Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of fires up north, typically about 500 to 800 fires in all of Alaska per year. It is important to realise that fires are a natural part of the ecosystem there. Black spruce (Picea mariana) trees "cause" fires to their own advantage - burning out other trees and then repopulating the area, squeezing out contenders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana#Ecology

The important question is whether there is more fires than usual or less fires than usual. The fact that there are fires carries little information.

That being said, this summer in Alaska is indeed exceptionally hot: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/07/06/alaskas-c...

This summer's exceptional temperature coincided with a bump in black spruce's pollen production causing everything to be covered in yellow:

> Spruce trees release pollen annually, but every three to five years there is a natural bump in pollen production. This cyclical process is called masting, and it flushes the forests every few years with spruce seeds, overwhelming seed-eating animals like red squirrels and white-winged crossbills, and thereby ensuring many uneaten seeds go on to germinate.

Are the fires typically peat fires or forest fires? Because right now they are having the former.

Forest fires. Not sure how common peat fires are - don't know almost anything about them. Looks like a much bigger deal (because it's rare, hence the ecosystem/communities are not prepared to deal with them).

Also they're having forest fires too, like every year: http://smoke.alaska.edu/current_fires.html

> Pierre Markuse, a satellite imagery processing guru, has documented some of the blazes attacking the forests and peatlands of the Arctic.

I was just there a few weeks ago. Reduced visibility in many places due to smoke, many "thank you firefighters!" signs along the road, helicopters picking up water from some of the millions of Alaskan lakes. It's still a very beautiful place.

This isn’t about local ecosystem disruption. It’s about releasing more global warming gasses into the atmosphere than humans have produced since the start of the industrial revolution.

Carbon monoxide is probably preferable to methane in the atmosphere. (attached link discusses carbon dioxide vs methane as greenhouse gases, carbon monoxide is less troublesome than CO2) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140327111724.h...

This is my optimistic take! :D

The peat consists of methane, fyi.

Burning down the entire world's vegetation would result in less carbon emissions than we've already emitted. It's actually a pretty mind blowing fact.

http://www.futureearth.org/blog/2018-jan-31/how-much-carbon-...

> Trees and other vegetation are the planet’s carbon storage closet – absorbing and releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in an ongoing cycle. But just how big is that potential? A study from December has calculated that the world’s vegetation, from Amazonian rainforests to Eurasian grasslands, may hold about 450 billion tonnes of carbon today.

https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions

> From 1870 to 2014, cumulative carbon emissions totaled about 545 GtC. Emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (approx. 230 GtC or 42%), ocean (approx. 155 GtC or 28%) and the land (approx. 160 GtC or 29%).

But we're discussing peat, which is accumulated over thousands of years.

Pardon my ignorance, that does indeed look worse.

Actually it's about carbon trapped in the permafrost, not in the peat. Idk how burning peat contributes to permafrost melt.

Elsewhere in the comments someone mentions that the released carbon from all peat burning is about 2.5 times more than all emissions since the start of the industrial revolution.

What's discussed here are Siberian permafrost peat fires, not Alaskan forest fires.

> The important question is whether there is more fires than usual or less fires than usual.

Copernicus's post [0], linked in the article:

"Although wildfires are common in the northern hemisphere between May and October, the latitude and intensity of these fires, as well as the length of time that they have been burning for, has been particularly unusual."

It also shows a chart of the of heat output from wildfires in June 2019 compared to the the 2003–2018 average.

[0] https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cams-monitors-unprecedented...

Is pollen the limiting factor for seed production? Your quote seems to suggest it is, unless its sloppy writing.

As I understand this is more of a mechanism for controlling the production of seeds. The idea is simple: producing seeds increases the population of seed-eating animals. But if the trees coordinate and keep on releasing few seeds, then many all of a sudden, then animals will be overwhelmed by the food supply and much of it will go to uneaten, therefore more seeds will germinate. Next breeding cycle there may be more animals (because the forests were all-you-can-eat buffets), but the seeds supply will be low again, reducing the animal population.

I'm not sure what's the specific mechanism of coordination (i.e. the specific signal that selects the many-seeds years), the article does not explain it. But it coincided with very high temperatures this year, on top of the persistently increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere (plants love the CO2 levels we've generated).

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