If a tree burns down how much CO2 is produced?

Question

Is it true that it releases as much Co2 as it produced oxygen throughout its lifetime?

Answer 1

Rates of carbon sequestration vary from 1 to 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare of forest per year.

It would depend on the size of the tree and its age. Canada has a huge problem:

"By the time the unprecedented infestation ends, the rice-sized beetles will have killed so many trees an extra billion tonnes of carbon dioxide will be wafting through the atmosphere, researchers from the Canadian Forest Service report in the journal Nature on Thursday.

That is five times the annual emissions from all the cars, trucks, trains and planes in Canada, says lead author Werner Kurz, who warns the beetle's impact goes far beyond the B.C. border"

And how about When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast two years ago, the storm devastated 320 million trees.

Answer 2

It releases all the CO2 it has stored in its lifetime when it burns.

Nightwind, global warming "extremists" are well aware of this fact and have been some time. Additionally, although forest fires are natural events, forest fires on the scale we are currently experiencing are not. In North America, many forest fires are being caused by misguided management practices, which included fire suppression. It is natural for small areas of forest to burn every year. Some trees are even dependent on the heat of fires to prepare their seeds for sprouting. After decades of fire suppression due to poor understanding of ecological systems and human encroachment in wild areas, many of the West's forests are basically giant tinderboxes. In the past, surviving trees would have absorbed much of the carbon released by forest fires and mitigated the effect on the carbon cycle. Now, unfortunately, the fires are likely to get quickly out of hand, killing nearby trees that otherwise would have survived.

Additionally, many second and third world countries, particularly Brazil and Indonesia, are burning millions of acres of rainforest every year to make room for palm oil plantations and other agricultural pursuits - far more than would ever occur naturally, even in areas where slash-and-burn farming is traditional.

Human-caused forest fires such as these quickly become a vicious cycle. By burning trees on our current scale, we are not only releasing massive quantities of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, we are also killing the organisms that can absorb it again. This speeds climate change, which is predicted to lead to increased heat and drought in many areas of the world, which encourages more and larger forest fires, which kills more trees and releases more carbon...

Even if you don't believe in AGW, as you obviously don't, forests regulate climate in other ways. In particular, they add water vapor to the air, which increases cloudiness and therefore coolness and rainfall. Large forests even create their own microclimate. For that reason, deforestation tends to lead to more frequent droughts and even desertification, which in turn makes it harder to reforest the land, or use it for agriculture, which leads to more forest being burned, which leads to more drought and desertification... (Check out Niger for an example of this cycle gone out of control.)

Answer 3

it is true that it releases as much Co2 as it CONSUMED throughout its lifetime?

that is, all of the carbon that it stored, is put back into the atmosphere.

some plants in the ocean sink when they die, and take the carbon with them.

that slow process will eventually help restore/reduce the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Answer 4

Funny how these little factoids come up from time to time to slap a little reality into the lives of the Global warming extremists. As if the average intelligent person couldn't already figure out or assume that nature and natural events provide more pollutants in the world than man could ever produce.

Things like Mt. Saint Helen's eruption, Mt. Pinotubo, Mt. Vesuveus, Hurricanes, etc etc.

Answer 5

It's true and that is why is better to drowned a tree instead of burning.

Answer 6

Some of the carbon would be in the roots, which would not burn.  

Answer 7

Very Good Question. The answers indicate complexity to this short question.

Adding to the previous answers: In part it depends how hot the fire is which varies as the fire burns material and reduces its fuel supply.

Very hot fires actually transmit a lot of heat by radiation and can propagate the fire to other trees without direct contact with them.

Low temperature fires probably produce, relatively, more Carbon Monoxide which can kill fire fighters directly, hard to know if and when it happens. But, the radiation heat is a bigger danger, that's why the shelter blanket is covered by a reflecting surface.

High temperature fires may burn some of the roots and the carbon sequestered (buried) by the tree and produce a lot more CO2 than burning an isolated tree of the same size.

But, the heat radiation also provides the best means to detect forest fires shortly after they start. Passive Infra-red sensors were used in Vietnam to locate people boiling a pot of water from airplanes. We are now using this, for the first time, in California.