Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

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It's easy to get a sense of proportion for these things.

Example: One of the latest fires in Southern California burned through 5200 acres in about four days. What was burned easily represents twenty years of growth.

Simple math: 20 years x 365 days = 7,300 days

The CO2 was released in four days, therefore 7,300 / 4 = 1,825

If carbon re-capture was 100% efficient and 100% reversible (not the case), that means you need 1,825 units of time to recapture what you release in one day.

I used "a thousand years" as a figure of speech to communicate that it takes a massively long amount of time to grab CO2 out of the atmosphere, no matter the source. These are not efficient processes. Even if my figure of speech is off by a factor of 100, it means the annual CO2 contribution by forest fires takes ten years to recapture. That is an unwinnable ratio.

Sticking our heads into the ground and ignoring reality isn't going to solve any problems. For example, there are fires around the world that have been burning continuously for hundreds and thousands of years. And these are not small insignificant fires. If all of humanity evaporated from this planet tomorrow, atmospheric CO2 would still require tends of thousands of years to come down. These are planetary scale problems that are impossible for us to solve. The "save the planet" narratives out there are hubris at best, and money-making/power-grabbing scams at worst.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/04/16/the_undergr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

What I find truly remarkable is that we can't even control these fires that burn for a century or more and we are actually buying into the idea of saving the planet. The scale of these fires, when compared to a planetary scale problem is a rounding error, laughably small. One way I think of it is: Put out all of these long-burning fires and they I'll believe we might be able to affect atmospheric CO2 at a planetary scale. Until then, it's a fairy tale. A fantasy.

You seem to obfuscate pretty simple concepts through some pointless math. Yes if we burn a forest that took 20 years to grow, to capture the same amount of carbon you will need to grow the same amount of trees for 20 years (or equivalently double the trees for 10 years ...). The recapture is 100% efficient and 100% reversible or are you suggesting that carbon is somehow transformed into a different element. If a tree contains e.g. 1 tonne of carbon it needed to extract that amount of carbon from the atmosphere. The thing is, growing trees happens much more frequently than forest fires. So we can capture significant carbon from the atmosphere by planting more trees (with the added side effect that it would make places more pleasant to live).

Regarding coal-seam fires, the amount of carbon they release compared to the amount of coal we burn purposefully is negligible (that doesn't mean we should not put them out though)

> The recapture is 100% efficient and 100% reversible

Nothing is 100% efficient. Nothing.

On the question of time. here's an easy read [0]:

Quoting:

"Changes to our atmosphere associated with reactive gases (gases that undergo chemical reactions) like ozone and ozone-forming chemicals like nitrous oxides, are relatively short-lived. Carbon dioxide is a different animal, however. Once it’s added to the atmosphere, it hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years. Thus, as humans change the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide, those changes will endure on the timescale of many human lives."

This article is very interesting in that it shows just how some of our assumptions --things we thought we knew-- are wrong. For example:

"We’re seeing that Earth’s tropical regions are a net source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, at least since 2009. This changes our understanding of things."

Sadly climate-change has mutated into an area dominated by some of the most incredible fantasies I have seen in pseudo-science. This is one of them. Looking at burning trees or wood as carbon neutral with the benefit of ignoring the most important variable in the equation: Time. Others are claims to be able to reduce CO2 at supernatural rates (save the planet in 20, 50 or 100 years), etc.

If there's on thing I have learned by taking a deep dive into this subject is that most of what is out there in political and popular circles is somewhere between a fantasies and outright lies. The real science is having trouble getting out to the surface because it has no political or financial value.

You can't get votes if you talk about dropping CO2 by 1 ppm in a thousand years. If, on the other hand, you convince people that we are all going to turn into goo in two decades and we can fix the problem --if you give me money, power or both-- well, that's powerful. And so climate change turns into a cult to the benefit of politicians and those able to make money out of the narrative.

[0] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...

If I spend 20 years accumulating baseballs, and then go out and drop them all in a baseball field full of people over the course of about 4 days, and all those people really want baseballs for some reason, will it take 1825 days for them to pick all the baseballs up?

> If I spend 20 years accumulating baseballs

I'm sorry, that has no relationship whatsoever to the subject. I could take it apart piece by piece. Still, it would be an exercise in futility.

Here's one that might highlight the nature of the problem:

Imagine you burn a cubic meter of wood at the base of a building with twenty floor. All internal doors and stairs are open, so the smoke and gasses can go everywhere. Particles can travel into cracks, air ducts, all kinds of places and land.

A few hours later the fire is out.

Now go and remove all gasses dispersed through the building and recover every particle deposited on every surface across twenty floors.

First. It's impossible.

Second. If you really wanted to attempt such a feat, it would require more energy and resources --by orders of magnitude-- than what went into creating the mess in the first place.

Third. It would take exponentially more time than what it took to consume the pile of wood.

Now take that and extrapolate to a planetary scale.

It's called "greenwashing".

Didn't know the term. Thanks.

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