With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

Every year, farmers continue burning forest in Borneo to clear land for
farming. And whenever the weather is dry, those fires spread out through
the jungle and down into the peat. Satellite images suggest that 12 million
acres of the swamp forests were in flames at one point during late 2002. And
2002 and 2003 were the first back-to-back years in which net additions to
the atmosphere's carbon burden exceeded 4.4 billion tons. Rieley reckons
that the burning swamp forests contributed a billion tons of that.
It looked as if smoldering bogs in remote Borneo were single-handedly
ratcheting up the speed of climate change. They show, says David Schimel,
of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder,
Colorado, how "catastrophic events affecting small areas can have a huge
impact on the global carbon balance." Fire in Borneo and the Amazon may
be turning the world's biggest living "sinks" for carbon dioxide into the most
dynamic new source of the gas in the twenty-first century.