A Single Fire Killed at Least 10% of the World's Giant Sequoias, Study Says
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This is only true if you look at short term. In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE.
For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever. For these sequoias the future is either they burn or they fall down and rot. In both cases the carbon is released.
Another common process is run off from rivers getting buried under a continuous stream of silt, and a significant portion of that biomass comes from trees.
There's no point in looking at individual trees.
I remember some statistics that humanity is emitting more new carbon into atmosphere every decade that entire mass of biosphere.
So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere.
Even if we somehow got it to double its entire mass (nobody even dreams of that), this would amount to pausing our emissions for a decade.
Didn't understand your point here initially but I think what you mean is - we've significantly outpaced the biosphere's ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not irrelevant, it's overloaded.
It is not overloaded. Trees are not concerned by the extra CO2 in atmosphere.
Biosphere is a cycle, which means that it has net zero effect on the amount of CO2 in atmosphere.
Any CO2 removed from atmosphere is at the same time counteracted somewhere else. Maybe it is burning or rotting or maybe it has been eaten by a breathing and farting camel.
More biomass just means there is more CO2 taken out as well as supplied in.
The only way it can have non-zero effect on the atmosphere is if we are interacting with what is called sequestered carbon.
Humanity is taking out carbon out of long term storage that has been sequestered for millions of years, but there exists no natural process that would counteract it efficiently.
There only exists a number of buffers -- an atmosphere as well as oceans.
A forrest stores carbon as long as the forrest exists, dead trees emit carbon as they die/rot/burn away, living trees store carbon as long as they are alive (and they help maintain the soil where carbon gets stored also)
Once a forrest reach maturity , it will be a store like any other carbon store (but perhaps a fragile one , it can easily be cut or burned down).
Basically, if you remove a forrest (e.g. burn it down), most of the carbon is released into the atmosphere - thus it's a storage keeping the carbon it stored away from the atmosphere.
Forrests store about 400 billion tons of carbon in total , and we emit about 9-10 billtion tons of carbon per year.
(most numbers you find will be of co2, but those 2 oxygen molecules account for quite a bit of the volumn/weight also, so make sure to not mix numbers that account for just carbon with numbers that represents co2 )
Based on this, the more healthy thing to do is plant more and cut down more. And repeat.
CCS (carbon capture & sequestration) is still needed. Even if we stopped emitting GHG today we’ll be above the 1.5 degrees target, but CCS is not a technology that “buys us time” It’s something we use in conjunction with renewable energy resources. CCS isn’t even operating at a large enough scale yet to begin to mitigate or lessen the effects.
I don’t mean to harshly criticize. This idea that carbon capture is a time buying technology is often used as a greenwashing narrative to discourage the adoption or solutions we already have.
Really? What are you thinking of? Wikipedia makes it all sound pretty speculative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
Forests also have excellent effects on local climate and the water cycle, and provides habitat for wildlife and biodiversity. More forests gives us a healthier world.
Forests do use land(that could go to solar energy farms or food farms) and do not sequester as much carbon as CCS. Not that I’m saying “no forests!”. We need them for a lot of other important reasons besides capturing carbon. We could always use policy that discourages wasteful uses of land since we’re definitely not making the best of it in the US at least currently.
I believe there were some efforts to turn oil rigs into carbon capture stations? Might have just been an idea I heard at a research conference though. There’s always more ambitious solar geoengineering methods that if(huge if) pans out require no land.
Basically, they need to be turned into tomorrow’s coal or oil.
You can still get coal made from trees, when a forest fire turns some wood into charcoal and that gets buried in the soil, or under unusual circumstances where a tree gets buried somewhere inhospitable to the microbes that can decompose lignin.
All of these things happen at massive scales, so even though the vast majority of wood does decompose before it can be preserved, even a few percent is probably enough coal to power some future post nuclear apocalypse society's industrial revolution in a few dozen million years time.
If that spike further prevents the cycle from continuing (because the Sequoia can no longer grow in sufficient time scales) then you suddenly have a net release that will not be recaptured.
Which is, of course, exactly the point of the article: keeping the carbon trapped in the cycle is the sink.
I don't know your intent, but this seems like a deliberate framing of a technical truth in a particular light in order to downplay consequences. If this isn't your intent; great! But if it is, it's not a responsible way to foster discourse.
We should all exercise maximal humility in dealing with climate change because we are dealing with incredibly complex systems with truly catastrophic implications of making the wrong choice. We need to engage with each other as constructively as possible to any chance of minimizing the harm.
Breaking the cycle is a source, and
strengthening the cycle (increasing its depth) is a sink.
Trees and plant matter typically turn into peat and eventually coal.
In the long term, in other cycles, everyone alive will die, humanity will cease to exist, the sun will supernova, and the universe will contract to a single point (is the last one accurate?).
Meanwhile, sequestering carbon for 2,000 years seems like a useful cycle, and only a "short term" if your community functions on geological timescales. This isn't the grass in your lawn.
> For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever.
This is actually a thing. We just need to stop digging up those old trees.
They participate in a cycle but the cycle grows with time, because you have more organic carbon trapped in alive beings and less in the air, so can trap more and more.
And at long term this trees will move part of this carbon to the soil. Unless we will keep burning the soil like idiots, of course. Anything that will work at short term is extremely valuable at this moment.
It's hard to believe those trees died in this fire. Tragic if true.
And it's happening again as we speak.
This does not mean that human-made fires are good. At this point, any additional release of CO2 is pretty bad.
Just motivated by the fact that there are people other than Californians on HN.
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2010-03-giant-sequoias-yield-longest-h...
"Climate relationships with increasing wildfire in the southwestern US from 1984 to 2015" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781...
My only notion so far is to pre plant species adapted for the anticipated conditions, ahead of the changes.
Good grief.
Gotta read to the end. Only 2 pages, though.
Looking for earth-like planets and trying to detect signs of life as we know it might eventually bear fruit, but whatever life is there is likely to resemble earth around the time life emerged on land a relatively recent 400 million years ago. The signs of life won't be alien structures, but biochemical signatures. What about the other 4 billion years, when Earth's life existed only in the oceans? On cosmic time scales, that's far more likely, but do we know enough about what Earth looked like to recognize that on exoplanets?
Projects that attempt to detect advanced extra-terrestrial life by their electromagnetic emissions, like SETI, seem especially misguided. We've only had the ability to broadcast radio for 100 years or so. That's laughably short on cosmic time scales, and the distances they've propagated are insignificant even on just a galactic scale. Just 75 other systems exist within that tiny distance, and our signals are likely distorted and attenuated to the point of being indistinguishable from background noise for most of them.
The book I like to recommend is titled Life Beyond Earth: The Intelligent Earthling’s Guide to Life in the Universe by Gerald and Feinberg and Robert Shapiro and published in 1980. It speculates on what forms life could take and how we might know something is living even if it doesn't fit our conventional ideas of life as we know it.
This storm transpired across the entire North-western region of the state, starting a half dozen 'complex' fires[0]. Complexes are multiple fires that join together to form one large fire. Any single one of these was devastating. Taken together, it's mind blowing.
I remember waking at about 4:00 AM on that Sunday (August 19th). Thunder woke me, and there was plenty of lightening. I dozed and each thunderclap woke me again. I kept waiting for the downpour to start, but it didn't. After about an hour of this, I remember thinking that fires must be starting somewhere. It wasn't long before I could smell smoke.
It’s appeals to simpletons with an agenda. California is filled with such special interests. We can’t get old growth back. What about beatles? Are all trees the same? How long does it take undergrowth to regenerate after a controlled burn? People can’t answer these, they just repeat mindlessly, “fires are a fact.” Just like the globalization zombies. Imagine if humans had never changed things. We’d still have slavery and be living in caves.
Are we witnessing the last march of the Ents?[2]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_giant_sequoia_groves [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKl3gPGdtpc
When the seas rose from 20kya until 8kya, inundating millions of square miles of prime habitat, people moved uphill. But other people had already been living there for millennnia. Often those were peoples who had been driven out of prime bottom land, and were making do in marginal circumstances. Guess what happened then.
They made babies together?
That site even has a database of sequoias, for example https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/europe-giantsequoia/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum
[2] https://www.monumentaltrees.com/en/nld/gelderland/wageningen...
https://www.giant-sequoia.com/faqs/giant-sequoia-landscape-q...
Wow! I knew they were tall, but I had no idea they could grow to a mile and a half... and typically! ok, ok, jk. You meant elevation not height, to which the really tall ones may get over 300'.
That a more natural "fire is part of the landscape" approach is the key to preserving a landscape built by fire. It may not settle on what it looks like right now, but the American west has been fire-managed as far back as people have been talking about it, before it was written.
Forest fires happened outside of human intervention.
To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
It would be ‘good’ if we weren’t causing this one, but good and bad are concepts of consciousness
If you remove sapience from this situation, then blood pressure just is, period. One particular aspect of what is just one big chemical reaction, or [insert whatever is at the bottom of how reality works].
It is said that since god died, the meaning of life is what we make it to be. But if there's no one around capable of processing the concept of meaning, then life has no meaning at all.
I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.
But these are still coupled questions. On the one edge of the spectrum you have archaea, bacteria and viruses - glorified chemical reactions. On the other edge you have us. I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. The way we normally reason about, we try to figure out which entities are capable of enough self-awareness and experience processing that we can talk about them feeling pain, suffering, or - for this discussion - finding meaning.
The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter.
> The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it.
> As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else.
Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
I mean oxygen producing single called organisms drastically altered the environment. They were not conscious to actually notice, but we are. But tons of species went extinct and the earth was irrevocably changed due to their presence.
Thinking humans are special on the cosmic timescale is just arrogance.
Agreed - I don't find anything to disagree with in what you're saying.
I'm asking that seriously. Humans are the ones that value them. Without humans, nobody would care.
Of course we should know better, and be kinder to our planet, for our own good. As far as nature is concerned, we are doing what nature does. And if we go extinct as a result, that's part of nature too.
If this what people are afraid of; We, humans, could do the same without losing 1000 years of wood and killing a few bombers in the process. Scorching a pinecone is easily repeatable in a lab, and then you can care for the saplings for two or five years until you can plant it in nature. End of the problem. Most will survive exactly when we want them to be. Keep the rest of your millions and use it for something more useful than rebuild entire cities each four years.
There is not need to burn the forest for that or to convert arsonists or criminals into heroes claiming that 'nobody thinks in the saplings!'. Now all that we need is to stop making excuses to start hunting seriously the criminals and put them in jail. Period.