In dozens of locations around the world, there are vast underground coal fires consuming millions of tons of coal - creating enormous environmental and human health problems and adding greatly to our climate change burden. Some of these fires have burned for decades - some for centuries.
One of the most troubling results of these fires, he says, is the carbon dioxide (CO2) they generate, including about 360 million metric tons of CO2 from coal fires in China alone. "The CO2 production of all of these fires in China is more than the total CO2 production in The Netherlands," Rosema says. This amounts to 2-3% of the annual worldwide production of CO2 from fossil fuels, or as much as emitted from all of the cars and light trucks in the United States. "Coal fires release a variety of potentially harmful gases [and] combustion by-products, including sulfur and particulates," says Glenn Stracher, associate professor of geology at East Georgia College in Swainsboro, Georgia. "The catastrophe that we're faced with is the fact that these fires are emitting noxious gases." In fire-plagued regions such as in Centralia, Pennsylvania, he says, the ground is littered with sulfur and other pollutants that have killed off virtually all visible plant and animal life.
Coal is, you see, a member of the same hydrocarbon family as oil and natural gas, and it is, like gas and oil, claimed to be a 'fossil fuel' created in finite, non-renewable quantities at a specific time in the earth's history (when the stars were, I'm guessing, in the proper alignment). And yet this allegedly precious and limited resource has been burning off at the rate of millions of tons per year, year in and year out, for at least a million years, and probably much longer.
This raises, in my mind at least, one very obvious question: how is it possible that nature has been taking an extremely heavy toll on the globe's 'fossil fuels' for hundreds of thousands of years (at the very least), without depleting the reserves that were supposedly created long, long ago; and yet man, who has been extracting and burning 'fossil fuels' for the mere blink of an eye, geologically speaking, has managed to nearly strip the planet clean?
_________________ Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
I'm just gonna find a cash machine.
Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 4:34 pm Post subject: Re: Coal Fires
quote:
"This raises, in my mind at least, one very obvious question: how is it possible that nature has been taking an extremely heavy toll on the globe's 'fossil fuels' for hundreds of thousands of years (at the very least), without depleting the reserves that were supposedly created long, long ago; and yet man, who has been extracting and burning 'fossil fuels' for the mere blink of an eye, geologically speaking, has managed to nearly strip the planet clean?"
Aha! The world, its resources and its capacity to absorb pollutants must indeed be infinite! What a genius this guy is! How did we all miss this obvious fact?
Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 4:58 pm Post subject: Re: Coal Fires
The denialist clown and others like him are INNUMERATE. Several hundred million tons per year is a small part of the 27 *billion* tons of CO2 that we pump into the atmosphere every year. Since most of the coal seam fires have been set by mankind in the last two hundred years it is quite reasonable to say that natural coal seam fires were much, much smaller in scale and did not pump even as much CO2 as volcanoes.
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