[hepr-vn] Don't Burn the Crops

[Vern Weitzel]

Perhaps a negative argument to swidden farming, which many have considered
a sustainable solution in the past. Any comments?


http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/05/dont-burn-crops

Don't Burn the Crops

— By Julia Whitty | Tue May 26, 2009 5:44 PM PST
—NASA

Want a quick recipe for reducing Arctic ice melt fast? Stop burning northern 
hemisphere farmlands and pasturelands.

New research finds that large-scale agricultural burning in Russia, Kazakhstan, 
China, the US, Canada, and the Ukraine is melting Arctic ice.

The big contributor: Spring burning, when farmers torch crop residues and brush 
to clear new land for crops and livestock. The black carbon soot produced by 
these fires flows north, warms the surrounding air, and absorbs solar energy 
when it falls on ice and snow.

How bad is the problem? Springtime burning may account for 30 percent of Arctic 
warming to date.

The good news is there's an easy fix. Targeting these burns gets us a genuinely 
fast reduction in temperature over the Arctic. Plus we know how to control these 
pollutants right now. Just stop burning. Right now. Before the melting ice 
rewires the oceanic currents delivering us the climate we're used to.

The research is part of POLARCAT, an international effort to track the transport 
of pollutants into the Arctic from lower latitudes. Researchers were surprised 
to find 50 smoke plumes that analysis of satellite images revealed came from 
agricultural fires in Northern Kazakhstan and Southern Russia and from forest 
fires in Southern Siberia. The emissions from these fires far outweighed those 
from fossil fuels.

"These fires weren't part of our standard predictions, they weren't in our 
models," says Daniel Jacob, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and 
environmental engineering at Harvard.

Although global warming is largely the result of excess accumulation of carbon 
dioxide, the Arctic is highly sensitive to short-lived pollutants like black 
carbon. Forest fires, agricultural burning, primitive cookstoves, and diesel 
fuel are the primary sources of black carbon.