British Columbia’s forests are being ravaged by a scourge of tiny pine beetles, which are turning lush green trees into rotting pulp at an alarming rate. The beetles are killing so many trees that the greenhouse gases released by decomposing wood are expected to outweigh all similar gases emitted by BC’s 4.5 million residents next year — as well as their cars, homes, factories and power plants — by three megatonnes.
How can trees of all things be worse polluters than people? The Globe and Mail reports:
A pine beetle study released this week by Natural Resources Canada contains the eye-popping revelation that B.C.’s forests - far from being a weapon in the fight against carbon dioxide - have been spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for six years. The culprit is the pine beetle, which has turned vast swaths of forest into rotting stands of punky wood.
Next year, those decaying logs will emit 73 megatonnes of carbon dioxide - more than the entire economy of British Columbia, which is likely to clock in at something just over 70 megatonnes. Werner Kurz, senior research scientist with Canadian Forest Service at Natural Resources Canada, says the carbon output from forests will fall through the next decade; by 2020 it should only be only 37 megatonnes.
With no frame of reference, it’s tough to get a solid idea of exactly how much a megatonne is. Whenever I’m forced to use big abstract terms like “billion” or “megatonne,” I try to put them into perspective with a concrete example, so here goes: on average, a car emits about 27,650 kg of these gases per year. A megatonne is a million tonnes, or a billion kilograms. So, a megatonne of greenhouse gases is equivalent to the output of 36,167 cars in a year. The beetles create 70 megatonnes each year, so that means they pollute as much as 2,531,645 cars — twice as many as there are in the province.
BC does have a “Mountain Pine Beetle Action Plan,” which basically aims to control beetle populations, re-plant trees and harvest dead wood kill before it rots.
In related news, BC’s reforestation program just planted its six billionth tree since it began in 1930. For you statistics geeks out there, that’s an average of 76,923,076 new trees per year, 210,748 per day or 2.4 per second. That sounds awfully impressive, but I couldn’t find any data on how many trees they’ve chopped down in that time. I’m guessing it’s a lot.
Photo from Wikipedia.
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