One problem with the article is they again claim trees take away carbon from atmosphere.
This is only true if you look at short term. In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE.
For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever. For these sequoias the future is either they burn or they fall down and rot. In both cases the carbon is released.
And if you interrupt the cycle at any point and vent 10% of the participating carbon to the atmosphere, you are going to have a massive spike at that particular point in time.
If that spike further prevents the cycle from continuing (because the Sequoia can no longer grow in sufficient time scales) then you suddenly have a net release that will not be recaptured.
Which is, of course, exactly the point of the article: keeping the carbon trapped in the cycle is the sink.
I don't know your intent, but this seems like a deliberate framing of a technical truth in a particular light in order to downplay consequences. If this isn't your intent; great! But if it is, it's not a responsible way to foster discourse.
We should all exercise maximal humility in dealing with climate change because we are dealing with incredibly complex systems with truly catastrophic implications of making the wrong choice. We need to engage with each other as constructively as possible to any chance of minimizing the harm.
I see, so what you're saying is that the carbon cycle isn't a "sink" so much as it's a "source"? Burning trees can release CO2 which they might then do nothing to recapture?
Permanent carbon sequestration operates on geologic timescales so it’s very very slow, but trees are one of the more common ways to permanently sequester carbon. Deep roots in a low oxygen environment can last a long time. That still takes the top layer of soil being covered, but grass for example simply represents less biomass per acre.
Another common process is run off from rivers getting buried under a continuous stream of silt, and a significant portion of that biomass comes from trees.
That’s just not true on any reasonable timescale. Healthy forests absolutely build up organic matter in soil on various timescales, and while the carbon has various residency periods it’s a net sink. Things like forest fires can create charcoals as well, which last a very long time in soil.
Yes, each tree individually only temporarily stores carbon until it is eventually burned or rotted. But if trees are being replanted at a rate that CO2 in is equal to CO2 out, it's essentially a permanent storage when you look at the full system. Additionally, if you increase the total number of trees in the system, your storage increases, which is reducing the amount of CO2 in the air. Even if this isn't the end-all-be-all permanent solution, it certainly helps in the short term.
> In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE.
In the long term, in other cycles, everyone alive will die, humanity will cease to exist, the sun will supernova, and the universe will contract to a single point (is the last one accurate?).
Meanwhile, sequestering carbon for 2,000 years seems like a useful cycle, and only a "short term" if your community functions on geological timescales. This isn't the grass in your lawn.
> For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever.
This is actually a thing. We just need to stop digging up those old trees.
I wonder why this is so difficult to understand. Of course that trees take away carbon from the air. Is called photosynthesis. Is exactly what trees do.
They participate in a cycle but the cycle grows with time, because you have more organic carbon trapped in alive beings and less in the air, so can trap more and more.
And at long term this trees will move part of this carbon to the soil. Unless we will keep burning the soil like idiots, of course. Anything that will work at short term is extremely valuable at this moment.
No. We have permanent solutions already. We just need the policy to encourage their adoption and implementation. (And further research to advance the existing solutions)
CCS (carbon capture & sequestration) is still needed. Even if we stopped emitting GHG today we’ll be above the 1.5 degrees target, but CCS is not a technology that “buys us time” It’s something we use in conjunction with renewable energy resources. CCS isn’t even operating at a large enough scale yet to begin to mitigate or lessen the effects.
I don’t mean to harshly criticize. This idea that carbon capture is a time buying technology is often used as a greenwashing narrative to discourage the adoption or solutions we already have.
Nobody who's serious thinks there's a single silver bullet; we need multiple paths to sequestration, and the other technological solutions aren't scaling up yet. We also need to scale up renewable energy as fast as possible, and get people to stop driving ICE cars. People have to pick where to put their own effort and investments, but no one is saying that these efforts are mutually exclusive. Planting trees is one (very good) bullet among many, which we can do at large scale today.
Forests also have excellent effects on local climate and the water cycle, and provides habitat for wildlife and biodiversity. More forests gives us a healthier world.
Yes 100%. This is a really important point. We need to protect and expand natural areas around the world.
Forests do use land(that could go to solar energy farms or food farms) and do not sequester as much carbon as CCS. Not that I’m saying “no forests!”. We need them for a lot of other important reasons besides capturing carbon. We could always use policy that discourages wasteful uses of land since we’re definitely not making the best of it in the US at least currently.
I believe there were some efforts to turn oil rigs into carbon capture stations? Might have just been an idea I heard at a research conference though. There’s always more ambitious solar geoengineering methods that if(huge if) pans out require no land.
> So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere.
Didn't understand your point here initially but I think what you mean is - we've significantly outpaced the biosphere's ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not irrelevant, it's overloaded.
Okay, so it would be actually more precise if I said "It is irrelevant when it comes to removing CO2 caused by humanity".
It is not overloaded. Trees are not concerned by the extra CO2 in atmosphere.
Biosphere is a cycle, which means that it has net zero effect on the amount of CO2 in atmosphere.
Any CO2 removed from atmosphere is at the same time counteracted somewhere else. Maybe it is burning or rotting or maybe it has been eaten by a breathing and farting camel.
More biomass just means there is more CO2 taken out as well as supplied in.
The only way it can have non-zero effect on the atmosphere is if we are interacting with what is called sequestered carbon.
Humanity is taking out carbon out of long term storage that has been sequestered for millions of years, but there exists no natural process that would counteract it efficiently.
There only exists a number of buffers -- an atmosphere as well as oceans.
It's a storage, but yes it's part of the cycle also.
A forrest stores carbon as long as the forrest exists, dead trees emit carbon as they die/rot/burn away, living trees store carbon as long as they are alive (and they help maintain the soil where carbon gets stored also)
Once a forrest reach maturity , it will be a store like any other carbon store (but perhaps a fragile one , it can easily be cut or burned down).
Basically, if you remove a forrest (e.g. burn it down), most of the carbon is released into the atmosphere - thus it's a storage keeping the carbon it stored away from the atmosphere.
Forrests store about 400 billion tons of carbon in total , and we emit about 9-10 billtion tons of carbon per year.
(most numbers you find will be of co2, but those 2 oxygen molecules account for quite a bit of the volumn/weight also, so make sure to not mix numbers that account for just carbon with numbers that represents co2 )
"Temporarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If we built our cities with wood like we used to they can last hundreds of years. Thousands if we really did it right. There's a Japanese temple that's fourteen centuries old.
Yeah, the only reason we have so much oil is that it took a few 100 million years for fungus to figure out how to eat trees. So that carbon just collected and got buried until now.
Not quite. The vast majority of petroleum comes from the remnants of microorganisms like algae. They settle in anoxic aqueous environments, are buried over millions of years, compressed and transformed into organic rich rock called kerogen. If that kerogen is buried to sufficient depth and temperature it then cooks and is converted to oil and gas.
Trees and plant matter typically turn into peat and eventually coal.
Most existing coal was once trees, but large scale conversion of trees into coal was only possible in the carboniferous, when trees were new on the biological scene and there wasn't anything that could decompose them, so dead trees just piled up and slowly turned into coal under the anaerobic conditions of being buried under other trees.
You can still get coal made from trees, when a forest fire turns some wood into charcoal and that gets buried in the soil, or under unusual circumstances where a tree gets buried somewhere inhospitable to the microbes that can decompose lignin.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia article for coal formation links to this paper which refuted the idea that coal formation was primarily attributable to the delayed agility of microorganisms to break down lignin during the Carboniferous period: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611
I think it depends on the depositional environment, its still possible for trees to be buried before decomposition. Especially in forested areas with significant water flow. Once a log hits the muddy, anerobic bottom of a river/lake it essentially enters stasis, people fish centuries old logs out of rivers for profit.
All of these things happen at massive scales, so even though the vast majority of wood does decompose before it can be preserved, even a few percent is probably enough coal to power some future post nuclear apocalypse society's industrial revolution in a few dozen million years time.
> Brigham, the study's lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed. Beginning next week, teams of scientists will hike to the groves that experienced the most fire damage for the first time since the ashes settled.
It's hard to believe those trees died in this fire. Tragic if true.
I am no expert or anything, just want to mention that Sequoias need fire to grow. Their seeds usually survive fire and afterwards, new growth is triggered.
This does not mean that human-made fires are good. At this point, any additional release of CO2 is pretty bad.
Yes, but they are adapted to relatively frequent but lower intensity fires. As the article says, for the last century there was a policy of fire suppression, so the "undergrowth" (and from the perspective of a Sequoia, pretty much everything else is undergrowth) is much more dense than it usually was. So if a fire gets out of control, it may get more intense than the Sequoias are adapted to.
According to [1] there were more fires during the medieval warm period. "The scientists found the years from 800 to 1300, known as the Medieval Warm Period, had the most frequent fires in the 3,000 years studied."
It really astounds me how many people (not you, I don’t think) seem hell bent on blaming California’s wildfires on one source. It can be caused by multiple things at once.
Yup. And some of those cofactors are terrifying. Like the vapor pressure deficit. Drier air sucking moisture out of the ground. I'm struggling to imagine how we might mitigate that.
I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine and talking about a similar thing: we just aren't looking for life as broadly as we might. To a certain extent, it's excusable, because how do you search for something you can't even properly recognize if you found it? How do you decide you've detected life if it doesn't fit any definition of life you can be confident of?
Looking for earth-like planets and trying to detect signs of life as we know it might eventually bear fruit, but whatever life is there is likely to resemble earth around the time life emerged on land a relatively recent 400 million years ago. The signs of life won't be alien structures, but biochemical signatures. What about the other 4 billion years, when Earth's life existed only in the oceans? On cosmic time scales, that's far more likely, but do we know enough about what Earth looked like to recognize that on exoplanets?
Projects that attempt to detect advanced extra-terrestrial life by their electromagnetic emissions, like SETI, seem especially misguided. We've only had the ability to broadcast radio for 100 years or so. That's laughably short on cosmic time scales, and the distances they've propagated are insignificant even on just a galactic scale. Just 75 other systems exist within that tiny distance, and our signals are likely distorted and attenuated to the point of being indistinguishable from background noise for most of them.
The book I like to recommend is titled Life Beyond Earth: The Intelligent Earthling’s Guide to Life in the Universe by Gerald and Feinberg and Robert Shapiro and published in 1980. It speculates on what forms life could take and how we might know something is living even if it doesn't fit our conventional ideas of life as we know it.
Has there been any evidence of the cause of all these fires? It seems like I used to hear how fires may have started in the past, now it seems like it’s ignored.
In August 2020, there was a large, rare storm in California. It produced a lot of lightening, but very little actual rain. It produced 10,000 lightening strikes, with no rain to suppress the fires that resulted.
This storm transpired across the entire North-western region of the state, starting a half dozen 'complex' fires[0]. Complexes are multiple fires that join together to form one large fire. Any single one of these was devastating. Taken together, it's mind blowing.
I remember waking at about 4:00 AM on that Sunday (August 19th). Thunder woke me, and there was plenty of lightening. I dozed and each thunderclap woke me again. I kept waiting for the downpour to start, but it didn't. After about an hour of this, I remember thinking that fires must be starting somewhere. It wasn't long before I could smell smoke.
The article mentioned the fire was started by lightening. It didn't state the cause of all these fires, but there is plenty of evidence and theory about how a hotter drier climate leads to an increase in the intensity and frequency of fires.
the assertion at the end of the article is that fire suppression doesn't allow small fires to consume the readily available fuel on the forest floor, leading to large stores of tinder and hotter fires, the kind that could kill a Redwood
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now that some evidence is accrued. The conventional wisdom, we just need more controlled burns; fires are good”, is fallacy. It’s convenient to think that way. It appeals to our taste for “the old ways of doing things” but it pretends to situation is unchanged and it ignores all nuance, namely regional variation in the causes and consequences of these fires, and the changing nature of the ecosystem. I hear people say, “we just need controlled burns because that’s the way it always worked” and it’s like hearing people say “we should just go back to the 1950’s way of life, everything was better then.”
It’s appeals to simpletons with an agenda. California is filled with such special interests. We can’t get old growth back. What about beatles? Are all trees the same? How long does it take undergrowth to regenerate after a controlled burn? People can’t answer these, they just repeat mindlessly, “fires are a fact.” Just like the globalization zombies. Imagine if humans had never changed things. We’d still have slavery and be living in caves.
How has some evidence accrued for that view? The article you are commenting suggests that fire suppression, not controlled burns, over the past century have lead to more mega fires. People keep talking about more controlled burns because we aren't doing controlled burns. We're actively hindering them.
These are the biggest trees on earth.[0] They're absolutely stunning up close if you ever have the chance to see the ancient ones before they disappear. This is a recent list of their last natural groves, some of which are now gone.[1]
They can, and they are - we planted one in the backyard when we came back from our first family trip to the USA in 1979. It is now some 30 meters high and dominates the area, the iron fence needed to be moved so the trunk (which is about 1.50m in diameter at chest height) fits, it is encroaching a bit on the cycle path behind the house. This is in Abcoude in the Netherlands, a village just below Amsterdam. There are several specimens of Sequoiadendron Giganteum [1] in the Netherlands, among them one [2] in the arboretum at Wageningen University (where I studied forestry). It is a hardy species which does quite well in the wet Dutch climate.
It is somewhere between 25 and 30 m, I don´t know the exact height. The same goes for the diameter, this is a guesstimate. Having measured many trees it won't be that far off the mark though.
“ The giant sequoia is the fastest growing conifer on earth given the right conditions. We expect 4 feet of upward growth in the third year for trees in large pots and one-inch plus growth rings. They have the potential to grow faster every year. Giant sequoias grow rapidly tall and less dense when the rising and setting sun is blocked. They quit growing tall rapidly once they reach full sun. Once they reach full sun they begin to grow a thick trunk, dense foliage, and rapidly put on weight.”
In principle, yes. But wild land is being encroached upon worldwide. And other stuff is already trying to live on what is left.
When the seas rose from 20kya until 8kya, inundating millions of square miles of prime habitat, people moved uphill. But other people had already been living there for millennnia. Often those were peoples who had been driven out of prime bottom land, and were making do in marginal circumstances. Guess what happened then.
Giant Sequoias typically grow between 4000' - 8000' feet. I've been growing redwoods for the past two years and have 20+ Coastal Redwoods, but most of my Giant Sequoias die from being so low to sea level.
> Giant Sequoias typically grow between 4000' - 8000' feet
Wow! I knew they were tall, but I had no idea they could grow to a mile and a half... and typically! ok, ok, jk. You meant elevation not height, to which the really tall ones may get over 300'.
They already are, but it doesn't make natural forests of them. A few weeks ago we had a discussion about a database of sequoias in British Isles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047458
It's possible. I know a place in a remote part of France with one sequoia. I don't know how it arrived there (there is nothing of interest). However is it a good idea to massively plant sequoias outside their native range ?
This is just awful, but it's pretty clear the forests of the Western US are doomed. It just makes me sad, as I remember those forests from my youth, when they were still vibrant and healthy. 50 years is a long time in a human's life, but it's just a moment in the life of a forest.
A lot of forest managers are in agreement with the assertion at the end of the article, that if smaller fires are allowed to clear underbrush and are not squashed for squashing's sake, then there will be fewer mega-fires.
That a more natural "fire is part of the landscape" approach is the key to preserving a landscape built by fire. It may not settle on what it looks like right now, but the American west has been fire-managed as far back as people have been talking about it, before it was written.
I really dislike comments like these, because it removes personal responsibility while at the same time blaming everyone for the actions of individuals and the consequences of national or corporate policy. And it low-key advocates in favor of reducing or removing the human population entirely.
Forest fires happened outside of human intervention.
If you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".
Or, you could notice that we're the only ones that care. "Reduction", "destruction" are terms meaningful to us and us only, because we're also capable of appreciating the ecosystem as its own thing. The rest of life on this planet falls on the spectrum between "must eat, must not get eaten" and "runaway chemical reaction".
If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
That's quite a reductive view of the rest of the animal kingdom. There are plenty of animals that appear to have some degree of sentience and self-awareness, and every living thing cares about its own survival. We may have the best understanding of the situation on a global scale, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that, for example, some marine mammals have a good understanding of the declining conditions in the world's oceans, especially given how widely they migrate.
I'm open to admit there might be some animal species one could reasonably argue we should start seeing as people. Dolphins and some cephalopods come to mind, perhaps even some corvidae (and I'm getting increasingly uneasy about cows and pigs).
But these are still coupled questions. On the one edge of the spectrum you have archaea, bacteria and viruses - glorified chemical reactions. On the other edge you have us. I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. The way we normally reason about, we try to figure out which entities are capable of enough self-awareness and experience processing that we can talk about them feeling pain, suffering, or - for this discussion - finding meaning.
The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
> I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass.
Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter.
> The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it.
> As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else.
Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals.
That’s a better analogy - there have been countless extinctions and mass extinctions and the ecology shifts as the climate changes anyway. Nature is indifferent.
It would be ‘good’ if we weren’t causing this one, but good and bad are concepts of consciousness
"Who cares?" reminds me of the diagnostician's distinction between signs and symptoms. Vital signs of the health of the biosphere can be measured, just like your blood pressure can be measured regardless of whether you I should care about how you feel.
"Vital signs" are still only meaningful in terms of humans talking about how the body of a human (or an animal, or a living or life-like system) should function. Blood pressure just is - whether its measured value is "good" or "bad", that's up to our preferences for what it should be.
If you remove sapience from this situation, then blood pressure just is, period. One particular aspect of what is just one big chemical reaction, or [insert whatever is at the bottom of how reality works].
It is said that since god died, the meaning of life is what we make it to be. But if there's no one around capable of processing the concept of meaning, then life has no meaning at all.
"Would a tree falling in the forest ..." never seemed much of a puzzle to me.
I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.
I think the point GP is making is that this categorization is counterproductive to solving the underlying issues, regardless of what consensus is reached on the taxonomy of our place in the wider ecosystem.
To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
We are doing exactly what any other, less intelligent species is doing too: myopically exploiting the environment to fuel instantaneous growth. Wolves don't think, "heck, let's leave some deer around and limit our offspring so we may prosper next year".
Of course we should know better, and be kinder to our planet, for our own good. As far as nature is concerned, we are doing what nature does. And if we go extinct as a result, that's part of nature too.
They won't care. 10 million years after we wipe ourselves (and unpleasantly many of them) out, it will be hard to tell we ever existed, aside from the dip in fossil diversity right after. The raccoons might take up the yoke of sentience.
I chuckle thinking about future sapient trash-pandas discovering human landfills and worshipping the Ancient Ones who very clearly created this bounty for them. "They were so prosperous they put boxes of food on every street corner for our early ancestors."
It's possible to extend empathy to all living creatures, not just those similar to oneself. Or to put it another way, to take the view that all living things have equal value on a grand scale.
But if one takes a completely objective viewpoint, what makes humans special? We’re no different than beavers who make damns and flood a river. Sure we do it on a larger scale but are we any less “natural” than any other species? Keep in mind the fact we “care” is irrelevant and no more important than a beavers urge to build a damn. It’s all driven by genetics.
I mean oxygen producing single called organisms drastically altered the environment. They were not conscious to actually notice, but we are. But tons of species went extinct and the earth was irrevocably changed due to their presence.
Thinking humans are special on the cosmic timescale is just arrogance.
This type of self-defeatist attitude I can only imagine comes from suicidal people. It makes no sense unless the person saying it has given up on living.
I'm not talking about concerns of having a healthy environment and a clean planet.
I'm talking about population control that Malthusians want to impose so much, always on others, not on them.
Don't the cones need fire to open and disperse the seeds? I thought this is how that biome works, no matter how many pretty houses you build in it, it's still a wooded desert.
If this what people are afraid of; We, humans, could do the same without losing 1000 years of wood and killing a few bombers in the process. Scorching a pinecone is easily repeatable in a lab, and then you can care for the saplings for two or five years until you can plant it in nature. End of the problem. Most will survive exactly when we want them to be. Keep the rest of your millions and use it for something more useful than rebuild entire cities each four years.
There is not need to burn the forest for that or to convert arsonists or criminals into heroes claiming that 'nobody thinks in the saplings!'. Now all that we need is to stop making excuses to start hunting seriously the criminals and put them in jail. Period.
This is only true if you look at short term. In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE.
For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever. For these sequoias the future is either they burn or they fall down and rot. In both cases the carbon is released.