Which brings us to the problem: The CO2 shouldn't be in the atmosphere right now: If you burn wood today and the CO2 gets removed again by new plants within the next 100 years, that's still a problem.
Your point is absolutely correct and as far as I can tell you pointed it out genuinely, not facetiously. Edit: read other later posts here: didn’t know about the bacteria part. Learned something today!
This is absolutely not my area of expertise but intuitively there are two categories of energy sources: one which releases co2 (or other climate change impacting gases) and one which doesn’t. Wood, oil, gas, coal falls into the former. It’s just a question of time as you say until the loop closes. Solar, wind, thermal, etc would fall into the latter as far as I can tell.
Wood burning does not cause climate change provided it's matched by reforestation efforts.
As others point out, the real problem with wood burning is it's effects on air quality.
Montevideo didn’t seem like a place where suburbanites were burning wood of any form, but I was there in the summer, just for a day.
Here's one such county ordinance https://www.tuolumnecounty.ca.gov/365/Burn-Program
https://trademarkmammoth.com/woodstove-inserts-and-epa-compl...
Given that EPA regulations were cited, I assumed that the same rules apply everywhere. It seems instead that the harshest rules apply in one town.
But then, once the current mushrooms and bacteria manage to digest it, there is no way for it to accumulate again like that.
Petrol might be a different story, coming from the plankton falling at the bottom of the sea instead.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-ancient-fo...
The point was: When you burn wood today the atmosphere isn't going to be like "oh, but that CO2 was absorbed out of the atmosphere during the last 100 years, so that CO2 shouldn't contribute to global warming".
As long as we haven't solved climate change any CO2 released into the atmosphere should be avoided. It's okay to burn wood that would have rotted anyway.
But if you cut down a healthy forest, burn it and say "but it will be reabsorbed when the forst grows back, it's a closed loop" that's technically correct, but it still contributes to global warming because we now have additional CO2 in the atmosphere. Simply because it takes time for a forest to grow.
The closed loop argument is only really valid long term and when we've already solved climate change.
As you say, the loop has to close on a timeline shorter than the greenhouse gas effect's impact on climate. That can be true of wood but not coal.
And, regardless, it's not like we only burn wood that's starting to decompose. Quite the contrary.