Also I don't think the stuff that burns in these would have otherwise ended up buried/fossilized, so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
For people who have never lived in an area that is both rural and wildfire prone, pile burning to eliminate yard waste is an activity that is entirely foreign. You see, out here, most people believe that the primary method of eliminating yard waste is by burning it in a pile. I happen to live in town where there is trash pickup service available, but I opt to simply take stuff to the dump myself. Most people don't want to pay or don't have such service available. Burning yard waste is almost always extremely polluting. One burn pile full of leaves and pine needles can often smoke out my entire town. Fortunately, pile burning is only allowed on certain days (when the weather is such that wildfire risk is reduced). That is not to say that pile burning is always so bad; it has to be done properly. If the pile is hot enough, there is little smoke. But most people do not burn them hot enough with enough long-burning materials (i.e. wood).
So why did I bring this up, since a wildfire is just this on a massive scale? Well, I do not personally believe that properly managed fuel management would result in as much smoke and particulate pollution, for two reasons. One, indigenous peoples here used to regularly set fire to the forest to manage the fuel load. This was done regularly enough that there simply wasn't as much material to burn, and done when weather was cooperative (e.g. before rains). A modern wildfire can burn with such ferocity that most trees end up burning, instead of just the undergrowth. This represents a much greater release of long-captured CO2. And second, there is now a culture of placing responsibility on individual residents to maintain "defensible space", asking them to perform pile burning regularly. As I mentioned above, this results in what feels like disproportionately dense particulate pollution, with annoying regularity throughout the cooler times of year.
There is a more subtle link too. The fact that you can blame fires on climate change, means that people can evade accountability for poor management of forests (and other risky land) which means they can skimp on spending on reducing risk - e.g. through controlled fires.
Ever since microorganisms evolved to eat dead plant matter the conditions to make coal on planet earth (and to create a carbon sink of buried coal) have been gone.
What you are saying implies this is not a sink.
Trees don't live for all that long. Many common varieties only live for around 100 to 200 years.
> so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
The targets are just policy targets. That anything "counts" is just a paperwork game. However, as the article points out, if you want to make good administrative policy you should always consider the cost:benefit ratio. Perhaps California's policymakers have actually lost track of this give the sheer scale of recent fires.