Has anyone calculated what the carbon footprint of the Los Angeles fires has been so far?
Probably a very small number.
Most impact is on inhabitants (losing property and lives) PLUS insurance rates will be jacked up for EVERYONE...have no doubt about this.
It's zero as those trees previously absorbed the same amount of CO
2 and stored the carbon as organic compounds. I supposed it's problematic that the burning tree releases it almost instantaneously as compared to the time it took to store it but hey, it was free storage. Be that as it may, a tree when fully burned should have a net zero effect on atmospheric CO
2.
I am not sure what would be point of this calculation (as zero).
Of course, if you reverse the process the result is zero, but no one counts like this, typically.
The effect is an immediate release, causing a bump...but as I said, it's not much of a tonnage, i would think.
More exact calculations: I saw a number of 21000 acres burnt.
Forest has 89-106 tons/acre.
http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/climate_change/sequestration_facts.htmlLet's count as 100 tons for the forest, but in an urban environment tree +house carbon density is probably 20-30% at most, so, say 25 tons/acre max.
25x21000=525000 tons of carbon.
Humans emit 29 bil tons of carbon/year (
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-much-co2-does-a-single-volcano-emit/), so it was an equivalent of 0.0018% of human yearly emissions.
That said, Mt Etna produces 16000 tons of C02 a day, an equivalent of 4364 tons of carbon.
So, my rough calculation is that LA fires produced about 120 days worth of Etna regular emissions.
Quite a bit, but not catastrophic.
In total, 33 degassing volcanoes produce 60 mil tons CO2/year which is 16.36 mil tons of carbon.
So, LA was, maximally, an equivalent of 15.6 days of "regular" Earth volcanoes degassing.
It's more than I initially thought.
