this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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It's good to hear about burn management getting more attention, but a number of forests in the US literally evolved to grow quickly and burn every few years, with larger trees surviving these fires which are milder when they happen regularly. Calling forest fires an "emissions source" is misleading, because carbon released in these fires is part of the atmospheric carbon cycle, it isn't new carbon dioxide being brought up from millennia or eons of sequestration underground or under ice.
True, but physics doesn’t care where the carbon came from. If it can be limited it helps.
Humans are just so arrogant that they think they can fix nature. There's forests evolved together with fires. If you prevent fires, you can do more damage than good.
The carbon cycle evolved to be near enough to circular to not have run itself out of carbon in millions of years. It maintains this balance though changes in evolution that take tens of thousands of years minimum, not fifty. We’ve all but doubled the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we need to get as much of it out as soon as possible or we know what will happen.
We’ve already done vast damage, and are well on our way to all but exterminating our reefs and a large slice of ocean life. That’s not can happen, that’s absolutely will happen unless we intervene. Much like with dams, the chance of some localized ecological damage is not just acceptable but a bargin compared to what doing without really means.
OK so? You didn't understand what I said. We're trying to fix the problem we caused by trying to change nature in unpredictable ways, with unpredictable consequences. Se need to focus on the root of the problem.
Nature isn't unpredictable. It's done the same thing forever. We are the ones fucking it up.
What's hard to predict are the consequences of us further messing with it. We always think we can just tweak things. Like fixing forest fires or seeding clouds of sulfur. We're just naive apes with fancy tools.
If we valued a homeostatic, intentional civilization we could be the immune system of the planet instead of the capitalistic cancer we currently are.
There are degrees of uncertainty, and there you don’t have to try a new, or in this case old, idea everywhere all at once. The problem is too mich carbon is in the air, getting as much of it out as quickly as practical is the priority. Nothing mentioned here seems to be at odds with cutting carbon emissions, so i don’t see why you seem to think that it’s one or the other.
It's limited by being in trees and new growth.. Even after a fire. The carbon that makes a difference was buried under the ground until we poured it out all over ourselves and the world.
Except it’s not. After a fire a lot of it goes into the air, the little mass remaining goes into ash to be dug up by new growth that would have otherwise used atmospheric carbon. While some may eventually be buried so deep that it escapes the carbon cycle it took on the order of millions of years to bury what we’ve dug up in fifty. Nature can’t solve this on its own, not on the time scales necessary to avoid catastrophe. Nothing proposed here seems to require pumping an equivalent carbon from underground into the atmosphere, so there seems to be little risk of anything but a net benefit.
Stopping forest fires does not affect sequestration in the least. It would be far more efficient to just bury organic material in dead mines than to prevent forest fires, and preventing the forest fires destroys the natural ecology.
If you would kindly explain the mechanism by which destroying millions of acres of trees and putting most of that carbon directly into the atmosphere instead of being harvested or at the very least kept locked up in the trees, i’d be happy to hear it.
While some, not all but some, trees evolved to use fires as a way to clear underbrush for thier seeds to sprout, the to the tree a well managed logging operation has an identical effect without having put most of the forest directly into the atmosphere. We do, you know, know how to replant trees.
The carbon in the trees is part of the living carbon cycle. It's normal and natural. "Solutions" like this one interfere with the natural cycles of the environment for little benefit. The carbon we need to be worried about has been sequestered for millions of years, not the carbon that has always been in active use by living ecosystems.
Again, carbon is carbon. It doesn’t not effect the gobal climate just becuse it came from a tree instead of a car. While the effect may be small, so are most sources of carbon on their own. Keeping it out of the air might very well make between earth having a few small sickly coral reefs, and none at all. We can’t afford to pump carbon into the air just becuse that’s the way we’ve allways done it and change might be scary.
If nothing else, modern forest fires aren’t natural. We made them by drying out and heating the forest, by changing wether patterns, and a thousand other local environmental factors. Modern forest fires are hotter, faster, and far larger than they were at any point in the ten thousand years.
Saying "carbon is carbon" doesn't make it true. It just gives a slogan to your ignorance.
If you could explain why co2 we produced by makeing more frequent forest fires doesn’t insulate the world in the way the same molecule does when it comes from cars i’d love to see it.
Fine. It's a matter of scale and a matter of homeostasis. The environment is stable without humans burning hydrocarbons. The carbon exists in a cycle where it is released by dying animals and plants, and by natural fire cycles. When humans dig up millions of years of sequestered carbon, then it throws off the balance of natural ecosystems. The carbon is all mixed up in the atmosphere, where it collects PCBs and other pollutants from industry. Some of that carbon is re-sequestered by growing plant life. Any human efforts at burning the carbon that's actively being used by ecosystems are purely masterbatory and distract resources from actual solutions like decreasing dependence on oil.
Except this doesn’t take significant resources from reducing oil use. By the same logic we should ignore cuting emissions from air travel becuse it’s purely masterbatory and distracts resources from actual solutions like cutting coal and natural gas power generation.
Air travel is burning petroleum, genius.
And forest fires are burning unnatural and massive quantities of wood.
No, forest fires have existed for as long as trees have existed. It's not unnatural quantities of wood being burned. It's the amount of wood that is normal and natural for the ecosystem to maintain homeostasis.
Don't message me again. We're just going in circles at this point.