This should make prescribed forest burns a high priority- they burn the forest floor but spare the large trees- smoothing out carbon release.
There’s evidence that prescribed burns may lead to less carbon emissions [1].
In chaparral regions like the LA fires, prescribed burns might not help with carbon emissions. And for fire suppression I suspect there’s only so much that can be done to be responsive enough to recent hydrology changes.
Wildfire carbon emissions are very different from fossil fuel carbon emissions. Wildfires are releasing carbon that trees and other vegetation pulled out of the atmosphere in the relatively recent past. It's carbon-neutral for the same reason that burning firewood to heat your home is carbon-neutral.
Fossil fuel carbon emissions are releasing carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years. It's a net increase in current atmospheric carbon.
I hate this claim. It's true on the surface, but just look at city statistics from 50 years back. If you think burning firewood to heat your home is good for the environment in any way, you're insane. Perhaps, perhaps, it's not a huge problem for global warming, but it's a problem for CO, NOx emissions, toxic gases, it's not efficient, it generates toxic ash, occasionally it's really bad in unpredictable ways (it can be toxic, it can be carcinogenic, it can even be radioactive), it's ...
That assumes an inefficient burn that doesn’t actually heat a house either (a traditional inefficient fireplace heats a room but draws in cold outdoor air into the house). A proper wood stove, etc both heats the house and produces dramatically less pollutants.
Lol, tell that to southern Poland a decade ago. On a quiet winter days air pollution on the lower third of the country is off the charts even with all the limiting measures enacted over last years. The point is that burning stuff is incredibly polluting in any setting.
I think that is only a partly correct way to think about it. I live up in the Sierra foothills in a very rural area, and based on what I see, I think the effects of wildfires are indeed negating climate policy. Allow me to explain.
For people who have never lived in an area that is both rural and wildfire prone, pile burning to eliminate yard waste is an activity that is entirely foreign. You see, out here, most people believe that the primary method of eliminating yard waste is by burning it in a pile. I happen to live in town where there is trash pickup service available, but I opt to simply take stuff to the dump myself. Most people don't want to pay or don't have such service available. Burning yard waste is almost always extremely polluting. One burn pile full of leaves and pine needles can often smoke out my entire town. Fortunately, pile burning is only allowed on certain days (when the weather is such that wildfire risk is reduced). That is not to say that pile burning is always so bad; it has to be done properly. If the pile is hot enough, there is little smoke. But most people do not burn them hot enough with enough long-burning materials (i.e. wood).
So why did I bring this up, since a wildfire is just this on a massive scale? Well, I do not personally believe that properly managed fuel management would result in as much smoke and particulate pollution, for two reasons. One, indigenous peoples here used to regularly set fire to the forest to manage the fuel load. This was done regularly enough that there simply wasn't as much material to burn, and done when weather was cooperative (e.g. before rains). A modern wildfire can burn with such ferocity that most trees end up burning, instead of just the undergrowth. This represents a much greater release of long-captured CO2. And second, there is now a culture of placing responsibility on individual residents to maintain "defensible space", asking them to perform pile burning regularly. As I mentioned above, this results in what feels like disproportionately dense particulate pollution, with annoying regularity throughout the cooler times of year.
As far as CO2 is concerned, wouldn’t burning “yard waste” be neutral year over year? If you’re only burning this year’s growth, you can’t release any more carbon than the plants took in to grow in the first place. The wildfires might not be neutral because our forests are overgrown, but if they happened more frequently and only burned a years worth of undergrowth, they would be
As far as CO2 alone is concerned, that is true. The issue is that if you burn a fire cleanly, you (ideally) produce only CO2. If you burn the fire poorly, you produce less CO2 per se, and a _lot_ more particulates, which is bad for air quality. On burn days, the sky is noticeably smoggier all throughout the mountains, and the sunsets are tinted red. I imagine this would have the effect of trapping in daytime heat similarly to how cloudy nights after sunny days are warmer. And since pile burning generally happens during the day, we get an amplified greenhouse effect up here.
Would it not be buried? Plant matter dies and goes into the soil. Otherwise they would not be Carbon sinks at all.
There is a more subtle link too. The fact that you can blame fires on climate change, means that people can evade accountability for poor management of forests (and other risky land) which means they can skimp on spending on reducing risk - e.g. through controlled fires.
Plant matter dies and rots and the carbon escapes to the atmosphere.
Ever since microorganisms evolved to eat dead plant matter the conditions to make coal on planet earth (and to create a carbon sink of buried coal) have been gone.
Trees don't live for all that long. Many common varieties only live for around 100 to 200 years.
> so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
The targets are just policy targets. That anything "counts" is just a paperwork game. However, as the article points out, if you want to make good administrative policy you should always consider the cost:benefit ratio. Perhaps California's policymakers have actually lost track of this give the sheer scale of recent fires.
All carbon emissions are carbon positive.The source is irrelevant.
The result is this :https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
1.6 degrees above the historical average temps now, but 3 to 4 times that at the poles.
That forest fires are releasing carbon is part of the feedback loop, of global heating, which reduces the average vapor pressure, and therefore
rain, even though the total water content in the atmosphere has gone up, which, peversly, creates more intense single rain events, when conditions are right.Which will then cause grasses and shrubs to put on growth spurts, only to then dry out and
burn.
This is all one thing.Taking a single column and discussing that ,might be an engineers aproach, but this is not engineering, its a full on climate
shift and all of the variables are trending up.
1 technology has moved on significantly. There are new options, and increased focus will deliver more.
2 if a few hundred million people burn coal while we move up the tech tree it’s not a huge deal. If 7 billion people do, it really is. That’s a big part of why China has embraced solar, hard. It’s a new reality and we need solutions that fit the context.
Climate gains should be graded exclusively by either temperature measured or greenhouse gas level in the atmosphere, also measured. Not by any "estimated" metric.
It would be very easy to do. Measure CO2 average over year 2022, then over year 2023, and save difference. Then measure average in 2024, and compare difference to a previous one. If it s higher then humans get an F or 1/5 mark. If it lower, then the mark will be a bit better, depending on our actual, real performance in climate change.
That does not tell you why it changed though. It does not tell you what to do to change it. it does not tell you who was responsible for the change other than "the whole planet".
systems thinking requires an overview of sources, sinks and stability.. the comments here saying "it all ends up equal" are not only naive but dangerous.. equilibrium for stable climate is badly tilted and increasing daily.. these fires add quickly to the wrong side of that ledger
unfortunately, California alone cannot carry the entire US in reversing climate change. We need federal action to get this country out of the stone age.
Shame this stupid country re-elected a very friendly administration of the O&G industry, gutted the regulatory agencies with reversal of Chevron deference, and a party which installed a SCOTUS that is _very_ friendly to O&G.
It fucking sucks and I hate it. We have failed and the decisions happening today (re-election of an idiot) will be felt for _decades_
"Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.
The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species.
Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn. A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans from what they view as the plant’s rightful habitat."
This should make prescribed forest burns a high priority- they burn the forest floor but spare the large trees- smoothing out carbon release.
There’s evidence that prescribed burns may lead to less carbon emissions [1].
In chaparral regions like the LA fires, prescribed burns might not help with carbon emissions. And for fire suppression I suspect there’s only so much that can be done to be responsive enough to recent hydrology changes.
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116626
Wildfire carbon emissions are very different from fossil fuel carbon emissions. Wildfires are releasing carbon that trees and other vegetation pulled out of the atmosphere in the relatively recent past. It's carbon-neutral for the same reason that burning firewood to heat your home is carbon-neutral.
Fossil fuel carbon emissions are releasing carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years. It's a net increase in current atmospheric carbon.
Wildfires in forests are indeed burning trees.
Wildfires in suburban communities are burning non-wood materials, including many things made from hydrocarbons.
At the very least this suggests that if you're planting trees for carbon offsetting, the how and where matters.
I hate this claim. It's true on the surface, but just look at city statistics from 50 years back. If you think burning firewood to heat your home is good for the environment in any way, you're insane. Perhaps, perhaps, it's not a huge problem for global warming, but it's a problem for CO, NOx emissions, toxic gases, it's not efficient, it generates toxic ash, occasionally it's really bad in unpredictable ways (it can be toxic, it can be carcinogenic, it can even be radioactive), it's ...
It's really bad for the environment.
That assumes an inefficient burn that doesn’t actually heat a house either (a traditional inefficient fireplace heats a room but draws in cold outdoor air into the house). A proper wood stove, etc both heats the house and produces dramatically less pollutants.
Lol, tell that to southern Poland a decade ago. On a quiet winter days air pollution on the lower third of the country is off the charts even with all the limiting measures enacted over last years. The point is that burning stuff is incredibly polluting in any setting.
so the greening measures do nothing by your own admission ?
[dead]
This only really makes sense to say, if the wildfire are a result of climate policy. Which this article doesn't seem to be claiming.
Also I don't think the stuff that burns in these would have otherwise ended up buried/fossilized, so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
I think that is only a partly correct way to think about it. I live up in the Sierra foothills in a very rural area, and based on what I see, I think the effects of wildfires are indeed negating climate policy. Allow me to explain.
For people who have never lived in an area that is both rural and wildfire prone, pile burning to eliminate yard waste is an activity that is entirely foreign. You see, out here, most people believe that the primary method of eliminating yard waste is by burning it in a pile. I happen to live in town where there is trash pickup service available, but I opt to simply take stuff to the dump myself. Most people don't want to pay or don't have such service available. Burning yard waste is almost always extremely polluting. One burn pile full of leaves and pine needles can often smoke out my entire town. Fortunately, pile burning is only allowed on certain days (when the weather is such that wildfire risk is reduced). That is not to say that pile burning is always so bad; it has to be done properly. If the pile is hot enough, there is little smoke. But most people do not burn them hot enough with enough long-burning materials (i.e. wood).
So why did I bring this up, since a wildfire is just this on a massive scale? Well, I do not personally believe that properly managed fuel management would result in as much smoke and particulate pollution, for two reasons. One, indigenous peoples here used to regularly set fire to the forest to manage the fuel load. This was done regularly enough that there simply wasn't as much material to burn, and done when weather was cooperative (e.g. before rains). A modern wildfire can burn with such ferocity that most trees end up burning, instead of just the undergrowth. This represents a much greater release of long-captured CO2. And second, there is now a culture of placing responsibility on individual residents to maintain "defensible space", asking them to perform pile burning regularly. As I mentioned above, this results in what feels like disproportionately dense particulate pollution, with annoying regularity throughout the cooler times of year.
As far as CO2 is concerned, wouldn’t burning “yard waste” be neutral year over year? If you’re only burning this year’s growth, you can’t release any more carbon than the plants took in to grow in the first place. The wildfires might not be neutral because our forests are overgrown, but if they happened more frequently and only burned a years worth of undergrowth, they would be
As far as CO2 alone is concerned, that is true. The issue is that if you burn a fire cleanly, you (ideally) produce only CO2. If you burn the fire poorly, you produce less CO2 per se, and a _lot_ more particulates, which is bad for air quality. On burn days, the sky is noticeably smoggier all throughout the mountains, and the sunsets are tinted red. I imagine this would have the effect of trapping in daytime heat similarly to how cloudy nights after sunny days are warmer. And since pile burning generally happens during the day, we get an amplified greenhouse effect up here.
Would it not be buried? Plant matter dies and goes into the soil. Otherwise they would not be Carbon sinks at all.
There is a more subtle link too. The fact that you can blame fires on climate change, means that people can evade accountability for poor management of forests (and other risky land) which means they can skimp on spending on reducing risk - e.g. through controlled fires.
Plant matter dies and rots and the carbon escapes to the atmosphere.
Ever since microorganisms evolved to eat dead plant matter the conditions to make coal on planet earth (and to create a carbon sink of buried coal) have been gone.
peat is a preform of coal accidic build up peat is pretty carbon storing. Unless the peat dries out.
So you are saying forests and otehr natural eco systems are not carbon sinks?
> would have otherwise ended up buried/fossilized
Trees don't live for all that long. Many common varieties only live for around 100 to 200 years.
> so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
The targets are just policy targets. That anything "counts" is just a paperwork game. However, as the article points out, if you want to make good administrative policy you should always consider the cost:benefit ratio. Perhaps California's policymakers have actually lost track of this give the sheer scale of recent fires.
Why?
All carbon emissions are carbon positive.The source is irrelevant. The result is this :https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today 1.6 degrees above the historical average temps now, but 3 to 4 times that at the poles. That forest fires are releasing carbon is part of the feedback loop, of global heating, which reduces the average vapor pressure, and therefore rain, even though the total water content in the atmosphere has gone up, which, peversly, creates more intense single rain events, when conditions are right.Which will then cause grasses and shrubs to put on growth spurts, only to then dry out and burn. This is all one thing.Taking a single column and discussing that ,might be an engineers aproach, but this is not engineering, its a full on climate shift and all of the variables are trending up.
Heads up that this is from October 2022 and is not considering the recent urban fires.
This is silly.
Inhabited areas everywhere and non-inhabited areas everywhere have had an extreme growth in wildfire.
The gains stay the same be cause they were examples to other human-apes with other invisiible-line kingdoms.
Sum totals for the coal spewing nations and states among us are far worse.
They need to burn their coal to get out of their poverty, like we did.
1 technology has moved on significantly. There are new options, and increased focus will deliver more.
2 if a few hundred million people burn coal while we move up the tech tree it’s not a huge deal. If 7 billion people do, it really is. That’s a big part of why China has embraced solar, hard. It’s a new reality and we need solutions that fit the context.
Climate gains should be graded exclusively by either temperature measured or greenhouse gas level in the atmosphere, also measured. Not by any "estimated" metric.
It would be very easy to do. Measure CO2 average over year 2022, then over year 2023, and save difference. Then measure average in 2024, and compare difference to a previous one. If it s higher then humans get an F or 1/5 mark. If it lower, then the mark will be a bit better, depending on our actual, real performance in climate change.
That does not tell you why it changed though. It does not tell you what to do to change it. it does not tell you who was responsible for the change other than "the whole planet".
systems thinking requires an overview of sources, sinks and stability.. the comments here saying "it all ends up equal" are not only naive but dangerous.. equilibrium for stable climate is badly tilted and increasing daily.. these fires add quickly to the wrong side of that ledger
unfortunately, California alone cannot carry the entire US in reversing climate change. We need federal action to get this country out of the stone age.
Shame this stupid country re-elected a very friendly administration of the O&G industry, gutted the regulatory agencies with reversal of Chevron deference, and a party which installed a SCOTUS that is _very_ friendly to O&G.
It fucking sucks and I hate it. We have failed and the decisions happening today (re-election of an idiot) will be felt for _decades_
If it wasn’t the wildfires, it was the termite fumigation gasses! https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03042024/california-sulfu...
(2022)
From the WSJ:
"Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.
The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species.
Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn. A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans from what they view as the plant’s rightful habitat."
milkvetch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astragalus_brauntonii