Canada’s 2023 wildfires created four times more emissions than planes did last year – report
Canada’s 2023 wildfires created four times more emissions than planes did last year – report
Months-long fires spewed about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year, data shows
Always these odd comparisons. Just give us the amount of CO2 emitted!
3.28bn tons (2.98 metric tons)
I bet you didn't know that a metric ton was 1.1 billion times bigger than whatever non-metric ton they're referring to.
Hahaha indeed. But seriously, within the accuracy of the researchers I do not even know why they use 3 significant digits. I highly doubt they can be better than 0.5 % accurate. I would expect a value rounded to the nearest 0.1 (2 significant digits).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than the US state of West Virginia, new research has found.
Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe.
So when they burn all the carbon that’s stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said study lead author James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI’s Global Forest Watch.
These are far more than regular forest fires, but researchers focused only on tree cover loss, which is a bigger effect, said study co-author Alexandra Tyukavina, a geography professor at the University of Maryland.
“The loss of that much forest is a very big deal, and very worrisome,” said Syracuse University geography and environment professor Jacob Bendix, who wasn’t part of the study.
One of the authors of the Canadian study, fire expert Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, puts the acreage burned at twice what MacCarthy and Tyukavina do.
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