June 7, 2023 Wildfire Smoke Event | Hacker News Reader

June 7, 2023 Wildfire Smoke Event

storymaps.arcgis.com

23 pointssklargh13 comments

in case people are not aware, ESRI is a 90's style monopoly of subscription desktop software that has built itself an empire in California. The ESRI Washington DC research lead recently testified that "with generative AI maybe people wont be needing lots of QGIS subscriptions" (edit that is the direct quote on video) since AI can repeat ordinary GIS workflows. ymmv

You mean ArcGIS, right? QGIS is FLOSS.

https://qgis.org/en/site/

ArcGIS also has an online edition that doesn't need any desktop software, which is highly capable and costs nothing for individuals, no matter how much data you throw into it.

Not just California, basically every state and local government in the US with GIS department works off their ESRI subscription.

It's expected to happen this year as well - don't know if this is the new normal for Quebec.

https://www.ouranos.ca/en/news/2024-05-15/2024-forest-fire-s...

It is. Canada is covered in forests that sit on very thick layers of peat. Thanks to climate change we've entered a death spiral where the climate dries out the peat enough to make it flammable and once it catches fire, the heat further dries it out which makes deeper peat flammable the next season. The layer is at least a few meters deep and up to tens of meters deep in some places so the fires can even burn underground between seasons, leading to neverending wildfires.

Russia is facing the same problem with their peat and sooner or later, the strip from Washington to Montana will face it too.

And of course, peat is a fossil fuel (a precursor to coal), and burning it releases CO2. So this wildfire cycle is the equivalent of strip-mining all the Canadian peat deposits and involuntarily burning them, which further increases CO2 levels, which further raises global temperatures, which exposes even more feedback loops.

This is why the IPCC was targeting 1.5C as a limit beyond which any further anthropogenic climate change needed to be avoided. At that point, natural feedback cycles kick in, which make it very difficult to halt climate change (regardless of what humans do) before hitting 4-5C in warming.

Yep! Peat is estimated to be the biggest organic carbon sink on the entire planet. If all of it burns, it'll more than double our CO2 concentration to over 1,000 ppm at which point all bets are off.

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