The growing field of “firetech” is reinventing the age-old practice of prescribed burns and devising other novel methods of preventing and suppressing fires.
The growing field of “firetech” is reinventing the age-old practice of prescribed burns and devising other novel methods of preventing and suppressing fires.
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.