We should also not lose track of the fact that while AR5's RCP scenarios exclude emissions from fires, these fire carbon emissions are currently relentless increasing as indicated by both the first linked reference on trends in fire carbon emissions from Equatorial Asia and its non-linear sensitivity to El Nino (see also the linked Washington Post article) and by the last linked article by Scribbler on Siberian wildfires, and the exhaustion of man's discretionary resources to effectly fight such events:
Yi Yin, Philippe Ciais, Frederic Chevallier, Guido R. van der Werf, Thierry Fanin, Gregoire Broquet, Hartmut Boesch, Anne Cozic, Didier Hauglustaine, Sophie Szopa & Yilong Wang (23 September 2016), "Variability of fire carbon emissions in Equatorial Asia and its non-linear sensitivity to El Niño", Geophysical Research Letters; DOI: 10.1002/2016GL070971
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016GL070971/fullAbstract: "The large peatland carbon stocks in the land use change-affected areas of Equatorial Asia are vulnerable to fire. Combining satellite observations of active fire, burned area, and atmospheric concentrations of combustion tracers with a Bayesian inversion, we estimated the amount and variability of fire carbon emissions in Equatorial Asia over the period 1997-2015. Emissions in 2015 were of 0.51 ± 0.17 Pg carbon – less than half of the emissions from the previous 1997 extreme El Niño, explained by a less acute water deficit. Fire severity could be empirically hindcasted from the cumulative water deficit with a lead time of 1 to 2 months. Based on future climate projections and an exponential empirical relationship found between fire carbon emissions and water deficit, we infer a total fire carbon loss ranging from 12 to 25 Pg by 2100 in the coming decades, a significant positive feedback to future climate warming."
Also see:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/10/03/there-are-our-carbon-emissions-and-then-there-are-the-ones-the-earth-will-punish-us-with/?utm_term=.cd9f34ec5e21Extract: "In the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of researchers led by Yi Yin of the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement look at the potential of peat bogs in equatorial Asia — a region that includes Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and several other smaller countries but is dominated by Indonesia and its largest islands, Borneo and Sumatra — to worsen our climate problems. It’s timely, considering that last year amid El Niño-induced drought conditions Indonesian blazes emitted over 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the atmosphere. That’s more than the annual emissions of Japan (or, needless to say, of Indonesia’s fossil fuel burning).
…
The study finds a tight relationship between El Niño events and large peat fire emissions over the past 19 years. And it projects that under a high global emissions scenario, a warming climate will trigger more intense El Niños that, in turn, will correspond to more intense blazes (barring, that is, some major policy or political change that stops humans from starting fires to begin with). And under more moderate warming, there could still be major peat fire emissions during the century, the research finds.
“Most climate models predict a little bit stronger, not more El Niños, but more intense El Niños,” says Guido van der Werf, one of the study’s co-authors and a fire emissions researcher at VU University in Amsterdam.
And so much carbon could be lost in this way that it could affect the global atmosphere in what the paper calls a “significant positive feedback to global warming.”
More specifically, the study forecasts that as many as 25 petagrams, or billion tons, of carbon could be released in a high warming scenario — and 13 billion tons in a more modest warming scenario, which would require significantly changing the globe’s emissions trajectory and shifting it downward, while still likely missing the goal of limiting warming to just 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
If these numbers are converted to carbon dioxide, which has a larger molecular weight, that would correspond to between more than 47 billion tons in the more moderate warming scenario and about 91 billion tons of carbon dioxide for the high emissions scenario. (In fires, most of the greenhouse gas emissions would be in the form of carbon dioxide, though there would also be some methane and nitrous oxide emitted.)
The carbon math is clear: The world simply can’t have such an additional source of emissions. For instance, the so-called “carbon budget” for holding warming below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels was about 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide, as of 2011. And that’s for human burning of fossil fuels — not for releases from peat fires. If these fire emissions happen, then the already extremely narrow carbon budget becomes even narrower.
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The research suggests that, along with worrying about all the carbon stored in Arctic permafrost, which could greatly add to emissions in this century, we definitely have to worry about the carbon in peat, too.
“There’s definitely more carbon stored in boreal regions, but it’s not as vulnerable as this stuff,” van der Werf says. “If you get another few El Niño, you get a big pulse. Permafrost is a much more gradual process.”"
See also the following Scribbler article entitled: "“We are Suffocating from Smoke” — For Russia, Climate Change is Already Producing Fires that are Too Big to Fight".
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/09/28/for-one-month-we-are-suffocating-from-smoke-for-russia-climate-change-is-already-producing-fires-that-are-too-big-to-fight/Extract: "Exhaustion of emergency response resources is one of the big threats posed by climate change. In instances where entire regions see extreme weather conditions that are far outside the norm for an extended period of time, such as as severe droughts, floods, and fires, instances of exhaustion are more likely to occur. Exhaustion also occurs when events appear that are too large or intense to manage. It appears that firefighting efforts in Russia are starting to show some signs of exhaustion. Not good, especially considering the fact that these conditions are tame compared to what will happen in future years without some very serious climate change mitigation and response efforts now."