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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah yes I’m sure capitalism can solve this issue.
Irrespective of the economic system, it’s still necessary to actually do the things they’re trying
I agree. But the problem comes when the investors want to start to see a return. Just look at the state of the tech industry now. Consider the failure of second sight and how it’s left people with brain implants that no longer function.
I agree the tech looks promising and we are going to need a lot of adaptation solutions but right now theyre being funded in order to take advantage of the serious cost to society and with the need for returns those costs will only spiral upward. This will be especially obvious when we consider that it is the poorest communities who are most affected by climate disasters. The richest people will get adaptation. The poorest will get refugee status.
By relying so heavily on private solutions governments abdicate responsibility and communities get left to pick up the pieces.
Wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystem. Some ecosystems would collapse without them. But stopping wildfires doesn’t cut into profits, it can even be made profitable!
They’re talking about having frequent prescribed burns, as was the practice before European arrival, instead of lower frequency hgih-intensity fires.
That’s nothing new. We’ve been doing that since the 80s.
Not at anything like the needed scale
Well that’s because the plan is stupid and ineffective. Far more carbon could be sequestered by growing kudzu and then dumping it down mines.
how about, the fuck not ? …
What they’re doing is showing how to make it cost-effective to go back to something like the pre-colonization fire regime of frequent low-intensity fires. This makes it possible for western North America forests to return to having fewer but older trees which sequester more carbon than growing lots of small trees fast and then having them all burn in an intense fire
sounds cool, but the solution to global warming is socialism with mild capitalist traits. tech bro solutions always include extra steps and are profit driven.
If you look at who is involved, its a bunch of forestry and fire ecology types with a few tech people supporting them
i give u credit: i didn’t read the article, just assumptions
