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Here is how that was accomplished: As over tens of millions of years, plants and trees grew and died, the dead wood and foliage fell to the forest floor where it decayed with the help of water. This decaying plant life was buried in successive layers of peat, so the carbon that had been in the living plants was now in the peat. Over time, the processes of the Earth buried the peat and the carbon went into "long term" storage where it was transformed by heat and pressure into coal or oil. So, it took millions of years to remove the carbon from the atmosphere and bury it in the ground in sufficient quantities to produce our present atmospheric balance.
However, humans found the coal and oil hidden in the ground, and discovered that these substances provided a great source of energy. So, by burning coal and oil, without realizing what we were doing, we have been taking the carbon that it took plant life seventy million years to remove from the atmosphere and store safely in the ground back out of the ground and releasing it back into the atmosphere. And, we are releasing this carbon at a rate faster than plants can remove it again. We have been innocently and foolishly setting a process into motion that we ultimately won't be able to survive: the uncontrolled release of carbon from safe storage by burning fossil fuels. We are reversing a process that took millions of years for plant life to accomplish and we are reversing it so quickly that we are altering the climate of the planet.
Warming the climate, while it might encourage some plant growth on a short term basis, will ultimately harm the very plants and forests that are a major path by which the Earth can get the atmospheric carbon dioxide back out of the air and into the ground again.
One of the ways that we are witnessing the harm to these living forests is in the form of fires; too many fires. While fire has always been a step in the natural part of forest ecology, it typically would occur only once every hundred to three hundred years. Today, the fire situation is far more acute.
When trees burn, there is a double loss. Not only is the carbon they hold in their tissues is released into the atmosphere, but the living organism that was capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere is dead as well.
Uncontrolled logging is a problem in the boreal, too. Currently it is estimated that logging the Siberian forest has reached 15,500 square mile per year (much of it illegal) and fires are burning 4,000 square miles of forest annually. It's been estimated that much as ten percent of the carbon we put into the atmosphere is absorbed by the Siberian forests and they are vanishing. Additionally, the boreal fires have put as much as fifty million tons of carbon gases into the atmosphere. One can begin to see how the process of global warming could accelerate very quickly--literally picking up speed--if the processes feeding the trend of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide aren't dealt with very soon.
Humans and other mammals may be able to scurry away from the threat of a forest fire, leaving the trees to burn alone, but we ultimately can no more escape death brought on by a massive failure in the balancing act of the cycle of carbon than a tree in a burning forest can escape a raging fire. While a tree can't go anywhere to get away, neither can we. There is nowhere to go when our planetary system fails. Not even Mars.
From the book Dead Mars, Dying Earth
by Dr. John Brandenurg & Monica Rix Paxson
©2000, reprinted with permission
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