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Comment by krisroadruck | Hacker News Reader

Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all. Every tree releases its carbon, either by being burned or when it dies by rotting. It's effectively a non-trapped part of the atmospheres circulatory system. Remember trees breath the stuff in and eventually they exhale. The problems only crop up when you extract trapped hydrocarbons from underground and burn those. Oil and Coal bad, Tree's not so much.

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This is not the point, nor the problem....

1. Tropical peatland is not just trees. Its also got peat - a pile of vegetation that isn't exactly rotting - but rather storing carbon. In fact peat is a fuel source in many parts of the world - not coal or oil, but similar to those in releasing otherwise stored carbon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_peat

2. The process in this area also releases a lot of methane, which rotting doesn't always release, and certainly doesn't release this quickly.

> Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all. Every tree releases its carbon, either by being burned or when it dies by rotting.

In the normal lifecycle of a forest, there is a continuous low-level carbon release from trees rotting (or small fires) which is cycled back in the forest by new trees growing up in their placed. A mature forest is a carbon store, if the forest is stable it takes in as much carbon as it produces out.

You burn the forest, all the locked carbon gets released in the atmosphere with no recapture.

And that's not even considering that indonesian forests sit on peat, which are non-cycling long-term carbon stores.

> The problems only crop up when you extract trapped hydrocarbons from underground and burn those. Oil and Coal bad, Tree's not so much.

All that oil and coal originally came from the environment, it's the exact same result.

The article says the fires are especially bad because they're burning peatland this year, which is releasing trapped hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.

It's not "this year", most indonesian forests sit on peat. This year's bad because it's a severe El Niño year making south-east asia very dry and thus fires worse. The article notes that the previous record year was 1997… which was also a strong El Niño year.

Peat contains hydrocarbons? Are you sure?

Well, trapped carbon is what actually matters. But yes, there are hydrocarbons of various forms in just about everything that is or was once alive.

Hydrocarbons are molecules that contain nothing but hydrogen and carbon. That includes things like gasoline.

Most living organisms contain no hydrocarbons at all. They might contain carbohydrates or proteins or fats, but not hydrocarbons.

> Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all.

Of course it does. I have a tree. I can leave it alone for 100 years and it will reproduce itself several times over and then die and rot. Or I can burn it today.

> Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all.

This gets trotted out every time population, deforestation, and similar are discussed in relation to climate.

Yes, the cycle is roughly balanced. However, the magnitude of CO2 in the cycle increases. The cycle is not instantaneous; some of that CO2 in the cycle is always atmospheric. If you increase the volume of CO2 in the cycle you by definition and necessity increase the volume in the atmosphere at any given time.

So the fact that it's releasing as much in one day as the entire US does in a year means nothing?

Wow...that's strange...it's going to take a bit to get my head around the logic of that. I'm not saying your wrong but I have to ponder it a bit...

[EDIT] So the article edited its conclusion after I posted this...please consider this before you ding me. It originally said the fires were releasing that much. Thank you.

That is not what the article says. The article claims that for a single day these fires emitted more than the US did on that day.

It's not as much in one day as the entire US does in a year. It's as much in one day as the entire US does in one day.

If by burning the trees you are also permanently changing the use of that land from forest to agricultural then you are changing how much carbon is held by that area. This leaves aside the problems with burning peat.

This does change both the short term and long term atmospheric balance. If the land were left to eventually recover then the long term balance would be restored. That isn't going to happen.

that's true if they let the trees re-grow to maturity and let the deep layers of peat reform (which AFAIK takes a really long time).

for better or worse these stands of older trees are a finite resource, and once they've burned them all the problem stops getting worse. But by then the CO2 is released and unlikely to be re-sequestered in Indonesia anytime soon

So one tree burnt is the same as one tree sure, but when you're killing year old trees that usually live for 30 years then it seems you would be adding more carbon than you would have otherwise. 30 1 year trees or 1 30 year tree. Is it still equivalent?

Are you sure about that?

Burning the tress is not part of the natural process that I can only imagine have been built over millions of years to find some sort of balance.

Just like any other system if you overload it beyond what it's built to handle it has consequences.

Genuinely interested.

I don't know about the forests in Indonesia, but for the most part, it's natural for forests that will burn to burn. At the extreme, there are tree species that only really reproduce after a forest fire, Jack Pine and Sequoia come to mind. Google says they are pyrophytes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte

Trees, on average, have a life span of a couple of decades. If we could capture all that carbon back by just re-growing trees for 10-20 years, we'd be fine. It's releasing over a period of 200 years the carbon accumulated through millions of years of oil and coal formation that is uncontrollable and will have devastating effects on the environment.

> Trees, on average, have a life span of a couple of decades.

This is not burning a tree it's burning forests, forests have lifespans of millennia. And that's not even considering these specific forests sit atop peat, you're not going to re-grow peat soils in 10 years.

> If we could capture all that carbon back by just re-growing trees for 10-20 years, we'd be fine.

Which is not what's happening, and fast-growers impoverish the soil and don't set up self-sustaining forests, we're mostly just setting the whole area up for erosion.

Sort of. It would be nice if we could sequester the carbon already in the air in trees. The benefit is two fold: More trees, and removal of carbon that is already in the air from burning fossil fuels.

Wood construction (e.g. 2x4 or other dimension lumber houses) does this to some extent, although there is carbon emission inherent in the harvesting, sawmilling process, transportation to the worksite and actual house construction. I'm surprised there isn't more general public awareness of using wood in engineering processes to offset the carbon costs and provide long-term carbon sequestering

This is what amuses me when people talk about ebooks being environmentally friendly. A paper book will usually be made of paper milled from a sustainably managed forest - we don't generally go clear-cutting virgin forests for wood pulp. A lot of sawmills and paper mills, furthermore, burn their waste wood and sawdust as fuel for the mill. The whole process, aside from transport, can be carbon-neutral, meaning a paper library can be seen as a repository of sequestered carbon. Moving from paper books to plastic tablets that consume power and need replacement every two years is anything but environmentally friendly.

To add on - the goal is to preserve more forest space. If we do that, we can effectively sequester that carbon for long periods of time.

You cannot just infinitely accumulate trees. In a steady state, forests neither sequester nor release carbon.

> In a steady state, forests neither sequester nor release carbon.

In a steady state, forests are carbon stores, same as coal veins, oil reservoirs or methane clathrate.

No, but you can still increase the amount of sequestered carbon by expanding forestland, as forest is a carbon sink. We can control atmospheric carbon by reducing emissions, but we can also control it by sequestering more carbon, which more forestland can help do.

Semi-permanently eliminating forested regions for alternate use shifts the environmental carbon balance - doesn't it?

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