Chemicals released during wildfires in Australia damaged the ozone layer | Hacker News Reader

Chemicals released during wildfires in Australia damaged the ozone layer

nature.com

253 pointspseudolus104 comments

I highly recommend The Juice Media YT channel and their caricatured series called "Honest Government Ads" [1]. They are covering climate change and, among others, Australian government incompetency in quite funny, provocative and slightly NSFW way.

[1] The Fires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BmbvTvFQ3g

[1] We're Fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOmdkN6MOwU

[1] the Safeguard Mechanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrkE_VaMD4k

I thought that named looked familiar and oh my, they are the RAP NEWS guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6O6sM2Shok

I'm going to lose an hour of my life reminiscing about how Youtube used to be and what it would have been.

Wow, that was excellent, thanks for the pointer. I also liked "ultimate rap battles of history", but this rap had an excellent political take on it. What kind of justice would we want served on us eventually? We can do better than we have so far. What great historical references, what did we do with the nazis at Nuremberg, hire some at nasa, and hang some of them. It's complicated but it's not wrong.

Sadly Hugo (the rapper) decided to go solo to focus on his own career, he does some Rap News inspired videos now, it's not quite the same without Giordano: https://youtu.be/N4-FGp0vvck

Rap News was wasted on the early 2010s. Such a stable, boring time compared to Brexit, Trump, Covid, the war in Ukraine, ChatGPT, UAP disclosure. Why couldn't Robert Foster have been born a few years later?

I haven't thought about Robert Foster and Rap News for years. I can still remember the rap about wikileaks

"Shattering schemes and the lies that we've been sold. By a fourth estate that rolled over and did as it's told."

Obama vs McCain was the most boring presidential election ever. Because either way, we could be sure nothing too crazy was going to happen in the White House for at least four years. The media must have hated it.

Never thought I would miss suit colors being controversial.

Love things like this!

"Brought to you by the Department of Thoughts and Prayers"

"Everything is Cool and Normal (TM)"

I've learned the wonderful word "shitfuckery" from them.

Unfortunately I have to live in this country and if it were practical to move elsewhere then I would.

When I was younger the Australian population essentially believed in a common cohesive set of narratives about themselves and their position in the world and local politics involved arguments that nuanced those beliefs—that is, not much changed.

In recent decades that's changed and the situation has now reached its antithesis to the extent that the country is essentially ungovernable when it comes to big-ticket policies like climate change.

Dozens of vested interests now run government policy, cohesion has long since flown out the window.

Go to your closest international airport.

Buy a one way ticket to New Zealand.

Doesn’t solve any problems, but it makes it way easier to cope with Australian media and politics.

And shit, you can vote here after 3 years.

Been there and love the place and likely would end up there if I could.

Incidentally, decades ago when I first went there I instantly fell in love with the Kaikoura Coast—palm trees, the Pacific Ocean and snowcapped mountains in the same scene. I've been to no other place on the planet where that combination ocurrs, NZ has it all.

Question, why then do you mob so frequently go west and end up in the Emerald City? You should know by now it's only a chimera—'emerald' when viewed from a distance.

Or.. Maybe you got older and your glasses lost their tint.

See ya mate, have fun in Uzbekistan or wherever you end up.

People are constantly moving to different countries. Just make a bit more of an effort. Im sure you could find a way to leave.

These are amazing.

Curiously enough, chlorine radicals and volatile organic compounds from coal and wood combustion have the opposite effect in the lower atmosphere, where the interaction increases ozone production (due to reaction with various nitrogen oxides). This also generates the lung irritant PAN which is a component of brown smog:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep36821

> "The chlorine radical is a potent atmospheric oxidant, capable of perturbing tropospheric oxidative cycles normally controlled by the hydroxyl radical. Significantly faster reaction rates allow chlorine radicals to expedite oxidation of hydrocarbons, including methane, and in polluted environments, to enhance ozone production... Even when present at low levels, Cl radicals can have a profound impact on tropospheric oxidation and radical cycling. Cl chemistry can significantly impact levels of tropospheric ozone, a greenhouse gas that is also a precursor for the OH radical, destroying it in clean environments and enhancing its formation under polluted conditions."

Incidentally, Australia's massive wildfires of 2019-2020 produced about 700 million tons of CO2, which is only about 1/3 of Australia's annual fossil CO2 generation from coal (counting total production of Australian coal, of which only about 1/5th is burned in Australia itself, the rest being exported).

If you want to eliminate fossil fuel use, and aren't just posturing for political convenience, stopping production makes a lot more sense than stopping emissions at point-of-use.

>If you want to eliminate fossil fuel use, and aren't just posturing for political convenience, stopping production makes a lot more sense than stopping emissions at point-of-use.

Talk about posturing. This is the least effective way to reduce carbon emissions, because it simply won't be done without sufficient replacement energy generation and transmission in place, as well as alternatives for spot-use of hydrocarbons like automotive, heating, etc.

If you want to get nothing done, propose solutions that make nobody happy. If you want to get something done propose solutions that can work.

However, it would force people to do something. Restricting supply increases price, and thus alternatives/efficiencies become more viable.

An effective climate preservation campaign would focus on production facilities - coal mines, oil rigs etc. Not necessarily directly - for example the best way to shut down North Sea oil production would be to make it impossible to fly helicopters out there - protest airfields, helicopter maintenance depos, protest to the pilots, disrupt the logistics. Of course this then becomes a national security threat, and would be dealt with accordingly.

It forces them to vote you out of office and in come the subsidies for coal.

Yeah, for an example of how this works horribly in practice, look at how the French yellow vests rolled back their climate taxes

Until the supreme dictator decrees this we need to figure out something that works in a market economy as we don’t have a command economy.

At better way is tax it. Governments are experts at taxing.

And corporations are experts at regulatory capture.

I would be amazed/surprised if one is introduced and effective. But you don’t get what you don’t fight for. Just because the odds are stacked against today doesn’t mean we can’t do something to shift that stack a bit for a better tomorrow.

More tax = increased cost to purchase resource = buyers finding cheaper alternative.

> If you want to get nothing done, propose solutions that make nobody happy.

I agree with you, but this also reminded me of the old definition of "compromise": making sure that nobody is happy.

At the very least, counting the emissions from coal produced in Australia on Australia's carbon emissions ledger and attaching the 'externalities' to the producer makes more sense.

Coal consumption will not go down if Australia stops exporting coal. It's a fungible commodity. Whoever uses Australia coal would just move to another source if prices are increased to pay for the unreleased carbon.

If you cannot ensure a consumer is affected, it won't change consumption (which is what we want).

Well, that's why you have a global international treaty treating all producers the same, so they all have to pay the same carbon cost per ton of carbon exports. They can pass the cost onto the consumer in the form of higher prices, or they can absorb it themselves (reducing profit margins).

It's also just easier to do the accounting on the producer-exporter side.

Sure, if you can somehow get all producers on board, that would be the simplest. If you cannot get all producers to play by the same rules, you are going to have to examine the consumption side as well.

So far the nations of the world have not shown such a unified stance.

Most realistic and effective solution will be to get the biggest producers and consumers to all agree to join the system, whilst at the same time agreeing to place tarrifs on trade with those that won't join.

> If you want to eliminate fossil fuel use, and aren't just posturing for political convenience, stopping production makes a lot more sense than stopping emissions at point-of-use.

This. And the fact I haven't heard of any country saying "we'll stop extracting coal/oil to help the environment" tells me nobody really cares about the environment - everyone just wants to look like they care to appease voters.

Depriving people of energy can be just as catastrophic. While not digging it up would be effective, I'm not sure some people in developing* country would necessarily agree.

It's a complex topic, and Australia (where I live) has little excuse to still be using coal fired energy so much. Politics gets in the way of the obvious solutions.

I don't particularly like attributing CO2 to the source. Unless we're going to stop counting CO2 emission internally, because the oil has been extracted elsewhere.

edit: updated to developing, didn't realise the other was offensive. My apologies

No, depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience. Depriving your children with a future is on a whole other level. And that is exactly where we are heading: climate catastrophe leading to famine, drought, flooding, unmanageable sea level rise etc.

People could do with a lot less energy 40 years ago, I'm sure we can get by just fine with a little less.

> depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience.

Where do you live?

I mean this rhetorically, because for a couple billion of people your definition of "minor inconvenience" is literally death.

Ask a Canadian how inconvenient it is to go without heat in the winter.

Ask an elderly Singaporean how inconvenient it is to go without AC in the summer.

As a rule of thumb, energy use by poor people is negligible with respect to the energy use of the rich. I'm sure Australia, the US and Europe could do just fine witb half their current energy usage. Take for example the situation in Europe : energy prices skyrocketed last winter and as a result 30% less natural gas was used. On a macro level this was only a minor inconvenience, nothing more.

If we want, we can buy less styff, fly less, reduce the temperature in our homes, eat less meat and spend less time commuting to a bullshit job. All without causing major inconvenience.

Remember how the entire world was effectively able to switch to lockdown+work from home overnight without coming to a standstill? Very inconvenient, but definitely not the end of the world

> No, depriving people of energe now is only a temporary inconvenience.

Wow. This is so incredibly out of touch. The world consists of more than just wealthy people driving large cars, living in large houses, flying for vacation and work.

Even poorer people in rich/developed countries people die due to lack of cheap energy through heatstroke or freezing. And that is just at a micro level. At a macro level a huge amount of the world's food production relies on cheap energy. Take it away and there will be disastrous consequences.

Inconvenience is a very poor guess. Energy restriction kills people.

More people than the climate, that’s for sure.

Energy production levels must increase profoundly, while costs must fall. This is already happening, and not even that slowly in the grand scheme of things. Personal energy generation and storage is already cheaper than the grid as long as you can finance the upfront investment at a reasonable rate.

I’ll say it until I’m, err, green in the face. Make clean energy cheaper and more abundant and it will be used. Make climate friendly products more compelling and cheaper than their dirtier substitutes, and the better products will win on the open market.

Climate austerity is not so much “saving the future” but rather “murdering the poor” and I find it morally indefensible.

No poor people will die from e.g. flying less, downsizing our cars or eating less meat. That is because the really poor (or perhaps half of all humans) don't fly, don't have cars and don't have a cheap meat based diet.

Roughly half the people alive today exist because of cheap energy. If you take that away, it will be more than inconvenient.

With respect to CO2 emissions, it is quite simple. The amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere is exactly correlated with the amount of fossil fuel dug up (modulo the proportion turned into plastics/whatever)

People will deforest their surroundings and burn wood to keep warm.

Which is probably less harmful than burning oil. At least that forest can regrow in 50 years, whereas the oil will take millions of years to reform.

According to The Guardian wood produces more CO2 than other combustible per unit of heat¹. It also produces as much if not more soot than burning coal and a quantity of NOx and SOx comparable to the combustion of natural gaz.² It also produces copious amount of creosote a substance known to cause cancer to workers in wood treatment facilities.³

Mature trees that have reached a slower growth phase are better used as construction material, that way the carbon is sequestered for a long time and younger faster growing trees that replace them can transform CO2 again.

1) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/01/pollutio...

2) https://wood-energy.extension.org/what-are-the-air-emissions...

3) https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/creo...

Yes, burning wood may be more sustainable in that lens. Whether it is less harmful is orthogonal. Heat pumps are efficient in ways that wood fires cannot be, for example, so oil -> electricity -> heat pump may well be far better for the atmosphere than "burn some wood".

It is not. Heating and cooking with wood is absolutely deadly, particularly because by definition it’s done, on average, by the poorest households in structures without proper ventilation.

This has the same energy as saying, "If we ban nukes, then people will just TNT each other."

You think? People have to keep warm; they don't have to bomb each other.

Anyway Europe is trying this wood instead of coal thing right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...

Or, more directly, it’s proportional to energy needs, with the means of production that are currently economical.

If you care about third-world countries, at least be polite enough to call them developing countries.

'Third World' was coined - I believe, by Alfred Sauvy in 1952 (following Pascal Boniface) - as an expression to literally mean "non aligned in the dichotomy of NATO vs Warsaw pact affiliance".

Stereotypes about qualities frequent in Countries of such /political/ quality (such as said alleged "need for development", following the poster) are not implied.

'Third' is proper for "non-aligned"; 'developing' when noting such state makes sense (special sense, since growth seems to be a shared goal); some other term for other cases - such as "rich in raw materials", etc.

I can come up with list of words that were coined with some intention and gained another. Why a term was created has nothing to do with how it is used and the gp comment wasn't in the context of the cold war history.

So you are aware that the word has multiple connotations, yet you chose to focus on the connotation that paints the GP in the worst light... why, exactly?

An inherent need to be offended on behalf of others, in order to add some purpose to ones life.

> yet you chose to focus on the connotation that paints the GP in the worst light...

Process of elimination.

There are two main connotations. The political one wasn't being used, therefore it must be the other one.

"worst" out of two is not exactly a stretch...

Or I interpret it in the context it is used, referring to poor countries as third world.

All this outrage about my remark is triggering my sense of irony. Too bad I'm social drinker only.

PS: congrats to the gp who edited his comment.

> Or I interpret it

You declaredly interpreted it as «[im]polite» - different from "poorly chosen", if the readers do not have enough grounds to assume your irony to be triggered before the «outrage».

In analytical terms, "Contries seeking independence may easily be reliant on key economic sources" makes sense.

At this point you are just looking for reasons for me to be deserving of your righteousness. I can't take part in your inner struggles, so please don't feel obliged to include me in the discussion.

If you have points, present /them/. If something is not clear, clarify it.

This is the second post in which you are presenting no content.

...And this whole branch started by you stating that an expression would be «[im]polite», and another acceptable, without the /content/, again, founding the statement. We are the ones trying to make some sense of your riddles (or stubs).

If someone says "Hey, you shouldn't use that term, it's impolite." what more //content// is there to give? And what "irony" are you talking about?

And this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083720 is not even remotely a riddle. You said the origin of the term. They pointed out that the term has changed, and the person using the term wasn't using that definition anyway.

Even with it being the proper term for "non-aligned [in the cold war]", the person using the term wasn't saying non-aligned [in the cold war].

> list of words

No need because that is the normal process, involving meaning and use - you could present the whole dictionary.

But it is none of our business if suddenly one individual or a multitude start using 'mangrove' for something they decide, and it gives no toss of credential to those who after that decide that 'mangrove' does not mean "mangrove".

Developing into what?

Exploitation machines just like big daddy united states. Unless they have resources we want ofc, then the CIA simply puts in a complicit dictator!

The third in "third-world" has the same meaning as the third in "third-party cookies". They were the countries that aligned themselves with neither the liberal (first) or communist (second) worlds who were the principal parties to the cold war. I wish people would stop getting offended at things they don't understand.

> I wish people would stop getting offended at things they don't understand.

What wasn't understood?

If the term third-world was being used to talk about cold war political alignment, they wouldn't have objected. But that's not how it was being used. The objection was completely valid.

That would be leaving a substantial amount of money on the table. Also, they're not necessarily the same countries or people; there are for example anti-fracking movements in some of the countries where that is happening.

Norway is the perfect example of this. Nationally they seem to be moving towards EVs faster than others but they have no problems producing oil.

The biggest lie told today is that pollution is our problem and that we, as individuals, can make a decent impact. Industry has to change to make any impact. It doesn’t matter how clean your cars or energy sources are if you keep pumping fossil fuels out of the ground.

Or maybe those countries are just realistic and didn't want to put people who already live paycheck to paycheck on a more desperate economic footing.

There's no cake milord!

Exactly. And restrictions on supply will force people to use fossil fuels more efficiently, whereas just increasing efficiency might actually make people use more fossil fuels - the Jevons paradox.

I would suggest the slogan 'Leave it in the ground!'

Coal exports are a huge part of Australia's GDP. Resource exports make 67% of their total exports https://www.rba.gov.au/snapshots/economy-composition-snapsho...

If Australia stopped exporting Coal (mostly to China), it would decimate not only their economy, but affect China (world's factory) making everything else expensive too.

Unpopular opinion: It seems with Coal or Gasoline, due to CO2 emissions, they've been seen as unclean and something we should switch away from. However their energy density is high, only below nuclear. Easy to transport, relatively safe. It's an amazing source of fuel.

I'm somewhat hopeful that someday we'll figure out how to capture 100s of millions of tons of C02 from atmosphere and turn it into synthetic gasoline-like fuel. All using solar energy.

The whole dance of global warming is because we know how to burn fuels and create heat + CO2 + H20, but we don't know how to do the reverse cheaply at scale.

Once we do that, then gasoline/ethanol is a renewable resource.

Lithium ion batteries are great, but gasoline is 100x denser than batteries.

> capture 100s of millions of tons of C02 from atmosphere

It's way more efficient to capture it at the source, ie. the coal plant. But nobody wants to talk about that because that would cost coal companies money and that's not allowed. They want to spew the pollution for free to keep coal energy "cheap" while the whole world has to pay for the cleanup.

It would take all the energy the coal plant produced to capture all of its CO2 emissions, it's a pretty futile cycle... For comparison, try to imagine a diesel truck that captured all its emissions onboard as it drove down the highway. It's not very plausible and would represent a huge drain on power output.

FutureGen was a massive failure, too.

If they were forced to pay the true externalized costs of burning coal they would either have to figure out the tech or go out of business.

Literally billions of dollars has been poured into trying to do this (in Australia alone but even more internationally), since the big coal and gas companies know it’s their only hope of continuing to operate long term, and very little has come from it…

If they were forced to pay the true externalized costs of burning coal they would either have to figure out the tech or go out of business.

> stopping production

And then how do you provide energy cheaply and reliably enough? That is in order to maintain today’s “civilizational level”, so to speak.

As far as I am aware the energy sources that are now branded as alternative cannot do that, i.e. provide energy that is both cheap and reliable.

Technology is reaching the point where renewables are just as cheap and reliable as fossil fuels (and note, coal plants break down and gas and oil supplies get interrupted):

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/australia-promi...

It's rather interesting that some major fossil fuel producers are building renewable domestic infrastructure (Australia, Saudi Arabia) although they don't seem to want to cut exports as quickly.

Both of you have good points. The world needs cheap energy to function. Renewables are becoming more capable by the day, and can/will be that source of cheap reliable energy.

But the transition is not going to be instantaneous. If renewables are as cheaper/reliable/better as fossil fuel (and continually improving) the economic incentives will effectively push the transition as fast as is possible. The transition is supply constrained as much as anything. Production of solar, wind is rapidly growing, but it can only grow so quickly.

So basically, chlorine compounds (hydrochloric acid) in the atmosphere from CFCs (old aerosols, fridges) turn back into chlorine thanks to the smoke particles, which wouldn't otherwise happen, and the sun then causes the chlorine to break down in sunlight to chlorine ions which "eat the ozone".

So it's a race against time between the ozone recovering through the decay of these CFC-related harmless chemicals, and smoke from wildfires making the ozone larger and not recovering.

Not all wildfires send smoke high enough though.

Interesting read!

Hydrochloric acid is a rather common chemical, produced by humans in the tens of millions of tonnes. I believe it is also quite common in nature - for example, your stomach acid is mostly hydrochloric acid.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to imply here. E.g. I don't usually vomit into the upper atmosphere.

If you ever change your approach, I would be interested in photographing this.

Are implying that you sometimes, albeit not usually, vomit into the upper atmosphere?

They don't seem to answer the question of why the chlorine in the atmosphere comes mainly from CFCs. What about all the chlorine we use every day from e.g. bleach and swimming pools? Does that not wreck the ozone layer because it never gets high enough into the atmosphere?

I guess that would be nice background, but you can also find the answer in like 5 minutes on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon From the section on Regulation:

> It turns out that one of CFCs' most attractive features—their low reactivity—is key to their most destructive effects. CFCs' lack of reactivity gives them a lifespan that can exceed 100 years, giving them time to diffuse into the upper stratosphere. Once in the stratosphere, the sun's ultraviolet radiation is strong enough to cause the homolytic cleavage of the C-Cl bond.

It sounds like a reason to do more controlled burns.

They also eat methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, so it's not all bad

Take home lesson, start wearing sun hoodies.

This article missed the chance to be much more interesting. While the 2019-2020 Australian fires were undoubtedly catastrophic, there have been other much worse fires in recent times. This one killed 34 people; a decade prior, the bushfire season killed 5 times as many people, with 174 deaths. Four decades prior to that, the bushfire season burned 5 times as much land area as the 2019-2020 season, with over 15% of Australia’s total land area suffering fire damage.

It was the particularly intense burning, causing smoke to travel much further than usual, that caused this season to loom so large in people’s minds. There are astounding figures, like that 80% of the populace experienced days or weeks of heavily smoke-filled air, or that it arguably killed as many as 450 people indirectly through smoke inhalation interacting with existing respiratory issues.

That intense burning was due mostly to the extremely high fuel density of the particular areas that were on fire - forests rather than grasslands. And the intense burning caused some incredible phenomena: flames at ground level that would reach the 20th floor of a skyscraper, radiant heat so extreme that you could be standing on the other side of an 8-lane highway and it would still give you 2nd degree degree burns in seconds and kill you in minutes, fire fronts that travel for days at an average of 6-8 miles an hour (even an ultra-marathon runner with a head start could not stay ahead of the fire) and reach peak speeds over 80mph (overtaking you in your car)… and all throughout, the roar of a thousand jet engines as vegetation literally exploded at the fire’s approach - gaseous decomposition from the ambient heat.

These fires were so intense that they launched smoke far higher into the atmosphere than fires usually do, and so we got to see some very unusual chemistry happen in the atmosphere.

I criticize the article for not being as interesting as it could be because it exhibits the same malady as so much of the other reporting on that bushfire season - the unique physics ignored in favour of using the tragedy for political purposes.

> the unique physics ignored in favour of using the tragedy for political purposes.

A new study attempting to explain a previously noticed phenomenon in the ozone layer is "for political purposes", seriously?

Perhaps I am being a little unfair, there is a lot of discussion of the physics and chemistry in the article. It may seem like a wild leap to start talking about politics because of a few paragraphs at the end of the article, to which I offer the defense that the Australian media landscape during that season was extremely, aggravatingly politicized. I did try to make sure most of my comment was focused on the interesting physics of extreme wildfires, leaving my criticism as a one-line post-script at the end.

This isn't an article about how crazy wildfires are, it's about the effect on the ozone layer, so not sure why any of that would be relevant.

If the objection is that the lead author used the term "climate change" out loud, the article seems to go out of its way to be precise so the "any mention of climate change is political" crowd won't be aroused:

> Haywood would like to see the new chemistry integrated into a climate model to forecast how ozone depletion might be affected if intense wildfires become more common.

I agree with the other commenter and I would even say you're completely failing to understand the medium, context, and purpose of the piece of writing you're criticizing.

I think this is illustrative of a broader theme which is how enduring and baked in a lot of our climate degradation is. As much as the chlorine compounds will decay, but not exactly anytime soon. To think we won’t have an issue with this again before they’re decayed would be ridiculous.

It’s the same thing with the broader topic of global warming. Absolutely we should seek to minimize greenhouse gas emissions, that’s a no brainer. But at our current stage in developement, especially with some countries not exactly being team players in this fight, a lot of the increase and future increase in temperature is baked in (pardon the pun). As much as I’m all for mitigation, much like the wildfires themselves, we will already have plenty of consequences to come. That’s why I’m so excited to see focus shifting more towards mitigation and resilience. We need to be prepared for the inevitable we’ve caused.

Personally, I wouldn’t use the term “excited”. The focus could just as easily shift towards nationalist movements trying to hoard resources and prevent refugees from warmer areas from crossing borders. There’s no guarantee that “resilience” is going to come in the form of technical innovation or human cooperation.

As much as I see the concerns, the issues that could arise from resilience are issues that can arise anywhere where human self-interest is present which is just about everything. I am excited for firms to start focusing on greener office buildings, even if their are some using it to greenwash for optics.

Though as I mentioned, I completely see your point. I guess I should rephrase to “I am excited that there is the potential for positive action in this space.

I read recently that wildfires should be allowed to burn down forests as smaller wildfires when prevented will result in larger wildfires in the future (because of availability of more dry organic fuel).

This combined with the current article makes me question the approach Australia currently uses for wildfires.

Do we let small wildfires burn themselves out?

If yes, why are larger fires happening? Should we actively trim forests periodically?

If no, why not?

Probably no one wants to take the risk or responsibility for letting a small one burn in the event that they lose control. No one gets in trouble for failing at trying to put it out. But taking the decision to stand back? You'll get raked over coals if it was the wrong decision.

They definitely do controlled burning to remove organic fuel. 4 years ago i was working at a farm in Western Australia near Albany and the sterling range mountain range they did a controlled burn which got out of hand and we had to evacuate. Spend the next week's putting out fires that reignite.

Farmers also burn down crop fields to make seeding easier and is a risk to jump in other fields or neighboring woodlands.

My girlfriend there worked as a parc ranger / firefighter. It's a big topic, farmers in the outback have their own firetrucks and teams

How could Dan Andrews do this? /s

Is it odd that a collection of non-USA researchers published something similar a year earlier? the USA-based Nature publication here is clearly paywalled so, hard to check the real differences, or publication references.

https://acp.copernicus.org/preprints/acp-2022-247/acp-2022-2...

No, not odd. Multiple of the authors of the paper you are linking are cited in the Nature paper. Your paper also cites prior research from Solomon - the first author of the Nature article. It is unsurprising that the two papers don't reference each other as they have been written and in review at the same time.

They are all atmospheric researchers, so there is ofc a change that their research subjects overlap.

Not sure why you are focused on "USA" or "non-USA", but FYI: Nature originated in the UK. Today, Springer-Nature is a major international publisher. Springer (formerly Springer-Verlag) originated in Germany, BTW.

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