Posted on 10/31/2019 7:30:44 AM PDT by grundle
Thirty-three uses of the word ‘carbon’.
"...But it also unleashes the carbon held by trees, other plants and soil. Forests store enormous amounts of carbon—more than double the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—and continuously soak up more, blunting the impact of all the greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels in power plants and cars. In recent decades, the size of fires, their intensity and the length of the fire season have all grown dramatically. The more destructive a fire, the more carbon it releases. In fact, largely because of fires, California’s forests emitted more carbon than they soaked up between 2001 and 2010, according to a 2015 analysis by National Park Service and UC Berkeley scientists. “After 100-plus years of fire suppression in forests, we’re seeing a lot more tree-killing wildfire,” says Matthew Hurteau, University of New Mexico fire ecologist and associate professor. “That has substantial implications for the carbon put back into the atmosphere.”
Further complicating the picture is climate change—the major factor behind the longer fire seasons and bigger fires. This creates a feedback loop, where megafires exacerbate climate change, which then encourages even bigger wildfires. One study found that from 1984 to 2015, climate change doubled the area burned by wildfires across the West, compared to what would have burned without climate change. As the globe keeps warming, scientists expect forests to continue getting warmer, drier and more flammable. Unless people reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will significantly increase the frequency of wildfires. One study projected that if fossil fuels remain the dominant source of global energy and greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, by 2085 the acreage burned by fire in California will increase one-third to three-fourths. Elsewhere in the West, the size and frequency of fire is expected to increase even more dramatically. Until recently, intense fires were rare in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. But one study predicted that with climate change, fire likely would become so common and widespread there that by the middle of this century, the region’s forests as we know them will vanish, replaced by other types of vegetation that may store far less carbon..."
Effing typical. Climate Change. They take a nugget of truth (about overgrowth and aversion to burning) and metastasize it out into support of the biggest hoax this world has ever seen. They just cannot give it up.
I had nearly exactly the same response. Boy, was that a lesson.
Actually I was commenting on the title of the article, which is a misstatement.
“Throughout the history of earth forest fires have burned and extinguish themselves naturally... Until the 20th century when smokey the bear came along and men needing work who had none during the dirty 30s needed a job... One genius way to employ them was hiring them as forest fire fighters... Altering that natural function will always lead to some kind of consequence. Naturally occurring fires cleanse the forest of dead and rotting wood... Without them, that dead and rotting wood dries up and actually creates more fires over time.”
So true. Old photographs taken during the Civil War show open woods where wagons were able to be pulled. Same areas today are choked with vines, briars and bushes, and with trees of all sizes from and inch up to three and four feet in diameter. Walking through many areas requires having a machete for clearing out a trail. A hundred years of built up fuel will have to be dealt with somehow.
But at community college, she learned that Native Americans used fire for thousands of years...”
It’s helpful that it was the Gentle Sons of the Forest and not the stupid evil Honky who started this or it would have no hope of being prescribed. ..
Also, clear cutting is an effective strategy in cleaning up under brush, providing fire breaks and stopping the spread of destructive pests like bark beetles.
Did you read the entire article? While it's nice that the whackos are finally admitting you have to do controlled burns to manage forests properly, they are still focused on things like "carbon" and "climate change" with a religious ferver. I lost track of how many times the article mentioned carbon and 'climate change'. It made it difficult to make it through it, because it was so loaded with nonsense.
What is especially glaring is the way they think of trees as not much more than a carbon sink. At the same time, they appear to have no awareness whatsoever that trees are not immortal. They live and grow, and thus accumulate mass, and eventually die and decay, releasing that mass back into the environment. The planet is a closed system, yet they are completely unaware of that fact. It's an astounding blind spot.
I stopped here.
For more than a century, people have been snuffing out fire across the West. As a result, forests, grasslands and shrub lands like those in the Bouverie reserve are overgrown. That means that, when fire escapes suppression, it’s more destructive. It kills more trees, torches more homes and sends far more carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. >>>>>>>>>
Why do they not mention that billions f federal dollars in federal money over the last hundrfed years have been mismanaged by California, who did not spend that money on forest management that would take the place of forest firs and brush fires...its called brush clearing. The federal national forests do that on an annual basis in a continuous operation by season.
Whence California? They missed the boat, like most liberals and leftists do when it comes to spending wisely.
See:
California failed to sufficiently manage its forests
11/15/18 06:30 PM EST
This Mother Jones article is just another lefty hit piece designed to keep blame from resting where it should.Propaganda which will lead to a continuing failure to address the problem. California will continue to burn annually until proper forest management is done.
They don't seem to get that the trees absorb the "greenhouse gas," CO2. That's good for the trees, and mitigates their feared gas. So now they are finding that the trees are full of stored carbon (from the CO2), but don't get the connection. They do now though seem to realize that a big forest fire releases more carbon into the atmosphere than is acceptable.
Perhaps California should be charged billions for Carbon Credits to offset the needless mega fires their envirowhacko policies have enabled.
This article makes it sound like radical new approaches are necessary. Not True! Go visit the Grand Canyon National Park and view their program on land management and fire control. They understand the steps necessary and carry them out efficiently. In California the land management regulations could best be titled as “Feed the Fire”.
The news is all about underbrush and fire wood.
Having traveled in California as a tourist, I recall much of the state is a gigantic field of high brown grass that is always a fire risk. They say the cows escaped from Wisconsin to California but to me it seems their pastures were brown and shriveled.
I wonder, why doesn’t all those thousands of square miles of dead brown grass conflagrate?
My husband and I watched an interview with a firefighter from California several years ago. I remembered it because he said in essence tree huggers had created the situation of more and worse fires because they filed lawsuits, etc that prohibited them from doing prescribed burns that would have eliminated a lot of the underbrush these wildfires use as fuel.
OH! I completely missed that! You are right.
Thank G@d they mentioned carbon and climate change.
I stopped here.
I read the article. And I began to think about Man Made Climate Change. And I got to thinking - there may be something to this after all. California is doing the best they can to dangerously change and alter the climate.
Their laws and policies are literally killing people.
This is how they operate. One outlier study, entirely based on wildly speculative data justifies enormous government intervention, now and forever. “The science is settled” even when their own “evidence” says it isn’t.
Yes, I went back and read it. I skimmed it the first time. Silly me.
My husband rec’d degree in Wildlife biology and forestry in early seventies. He said the very thing: environmentalists.
He also said the American Indians use to set fires to control fires out West.
Leftists don’t care! They love chaos. Leftists have taken over the Dim Party.
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