Denver’s skyline was frequently hazy this summer because of wildfires.

The emissions from the fires are doing more than messing with our view. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have found that the emissions are pumping out tens of thousands of tons of particles, carbon dioxide, pollutants that form ground-level ozone and even mercury produced by power plants and absorbed by vegetation.

Atmospheric scientist Christine Wiedinmyer at NCAR in Boulder is among the researchers studying what the wildfires are doing to our air quality. It’s a crucial question for the Denver metro area and northern Colorado, which have struggled through the years to meet federal air-quality standards.

It’s a serious concern for the entire region, where wildfires, including Colorado’s most destructive on record, have burned all summer. And it’s a problem likely to get worse as record hot, dry weather, driven by climate change, intensifies the fire danger in the West.

Wiedinmyer has compared Colorado’s wildfire emissions in 2002—another bad year—to this summer. Carbon monoxide emissions from April through June 2002 totaled 47,000 metric tons, or the equivalent of 15 percent of all human-caused sources for that time period. During the same period this year, wildfires in Colorado produced 76,000 metric tons of carbon monoxide—equivalent to 24 percent of all human-caused carbon monoxide in those three months. Carbon monoxide is an air pollutant regulated by air quality standards and is also released from man-made sources such as cars and power plants.

Carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities, was boosted by the wildfires this year. Wiedinmyer calculated that the fires generated 1.3 million metric tons of the gas through July. In 2009, the last year for which data were available, Colorado’s entire commercial sector emitted 4.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. The grand total for all sectors was 93.7 million metric tons.

“Overall, the fires are equivalent to a small fraction of that the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide,’’ Wiedinmyer said, “but when you start looking at individual sectors, at individual types of fuel, like coal or natural gas, it can be significant.’’

Smoke rises from a wildfire burning in Boulder’s foothills.

The figure of 1.3 million tons from this year’s wildfires covers just the first seven months. The number doesn’t include emissions from out-of-state fires that drift into Colorado.

The research has caught the attention of Colorado state health officials, who are trying to figure out what larger, more frequent wildfires will mean for air quality – and the mandate to meet federal standards. State regulators have tightened regulations on the natural gas industry in eastern Colorado as the metro area has slipped out of compliance the past few years.

So, health officials want to know the volume and type of emissions coming from wildfires, said Gordon Pierce of the state air pollution control division. Pierce said much of the state’s concern centers on the fine particles and other pollutants that form ground-level ozone.

Other states are also looking at the research on pollution from wildfires.

“One of the reasons we’ve looked at that, and the carbon releases from the fires, was that states are looking at their carbon emissions and trying to understand their carbon budget for policy purposes,’’ Wiedinmyer said. “Particularly in the Western U.S., it’s really important to consider the fires and what’s happening to the ecosystems. You have large releases of carbon to the atmosphere when you have these large-scale fires and they are significant when you compare them to anthropogenic emissions.’’

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An appeals court today said EPA's finding that carbon pollution and global warming constitute a danger to public health and that the EPA is obligated to act.

The Court, composed of both Democratic and Republican appointees, differed and sided with EPA. It concluded 1) the Endangerment Finding and Tailpipe Rule are neither arbitrary nor capricious; 2) EPA’s interpretation of the governing CAA provisions is unambiguously correct; and 3) no petitioner has standing to challenge the Timing and Tailoring Rules. “We thus dismiss for lack of jurisdiction all petitions for review of the Timing and Tailoring Rules, and deny the remainder of the petitions,” the Court said.

NWF, which intervened on EPA’s behalf in the case, applauded the decision. Joe Mendelson, NWF director of climate and energy policy and a co-counsel on the historic “endangerment” case, said:

“This decision is three strikes and you’re out. It puts to rest a mob of big polluters’ attempt to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from using the Clean Air Act to limit carbon pollution and tackle the threat of climate change.”

A copy of the decision is here: DC Circuit Opinion 6-26-12

The case comes less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court in American Electric Power v. Connecticut strongly reiterated the 2007 endangerment ruling stating, “Massachusetts made plain that emissions of carbon dioxide qualify as air pollution subject to regulation under the [Clean Air] Act”.

As I head back from the Gulf coast today, where I saw firsthand some of the terrible impacts of the BP oil disaster, I read Al Gore’s excellent op-ed that ran in The New Republic today.

In “The Crisis Comes Ashore,” Al Gore highlights that oil leaking from the Macondo well isn’t the only uncontrolled pollution we’re putting into the environment. Every three seconds, we put the same amount of manmade carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the highest current estimates of oil spilling from the leaking well. Both the oil spill and the carbon dioxide spilling into the atmosphere are causing harm to our planet.

The justifiable outrage over the BP oil disaster may be creating a new opportunity to pass energy and climate legislation, similar to how the public outrage from the Exxon Valdez spill led to the reinvigoration of environmental laws.

Will the oil spill become America’s moment to embrace a clean energy future?

My hope is that as Al Gore says, this “…is one of those clarifying moments that brings a rare opportunity to take the longer view” and that we will take this moment to make the world safe from our oil addiction and the climate crisis.

Credit: Library of Congress

South Dakota’s House of Representatives has passed a resolution calling for “balanced” teaching of global warming in the state’s public schools. The 36 state representatives who supported HCR 1009 believe that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant…Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as ‘the gas of life’”.

A lot of our planet’s substances are beneficial in moderation but harmful when there’s too much exposure. Take for example a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas called oxygen. Oxygen is essential for sustaining life on Earth. However, breathing elevated concentrations of this gas can cause oxygen toxicity, a poisoning that may lead to cell damage and death.

Carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the biggest global warming pollutants, is harmful and disruptive to ecosystems when there’s too much.

As originally introduced in South Dakota’s House, HCR 1009 stated “global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact.” Public schools were urged to teach, among other methods, the astrological dynamics that affect the world’s weather patterns. As in astrology. I’m a Taurus…and?

South Dakota’s state Senate intervened on February 24 and amended the resolution to remove the reference to astrology. The record of the legislature’s concurrent resolution HCR 1009 can be viewed here.

Dr. Richard Guyette, Director of the Missouri Tree-Ring Laboratory, like many, suggests that trees could be part of a carbon trading market: “Farmers can sell the carbon they have stored in their trees. Companies that emit excess of carbon would be able to buy carbon credits to offset their pollution.” Of course, carbon trading has its own pitfalls, well-explored elsewhere, but it is not the only strategy revealed by Guyette’s research.

The Missouri Tree-Ring Laboratory at the University of Missouri-Columbia recently used tree-ring (dendrochronology) and radiocarbon dating to get a more detailed picture of this carbon cycle by examining fallen oaks throughout streams and floodplains in northern Missouri. They found that an underwater oak holds its carbon for an average of 2,000 years, which is almost 2,000 years longer than its forest-fallen fellow, which only takes 20 years or so to decompose and release sequestered greenhouse gases. The average oak trunk moldering in the test streams was about 3,500 years old, and the oldest more than 14,000, showing that these Missouri streams have been acting as carbon storerooms for millennia.

This kind of information, which better sketches out variations in the carbon cycle, is necessary to an accurate understanding of the role forests play in climate change. As we learn more, improved policies adopted by governments and organizations, including universities, could mitigate or eliminate the carbon emissions that come from deforestation and poor land management. In fact, policies adopted by the United States since the late 1800s have already shown dividends by reducing the carbon flux by more than 440 teragrams per year, according to a CDIAC report. Research like that done at MU can improve our understanding of proactive land management even further, and hopefully be extended to tropical regions that hold the bulk of the planet’s undeveloped forests.

See More:

Water Keeps Carbon Locked Into Dead Trees— STL Today

Missouri Tree-Ring Laboratory

Reducing Tropical Deforestation Will Help Fight Global Warming— Mongabay.com

Carbon Flux to the Atmosphere from Land-Use Changes 1850-2005—CDIAC Trends