Earth Burns More Hydrocarbons than Humans Ever Did

Yes, if the earth produces more CO2 than humans by natural burning of hydrocarbons - and indeed the earth has been doing so for millions of years - then the "global-warming-caused-by-human-burning-of-hydrocarbons" is an obvious hoax.

This means that there's no global warming. We're *not* damaging the biosphere. The lives we're leading are perfectly fine, and we do not have to restrict our lives and sign international protocols. In fact, we're doing precisely what the earth itself does - burn lots of hydrocarbons every year - except that the earth does it on a much grander scale than humans could ever hope to do.

We are living in perfect harmony with nature. Human civilization should continue develop as we were always meant to do. As we were put on this earth to do.

Yes we should develop quieter, cleaner, more pleasant forms of energy. But we don't have to. It's fine if we don't. Of course we will, because that's a natural way of developing. But there is no crisis. We are not damaging the earth. The earth is more than happy with what we have been doing and we should feel no shame in continuing to live as we are. Indeed, we should be proud of humanity and its achievements.

Those who wrote and want us to sign the Kyoto Protocol want us to feel guilty with ourselves, to retard our development and to restrict our lives. Don't follow them.

Here's more research:

Zerafshan is rich in mineral resources. Large deposits of high-quality coals are located here. The Fan-Yagnob deposit has a high heating value, more than 80% of its coals are refereed to the coke-coals. The Fan-Yagnob coal-field is notable for an interesting natural phenomenon-"burning coal-fields". In the vicinity of Kishlak Ravat in the reserve Kuhi-Malik, the coal fire has been blazing for 3.5 million years.

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Natural coal fires along coal outcrops in the Powder River Coal Field or Powder River Basin (PRB) have occurred throughout the more recent geologic history of the area. Researchers using modern fission-track dating techniques on the baked and fused rock associated with ancient fires have dated in-place coal burn areas as old as middle Pliocene (2.8 ± 0.6 million years before present). Clinker float from a PRB stream gravel terrace has been dated as old as early Pliocene (4.0 ± 0.7 million years before present) (Heffern and others, 1983). Natural coal fires have been major contributors to the formation of the topography and landforms of the basin (Coates and Heffern, 1999). Early Native Americans held these coal fire areas as spiritual lands. Prehistoric inhabitants of the PRB used porcellanite (formed from intensively coal-baked shale or siltstone) for weapon points and tools (Fredlund, 1976).

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Geologists have dated the rubble left from coal fires—such as reddish “clinker,” baked shale covering burned coal seams—back 4 million years. Coal seams lace the earth. They can spontaneously ignite when oxygen and hot sunlight combine; then flames slowly devour the coal layer below ground.

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The reddish siltstone rock that caps many ridges and buttes in the Powder River Basin (Wyoming), and in western North Dakota is called porcelanite, which also may resemble the coal burning waste "clinker" or volcanic "scoria." LINK Clinker is rock that has been fused by the natural burning of coal. In the case of the Powder River Basin approximately 27 to 54 billion metric tons of coal burned within the past three million years. LINK

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Underground coal fire burning in Australia for 6000 years.

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Geological evidence from China suggests that underground coal fires have been occurring naturally for at least one million years. Solar heating and lightning strikes can often start a fire but if the temperature of the coal rises above 280°C it will simply burst into flames spontaneously.

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Coal can heat up on their own, and eventually combust, if there is a continuous oxygen supply. The heat produced is not dissipated and under the right combinations of sunlight and oxygen, can trigger spontaneous combustion. This can occur underground, in coal stockpiles, abandoned mines or even as coal is transported.

Such fires in China consume up to 200 million tonnes of coal per year, delegates were told. In comparison, the U.S. economy consumes about one billion tonnes of coal annually, said Stracher, whose analysis of the likely impact of coal fires has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Coal Ecology.

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He estimated that the Chinese fires alone consume 120 million tons of coal annually. That's almost as much as the annual coal production in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois combined.

The Chinese fires also make a big, hidden contribution to global warming through the greenhouse effect, scientists said. Each year they release 360 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as much as all the cars and light trucks in the United States.

Soot from the fires in China, India and other Asian countries are a source of the "Asian Brown Haze." It's a 2-mile thick cloud of soot, acid droplets and other material that sometimes stretches across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka.

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The British work, which appears in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature, used satellite images of a 2.5 million hectare area before and after the fires. The group estimates that 32 per cent of the area had burned, and that peat land within it accounted for 91.5 per cent of this.

They estimate that between 810 million and 2.57 billion tonnes of carbon was released into the atmosphere in 1997 during the catastrophic Indonesian fires – equivalent to between 13 and 40 per cent of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels in the same period.

The Australian findings were previously published in a paper in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

"Together these two papers provide strong evidence that unusual wildfires in a small part of the world contributed significantly to the largest one-year change to atmospheric CO2 in the observational record," writes Dr David Schimel of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in the United States. His comments appear in an accompanying article in the same issue of Nature.

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At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities, two Duke University physicists report.

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One of the wildfires burning in Colorado was started by flames from an underground coal fire that "may have been burning since 1910." How can a fire burn underground for 92 years, and why hasn't anyone put it out before now?

Underground fires usually begin when a coal seam juts up through the ground's surface. The coal can be ignited in three ways: by human accident, by lightning, or by spontaneous combustion—the process by which the explosive gases contained in coal combine with oxygen and heat up to the point where they burst into flame. (This process typically starts underground where the heat can't be dissipated into air.) When the seam ignites, the flames spread to burn the adjacent, underground coal.

But fire needs oxygen to burn. So what keeps underground fires burning for decades? Once a portion of the coal has burned, it turns to ash. Since the ash can't support the weight of rock layers above, the layers buckle, creating cracks and crevices where oxygen can get through and rejuvenate the fire. Underground fires are also sustained by mineshafts, which provide a steady stream of oxygen to the inferno.

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