Climate change - CO2 and Indonesian Peat Fires

I've just come across a great post over on Bill O the Wisp's blog:

GreenFudge is broadly a pro AGW blog. i.e. they support the theory of man-made global warming. Whatever you may feel about that, their blog makes interesting reading.

I picked up the following quote from This GreenFudge Post

[quote]Deforestation is responsible for 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and the draining of peat forests or peat bogs releases even more CO2 than deforestation does.[end quote]

Now to me, that sounds like 20% + 20% plus a bit more or about 45 % of total man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions. This incidentally roughly correlates with Al Gores "An Inconvenient Truth", although he places the figure at 30 % and spends less than 1 minute on it. Also the original Sheffield University research into the burning of the Indonesian peat forests in 1997 is illuminating. Sheffield University placed the burning Indonesian peat forest as contributing between 15 and 45% to the global total of AGW CO2.

So anyway, an minimum of say one fifth up to about one half of CO2 emissions come from either burning Indonesian peat forests or Brazilian and African rain forest.

The burning of the Indonesian Peat bogs are particularly useless. This all came about because 20-30 years ago, the Indonesian government decided to drain the massive Indonesian Peat forests in order to plant other crops.

The forests, based on peat, that in places are 30 meters thick and are over 30,000 years old spontaneously caught fire. This was a very big deal in the Far East in the late 90’s /2000’s when the smoke and pollution caused massive problems to Indonesia and surrounding countries. We heard little in England but see Reuters report here and Wikipedia here.

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