Improved sensing technology is showing that the amount of logging is about double what was being claimed and what was thought. From The Scotsman:
Rainforest disappears twice as fast
Land clearance and logging is destroying the Amazon rainforest twice as fast as experts had thought, it has been revealed.
It was already known that in an average year 5,800 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon is burned or cut to make way for cattle ranching, farming and other development. But a new satellite study shows that the extent of the damage is doubled by selective logging.
Each year the unregulated activity destroys an area of pristine rainforest as big as the US state of Connecticut. Selective logging involves thinning areas of forest by picking out valuable trees such as mahogany and other hardwoods to be cut and transported to off-site sawmills. Until now the damage it causes has been largely hidden from orbiting satellites by the spreading forest canopy.
The new survey, using ultra-high-resolution imaging, was able to home in on areas just 98ft wide to reveal the true impact of selective logging.
US expert Dr Gregory Asner, from the Carnegie Institute in Stanford, California, who led the study, said: "With this new technology, we are able to detect openings in the forest canopy down to just one or two individual trees. People have been monitoring large-scale deforestation in the Amazon with satellites for more than two decades, but selective logging has been mostly invisible until now."
Previous research has shown that in logged forests, sunlight penetrating the canopy dries out the forest floor and makes it much more susceptible to burning. Another worry is the loggers' use of tractors and skidders that rip up the soil and the forest floor. Loggers also build makeshift dirt roads for access, and these tend to grow and fuel the deforesting process.
The article unfortunately then veers off into enviro-land:
But one of the biggest concerns is the effect on climate change. When a tree trunk is removed by loggers, the branches and other debris are left behind to decompose and release the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. An estimated 400 million tons of carbon enter the atmosphere every year as a result of traditional deforestation in the Amazon.
The scientists calculated that an additional 100 million tons is produced by selective logging - large enough to alter climate change forecasts on a global scale.
The Energy Information Administration (a division of the Department of Energy) published this report: World Energy Use and Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1980-2001 which has CO2 stats for 2001 for these two locales: Asia (China is around 3,000 Million Metric Tons; India is next at around 900 Million) and the G-7 developed nations with the USA leading the pack at just under 6,000 Million Metric Tons. Considering that CO2 is a very minor problem (the major greenhouse gas is good ole' water vapor but since no one can do anything about it, it gets conveniently "ignored").
Just as a heads up, the composition of the atmosphere is as follows (I am rounding off the numbers in the table except for the CO2):
Nitrogen - 78%
Oxygen - 21%
Water - 0% to 4%
Argon - 1%
Carbon Dioxide - 0.0360%
Vanishingly small...
