Bushfires Release over Half Australia’s Annual Carbon Emissions

It takes many decades for them to grow back, and in the meantime these fires will only become more and more frequent so maybe they never will.

This would be true in a system in equilibrium. Although, as you point out, we are not at equilibrium, and so it's possible that the carbon storage won't be replaced if (for example), the burn rate increases.

Also, in our case, the lag matters too.

In many regions, like my local mid-north coast area, what has burnt is rainforest which doesn't usually burn but has been impacted by several years of drought. It is quite likely these forests won't recover as dense rainforest and will transition to more sparse eucalyptus which is a net loss in carbon storage as well as a tragic ecosystem loss.

It doesn't exactly matter how we count, but it's important we are consistent. If planting a tree is a carbon offset, then a tree burning down must be an emission. Otherwise bad actors will plant and burn and replant and reburn for infinite carbon credits.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised something like it is already happening.

> Burning trees that will grow back does not add any CO2 to the system, only just temporary. The trees that grow back will take up the CO2 again.

This is stunningly illogical nonsense. There is no closed system [containing only trees and their CO2; the planet with all its molecules is probably a closed system], trees will happily grab any CO2 in the atmosphere regardless of where it comes from.

If you burn all the trees, none will grow back and all the CO2 will eventually be elsewhere (possibly, but not necessarily in other plants).

If you don't burn any trees, but instead cut them down to use them for building houses, new trees might grow using CO2 from other sources.

If you plant more trees without burning any, they will happily use all this evil "added" CO2 to grow.

I don't understand "back burning", but I'd say it makes sense not to count bushfire since these trees are going to grow back and re-capture the same amount of CO2 that has been released in the fire.

Bushfires are considered neutral because the forest will eventually regrow and the trees and soil will eventually, perhaps after 50 or 100 years, absorb and store the carbon emitted -- if they return to their former state. With increasing heat and drought, that seems unlikely. No idea about how back burning is accounted, or why that is different. It seems like it might return to neutrality far quicker.

Guardian has been covering the Australia fires in some depth, here's a piece that expands on the above with much more from an Australian perspective.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/13/australi...

"Wood burning is turning into a major loophole in controlling carbon emissions". The UK's largest emitter, Drax is making claims to carbon neutrality, which exploits flaws in both UN and EU carbon accounting, and UK government's reporting of climate progress depends on that aircraft carrier sized loophole. A game many countries are joining in, or planning to.

Here's a piece on that: https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon-loophole-why-is-wood-b...

Last time I checked, this year is 8 fold of normal.

The reduced rainfall of the last several years and the extra heat this year means the forest is much drier than usual. It's burning faster and more of it is on fire at once than normal. Last year, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology predicted an increase in droughts and fires based on long-term trends in rainfall and temperature. "There has been a long-term increase in extreme fire weather, and in the length of the fire season, across large parts of Australia." http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of-the-climate/ Here's an article with quotes from more Australian scientists: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50341210

> If man interrupts, the native species can die out decreasing biodiversity and leading to bigger problems.

Yes, but planets can experience a runaway greenhouse effect and become unhabitable through natural occurrences.

Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's good for sustaining life.

Trees are also oxygen producers. I'm curious how oxygen would be produced around the world if forests decline dramatically. I think we need to consider more than whether or not carbon gets stored.

> Reforestation is not a viable solution to climate change.

It's a strange tangent to take here. The article makes no mention of reforestation.

Just to give some background about the situation in Australia: many of the trees are not just fire tolerant, but their seeds are triggered to germinate when a fire passes through - they depend on fire. This means that 1000s of saplings will arise where there were once 100s of established trees. This increases the fire risk over the next 5 years, but it does capture back a lot of that carbon.

A big problem is that much of the old growth forests, that have less tree density, and thick canopies that rob much of the sunlight to smaller plants, have been clear felled. In their place, is either regenerated forest, with a higher fuel content, or with paddocks, where grass fires can rip straight through.

But still, large canopy fires can still affect these old growth forests. As with all bush fires, the only thing that can be done is to back burn to contain them, and to ensure that sections of forests are divided by fire breaks.

I suppose, to reduce fire risk and potentially releasing all this carbon, we could just turn all the trees into furniture. But I love forests, so I hope deforestation never becomes a popular idea.

So what are you suggesting Australia does here?

> most of the people who identify as activists, are active towards ineffective measures.

It’s because they’re political activists rather than engineers. They’re fighting to progress their cause, not to solve a problem. I see my friends doing this all the time and it’s so frustrating.

> it's that most of the people who identify as activists, are active towards ineffective measures.

With wind power reaching 1 cent per kilowatt hour vs nuclear power plants that cost a lot more and take 20 years to build, they're possibly just being pragmatic. And the intermittent nature of most renewables isn't a show stopper. You combat it with four measures (in order of preference): mixed sources, interconnection, overbuilding and storage. And while that's more expensive than renewable by itself, it's still cheaper than nuclear.

> Forests are not carbon sinks, they are carbon stores.

Forests are very effective carbon sinks today. Only once you run out of land to plant new forests does it become a problem. At that time you can make new land by turning an older forest into biochar. The point is we should do what we can today.

Certainly we should continue research into more effectively scalable sources of nuclear power and other forms of climate sequestration. But we need to implement today's solutions today.

You make strong claims providing very little evidence. Edit your post with actual data please.

Yeah if only there were some way for trees to replicate and replace fallen, burned or rotting ones.

Wouldn’t you want to roll out the most cost effective power sources to power sequestration, even if those sources were intermittent and required sequestration efforts (today only extant at tiny scale and thus amenable to engineering) to scale up and down with current power supply?

Because nuclear power today is both expensive and requires many years to build out, while renewables cost a fraction of the price and can be built out in vast quantities very quickly.