16/01/2024
I have these conversations with customers about ‘dirty’ polluting stoves more and more these days, and most of them have heard the bad press regards wood burning stoves and ask if I’m worried they’ll be banned. This article is pretty much the conversation we then have, and gives the context needed by the consumer regarding particulates, but ignored by the campaigners.
The other criticism of wood stoves is the carbon dioxide emissions and their effect on climate change. Here are the highlights from that part of my conversation with customers:
1990ish Co2 levels at 280ppm and rising, IPCC models predict at 450ppm sea level rises and the end is nigh. Today, 2024, we’re at approx 400ppm and beachfront property remains some of the most expensive in the world.
At 200ppm photosynthesis really struggles, and at 150ppm ish it ceases. The IPCC didn’t mention that, did they? Photosynthesis is very cool and groovy and without it we’d all die, so in 1990 at 280ppm we really wouldn’t have wanted to go any lower.
Firewood grows on trees, and trees take Co2 from the atmosphere to grow. When you burn wood you only release back into the atmosphere some (the roots usually stay in the ground), of the Co2 the tree removed to grow. No net increase to the carbon active in the system, unlike coal, oil, and gas which release ancient, otherwise locked up in the earth, carbon, thereby adding to the net carbon in the system. How’s the electricity for your air sourced heat pump generated, I wonder?
Scientific teams have drilled through miles of glacier in Greenland and Antarctic, extracted ice cores, analysed them, and reconstructed climate records going back hundreds of thousands of years, and these ice cores all show many periods in Earth’s past when Co2 levels were at thousands of ppm. Like 5,6,7000ppm. It’s therefore not obvious to me why 450ppm would be an issue.
Guess what gas commercial growers pump into their greenhouses in order to make the plants grow bigger and quicker? You guessed it! Co2.
Well my thumbs getting tired now, and I haven’t even covered the IPCC, USGS, global green leaf cover and missing Co2 story, or IPCC models that don’t include water vapour (70%, and by far the most important, of the greenhouse gases), or the role of the Sun, oceans and many other variables on climate, but you get the idea. And please check my facts. Unlike others it doesn’t pay for me to mislead the public or my customers.
If you’d like to know more book in for a sweep, as my thumb really has had it now…
And get those log burners lit it’s cold out 😁
We don’t enjoy having to react to media sensationalism, however, there are times when it feels important to set the record straight. A negative narrative is being unfairly manufactured around the wood-burning stove industry, by anti-woodburning groups such as the ‘London Wood Burning Project’ ...
