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Are forest fires evil polluters?

Note the mass emissions in the Amazon and Africa in Sept 2007

The Carbon tracker shows the major CO2 polluters as they splurt out CO2. See the massive plumes of CO2 around the planet.

Look at China… watch clusters of coal fired power stations bursting into life only to shut down a month later. (Or maybe not.)

Is that mass rallies of four wheel drives each August in the Congo? No, it must be air-conditioners in Kinshasa…

😉

Tom Quirk tells me that the intermittent polluters around the equatorial region are likely to be massive fires. (And there are even monster fires as far north as Siberia).

I’m intrigued but I want some data. The NASA Earth Observatory obviously have some data — see the picture here of the same month as the picture at the top (sept 2007). It is not enough though. The dots represent the number of fires, but not the intensity, and not the fuel load…

 

Note the active fires in the Amazon and Africa in Sept 2007

Watch the global wildfires rage and die out in this animation below:

Australian fires don’t appear to rate in the CO2 pollution stakes — perhaps the fuel loads and length of time they burn are just not on the same scale as some of the tropical fires in Africa, the Amazon and SE Asia?

If anyone can find the data on bush fires, I’m curious…

 

h/t Tom Quirk

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