Comments on: Wood fires, soot and climate change

By: Gas Wood Stove - stovestoday.info

Gas Wood Stove - stovestoday.info — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:15:55 +0000

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By: David

David — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:14:54 +0000

Very informative article.Thanks.
If trees are felled or purposely grown to provide firewood then this is going to contribute to global warming. If the tree has died of natural causes then it would release the CO2 and burning it is simply speeding up the release of the gas.
Personally I love open fires, unfortunately here it's central heating but at one of my other houses it's all open fires. It's very remote and there's woodland and forest all around with an abundant supply of casualty timber, there's a massive woodpile and come the New Year we'll be sat round roaring open fires (hopefully with deep snow outside). All the timber we burn there is casualty timber and in addition, we've planted several hundred trees (not to be burned) which more than offset any carbon emissions.
If you have an open fire yourself burn casualty timber (ask the landowners permission first if removing from private land) rather than commercially grown timber. If you do have to buy in firewood then offset what you burn by planting some trees.

By: DSS

DSS — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:03:11 +0000

Dear John,
Thank you very much for your swift and helpful reply. We wrote the article partly to make sure we could honourably use our own wood stove, Intrepid II, and have also decided that we can.
Best wishes
Dianne

By: John Gulland

John Gulland — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:42:42 +0000

I am doing some research into soot and global warming and the extent to which this new knowledge affects the global warming impact of residential wood heating as practiced in North America. The article I'm working on should be published at The Woodpile next week. See: http://woodheat.org/woodpile/ One thing I have learned is that the soot emission researchers make a distinction between biofuels, by which they mean bio diesel and ethanol, and biomass burning, by which they mean burning wood or dung for cooking, and brush and stubble burning in agriculture. The text of your article doesn't use the term that way. I have also learned that about 25 to 35 percent of worldwide soot emissions are from China and India and are mainly from millions of inefficient cooking fires and agricultural open burning. And Marc Jacobson, one of the main researchers in the field says that “About half of the U.S. black carbon in particles smaller than [PM2.5] is from fossil fuel sources. The rest is from area sources; agricultural fires, structural fires, slash/prescribed burning forest wildfires, unpaved road dust, paved road dust, and construction dust, according to the 2002 U.S. National Emissions Inventory.” Jacobson doesn't even mention wood burned for energy, mainly because it is a tiny contributor. Nevertheless, it is important that we reduce to the extent possible the environmental impacts of all energy sources. As you point out, advanced technology wood stoves dramatically reduce particulate emissions, including soot. While the investigation of the soot issue is still in its infancy, indications now are that heating with wood in modern equipment actually produces a net reduction in global warming. The soot issue is complicated, but that hasn't stopped people who want to see residential wood heating banned in Canada and the U.S. from distorting the available information to serve their own interests. I should point out that I was alerted to your article by one of those activists. See: http://woodsmokeworld.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!66... John