All that Fuel Just Sitting There Waiting to Burn

It was so much easier when you could think of the Arctic as white, covered in a crisp layer of snow and ice. Today you have to think green as in vast tracts of ice-free ocean and exposed tundra and permafrost.

The tundra, largely frozen peat, is thawing and drying out. Peat is what people used for centuries to heat their homes.

There are a lot of peat bogs in the Lower Mainland, the largest being the Burns Bog. Every now and then part of it will catch fire and firefighters have a hell of a time putting it out. It takes days - if they're lucky.

Here's a riddle. What do you call a large peat bog on fire where there's no firefighters? You call it Greenland. Here's a satellite photo of a peat wildfire in Greenland last summer.

So, as you can imagine, such a fire releases loads of CO2 into the atmosphere but that's not the only problem. A potentially bigger problem is the soot carried on the winds, black carbon that lands to coat the Greenland ice cap.

Now you probably realize that white reflects the heat of the sun. That's why those Saudi princes are all cloaked in white from head to toe. Dark stuff, especially black stuff, absorbs that solar heat. That's as true for you in a heatwave as it is for ice that gets coated in soot, black carbon.  From Scientific American:

Scientists who studied the wildfire said that nearly a third of the soot landed on Greenland’s ice sheet. They warned that much bigger blazes could move through the icy island in the future, and the emissions from these fires could contribute to further melting of the already thinning ice sheet. 

“I think it’s a warning sign that something like this can happen on permafrost that was supposed to be melting at the end of the century,” rather than today, Andreas Stohl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), told Live Science.

...Using a computer model to simulate how soot would have been carried in the atmosphere, the researchers estimated that about 7 tons of an aerosol called black carbon—30 percent of the total emissions from that fire—landed on the ice sheet.

This amount of carbon didn’t have much of an impact on the ice sheet’s overall albedo, or reflectivity, Stohl and Evangeliou said. The wildfire, while unprecedented in size for Greenland, was small in comparison to the wildfires that raged over mainland North America last year. (Record-breaking wildfires in British Columbia in 2017 burned more than 4,600 square miles, or 12,000 square kilometers, according to Canadian news magazine Maclean’s.) By sending giant smoke plumes into the atmosphere, the North American fires deposited much more carbon on the Greenland ice sheet than the Greenland wildfire, Evangeliou said. However, the Greenland fire was much more effective at dropping carbon onto the ice sheet, he explained.

...Perhaps more worrisome, these peat fires can burn underground and unnoticed for a long time. Stohl noted that smoldering peat fires in Indonesia can burn for years before they flare up again on the surface. 

“We cannot actually be sure that the fires (in Greenland) are out,” Stohl said.

Now, here's the thing. There are vast peatlands across the far north. Canada has about a third of the peat on the planet.  And a lot of that peat tends to be in places so sparsely populated as to be effectively unpopulated. Who you gonna call? No one, that's who.

That peaty tundra has provided an insulating blanket for the methane-rich permafrost beneath. Permafrost is mainly soil, sand and gravel held together by ice. Scientists recently found that permafrost contains far more methane than had been expected.

So we seem to be confronted by a convergence of forces at play on the cryosphere that may be unstoppable at this point. These include western forest fires and tundra fires, both releasing CO2 and black carbon to the atmosphere, plus thawing permafrost releasing long sequestered methane into the atmosphere.

As Andreas Stohl observed, this was expected to happen by the end of the century only that estimate was out by some 80 plus years. Our bad. We got it way wrong. Our pessimistic forecasts turned out to be wildly optimistic. Oopsie.

What can we do to stop it? No one seems to have a quick fix answer. Okay then, what can we do to make it even worse, far worse? That's easy. Let's just stick to what got this nightmare rolling, fossil fuel energy. Better yet, let's just push really high-carbon fossil fuels on the world markets, as much as we can, as fast as we can. We can even build bigger and better pipelines. And an armada of big, wallowing, fat ass oil tankers. They won't all get through but a lot of them won't sink. Yeah, that's the ticket. Oh wait, some guy in Ottawa has already thought of that. Damn.

We Can't Pretend Any Longer

The tundra is burning.  Coupled with retreating glaciers and loss of Arctic sea ice, we now have three global warming feedback loop mechanisms that are plainly visible to the naked eye from space.

This is not the face of man-made or anthropogenic global warming.   No, we pulled the trigger but the Earth did the rest.  And now we're pretty much powerless to stop any of it.   We can't stop the tundra from burning, releasing greenhouse gases, spreading soot to northern ice caps and exposing the permafrost underneath, itself a rich source of massive quantities of once safely stored greenhouse gases.   We can't stop that and we're not even pretending we have that under control or that we're going to do anything about it.  Instead we just talk about something else, anything else.

Actually we're doing more than talking.   We're in a furious race to extract any fossil fuel we can pump, explode, boil or mine out of the ground.  We're eying the loss of the Arctic sea ice not as a disaster but as a terrific opportunity to extract fossil fuel energy from beneath the sea bed.  It's as though all this fossil fuel, that has lain safely buried beneath our feet since long before the appearance of man suddenly has a best before date and the clock is ticking.

The Americans have suddenly discovered new sources of oil and gas, potentially greater than the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.  It still won't be enough to relieve them of their entire need for foreign oil but it could come a long way to self-sufficiency.   So, what is the buzz in the States?   Exporting.   They want to export their windfall, especially the least carbon-intensive stuff, the natural gas.

As The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk revealed in his expose on the Nexen deal, the fossil fuelers are now in desperation mode.

"Just a couple of weeks ago the Wall Street Journal inadvertently explained Prime Minister Stephen Harper's extreme bitumen jingoism, the dismantling of domestic environmental legislation as well as Ottawa's promiscuous overtures to Communist China's authoritarian capitalists, including the perfunctory approval of CNOOC's takeover of Calgary-based Nexen.

"In language that no petro politician would use, the Journal boldly announced the obvious: Canada's bitumen was "suddenly, not a sure thing." Or even a smart one. The boom was over. 

"...Bitumen's ailing prospects also explain the government's secretive negotiation of a one-sided investment treaty with China that could make China's highly subsidized and corrupt state owned enterprises the nation's number one foreign investors by 2017.

"Harper's disregard for democratic sentiment on these issues (Canadians and Albertans in particular remain opposed to a CNOOC sell-out, let alone the trade deal) ultimately spell one word: desperation. And desperation in a bust and boom petro state, as any North African can tell you, is not a pretty thing."

It's a feature common to warfare that the gunfire reaches a crescendo in the minutes before a cease-fire comes into effect.  Is something similar happening with fossil fuels?   Are the fossil fuelers and their political minions at last coming to realize they're caught up in a volatile and high-risk fossil fuel bubble?  Are they finally figuring out that all those reserves on their books are woefully sub-prime assets?   Is this a giant "going out of business sale", an "everything must go" petro-bacchanal? 

If Nikiforuk and others, who've been warning us about this bubble for a good long time, are right then Canada and especially Alberta are in trouble.  Despite all its supposed Tar Sands wealth, the Alberta government is running in the red.  Now why would that be?   Could it be high unemployment?  No.  Well, it must be something.

So, with the North warming, the ice melting, the tundra thawing and burning, is this really a good time for a national blow out sale on fossil fuels?   What does this say about us?   What does it mean for our future and that of our children?

Isn't it time our political classes had an adult conversation with us?  Wouldn't it be nice if they would explain how their energy policies are to be brought into conformity with our environmental imperatives?   Tundra fires tell us something, that we have the cart ahead of the horse.

Tundra is Fuel and It Will Burn Us

We hear a lot about the tundra that blankets the far north thawing due to global warming.   As it thaws it releases previously trapped methane and CO2.

Well it does more than that.   As tundra thaws it turns into fuel for wildfires.  And let's put it this way, fire fighting isn't very effective up there.

In 2007, a tundra fire on the Anaktuvuk river in Alaska showed what's at stake.

"'Fire has been largely absent from tundra for the past 11,000 or so years, but the frequency of tundra fires is increasing, probably as a response to climate warming,' said co-author Syndonia "Donie" Bret-Harte, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology.

"The Anaktuvuk River fire burned 1,039 square kilometers (401 square miles), an area roughly the size of Cape Cod and visible from space, and released more than 2.1 teragrams (2.3 million tons) of carbon into the atmosphere. Radiocarbon dating of the soils revealed the maximum age of the soil carbon emitted from the fire was 50 years."

And a tundra fire is more complex than an ordinary forest fire.


"Smoke from the fire pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but that's just one part of a tundra fire's potential impact. The fire also consumed up to 30 percent of the insulating layer of organic matter that protects the permafrost beneath the tundra's shrub- and moss-covered landscape.

"In a pine forest, fire would burn up leaf litter on the ground, but not the soil beneath. Because the Arctic tundra has a carbon-rich, peaty soil, however, the ground itself is combustible, and when the fire recedes, some of the soil is gone. In a double whammy, the vulnerable permafrost is not only more exposed, but also covered by blackened ground, which absorbs more of the sun's heat and could accelerate thawing.

"'When the permafrost warms, microbes will begin to decompose that organic matter and could release even more carbon that's been stored in the permafrost for hundreds or thousands of years into the atmosphere,' Mack said. 'If that huge stock of carbon is released, it could increase atmospheric carbon dioxide drastically.'"

Smoke and soot from tundra fires in Labrador also caused dramatic melting of the Greenland ice sheet in July.

Satellite imaging on 8 July showed surface thawing on about 40 per cent of the ice sheet.   Four days later - just four days - that had grown to 97 per cent of the ice sheet thawing.

This is an excellent example of how everything in our biosphere is connected and contained in a remarkably delicate balance.   The tundra is circumpolar and it blankets the permafrost beneath it.   As we warm that tundra we're turning it into fuel - the trees and shrubs
and the carbon-rich soil beneath.

Is this one of those "tipping points" the climate scientists have been warning us about?   It sure seems to check all the boxes, ring all the bells.  We could be witnessing the early onset of runaway global warming.   Fortunately we're much too busy figuring out ways to increase our extraction and export of high-carbon fossil fuels to have time to worry about stuff like the tundra.   Where's the money in that?  Sheesh.