Researcher: Wildfires not adding to global warming

Forest fires are big, messy and disruptive. Scientists say global warming is making them bigger and bringing them more often.

But while burning all that vegetation releases huge volumes of carbon dioxide, the fires themselves don't appear to be adding to global warming, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society says in a new paper.

That's because forests are “carbon neutral,” said Tom DeLuca, a former University of Montana professor who works for The Wilderness Society's Northern Rockies office in Bozeman. He recently wrote a paper on the subject for the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

When trees and other plants grow, they absorb carbon dioxide. When they die, they release carbon dioxide, whether rapidly through combustion or slowly through decomposition.

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas. It helps trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, causing the globe's temperature to rise.

However, looking at the carbon cycle requires using a geologic time frame, DeLuca said.

The release from a fire “is all carbon that was pulled from the atmosphere in the past few hundred years,” DeLuca said in an interview. “And it will all be pulled out of the atmosphere again in the next few hundred years.”

In contrast, when fossil fuels like oil are burned, they release carbon that had been stored for many millions of year.more from Bozeman Daily Chronicle