate climate change. During the burning process that occurs in forest fires, 15% of the stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the remaining stored carbon is released slowly over the next decade as the fire debris decays. So the remaining 85% of the carbon will continue to be released over the next 10 to 15 years.

If we take just California's annual carbon release from their fires, putting aside that 2018's fires are far larger than previous fires, the emission of carbon from these fires alone is equivalent to 8 million passenger vehicles driven for one year. However, when you factor in the after fire carbon release then the figure is 19 million additional cars on the road.

Fort McMurray Fire Impact on Climate

The massive fires in Fort McMurray Alberta in 2016 released 41 megatonnes of CO2 but it was a mixture of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. To put that in perspective the none fire or land use release of greenhouse gas emissions in 2014 by Canada was 732 megatons, and of course, the current emissions are higher and escalating. Keep in mind the Fort McMurray figure does not include the other 85% carbon release that will occur over the next 10-15 years.

2017 British Columbia Forest Fire

In 2017 British Columbia had its largest forest fire season on record, and 2018 is likely to be larger. In 2017 the initial 15% release by August was 190 million tonnes of greenhouse gases which is triple its annual carbon footprint. It was expected to be another 20% before the fire season was over.

Natural Resources Canada

Siberian Fires Smoke Reaches Canada with Health Risks

NASA Image

The Siberian Fires burning in the have reached a point of 10 million acres and are burning out of control with no hope of containing them. In addition to the severe impact on the climate the fires also contain an impact on human health NASA has expressed it as follows:  Naturally burning timber and brush from wildfires release dangerous particles into the air at a rate three times as high as levels known by the EPA, researchers at Georgia Tech found.  The study also found wildfires spew methanol, benzene, ozone and other noxious chemicals.  Residents that smell smoke or see haze in the air should take precautions against breathing too much of it and stay tuned to local air quality information.

Feedback Loop

The research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service commented on the increasing amount of greenhouse gas release from fires as a dangerous "feedback loop." Climate change will continue to increase and accelerate as a result of increased fires and the lengthening of the fire season. This, in turn, will create even longer and more intense fire seasons around the world.

Reference

As California burns, climate goals may go up in smoke — even after the flames are out
Carbon release in wake of Fort McMurray wildfire spikes greenhouse gasses
'It's alarming': Wildfire emissions grow to triple B.C.'s annual carbon footprint
Smoke from Siberian Fires Reach Canada
BC wildfires caused in part by and contributing to climate change
B.C.’S Greenhouse Gas Emissions Have RISEN IN FOUR OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS

Plastic pollution: How one woman found a new source of warming gases hidden in waste - BBC News

New Climate Change Tipping Point

Sarah-Jeanne Royer Phd. has discovered that plastics are continually off-gassing in the environment initially it was thought this was restricted to CO2 but now it is apparent they are emitting ethylene, methane and propane into the atmosphere. Since plastics have only been around since the 50s the issue is minor at the moment but the problem will escalate quickly as these plastics are now beginning to break down in our environment and our production of plastics has increased exponentially. What Dr. Royer has discovered is another tipping point that will further escalate climate change that is now attacking our ecological and climatical systems that sustain the earth.

Plastic Industry Refuse to Cooperate

When the plastic industry was questioned about their process by so she could understand the dynamics of the problem the industry essentially excommunicated her. What does this mean? Does this mean they are perfectly aware of the looming danger of plastics? Does this mean they like many industries before them want to continue knowingly down a dangers path just because it is lucrative? I certainly don't understand why an industry based on science would not collaborate with another scientist who is trying to work on an issue that could seriously impact our ability to sustain life on the planet. You would think if they felt there was a problem with the research they would want to set the record straight, the reaction the scientist reported from the industry is frightening.

Research Paper Abstract

Mass production of plastics started nearly 70 years ago and the production rate is expected to double over the next two decades. While serving many applications because of their durability, stability and low cost, plastics have deleterious effects on the environment. Plastic is known to release a variety of chemicals during degradation, which has a negative impact on biota. Here, we show that the most commonly used plastics produce two greenhouse gases, methane and ethylene, when exposed to ambient solar radiation. Polyethylene, which is the most produced and discarded synthetic polymer globally, is the most prolific emitter of both gases. We demonstrate that the production of trace gases from virgin low-density polyethylene increase with time, with rates at the end of a 212-day incubation of 5.8 nmol g-1 d-1 of methane, 14.5 nmol g-1 d-1 of ethylene, 3.9 nmol g-1 d-1 of ethane and 9.7 nmol g-1 d-1 of propylene. Environmentally aged plastics incubated in water for at least 152 days also produced hydrocarbon gases. In addition, low-density polyethylene emits these gases when incubated in air at rates ~2 times and ~76 times higher than when incubated in water for methane and ethylene, respectively. Our results show that plastics represent a heretofore unrecognized source of climate-relevant trace gases that are expected to increase as more plastic is produced and accumulated in the environment.

About Sarah-Jeanne Royer

Over the past ten years, Sarah-Jeanne has been involved in 19 oceanographic expeditions in polar (Arctic and Antarctic), tropical and sub-tropical regions where on some occasions she was the chief scientist and responsible for the supervision of master and PhD students. Her research has been published in 15 scientific journals, presented at 18 scientific conferences where she gained a lot of expertise in report writing and grant writing.

After working in quantifying oceanic gases in the global ocean for more than ten years, she has now specialized herself on plastic pollution and marine debris in the environment. She published two papers one on the validation of ATR FT-IR to identify polymers of plastic marine debris, including those ingested by marine organisms by Jung et al., 2018 and her latest paper on the production of greenhouse gases by plastics that has caught a lot of attention with the media. She has many ongoing projects from citizen science to the tracking of marine debris in the ocean to a time series of the prevalence of micro-fibres in coastal regions.



References
a story by Matt McGrath the BBC Environment correspondent 02 August 2018
University of Hawai'i News
Production of methane and ethylene from plastic in the environment, Plos one
Sarah-Jeanne Royer's Research Gate 
sarahjeanneroyer.com