Canada wildfires last year released more carbon than several countries | Hacker News Reader

Canada wildfires last year released more carbon than several countries

reuters.com

38 pointswill-burner10 comments

This -among climate change in general- is one of the reasons we launched the largest crowd sourced real time CO2 map. [1]

The main idea behind is to create more awareness on local and regional emissions like the wildfires in Canada as well as to generate public available data with a dense network of CO2 sensors for scientific research. [2]

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/map

[2] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/airgradient-global-co2-map/

Wow. I do not think people fully appreciate that when a wildfire rips through a community, it's not just leaves and trees, but plastics and everything else.

Hmm But I assume the fire must leave a lot of unburnt charcoal, so the fire over all might still be carbon neutral?

Clarification:

When wood burns, it is carbon neutral.

When wood turns to charcoal, the carbon becomes pretty much inert. Unless it is burnt, it won’t rot or other wise return to the atmosphere. That makes wood fired charcoal manufacturing carbon negative.

I guess we're well within the "self-perpetuating feedback loop" at this point.

I wouldn't call it a loop. More like "orbiting towards the volcano" spiral.

Each wildfire makes the next more probable and we only need a faux step into the cone to enter a threshold of "non return without putting serious money on it", but we see also the same patterns again and again since decades.

2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/wildfire-investigati...

2022: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conditional-...

And also: https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2022/man-suspected-multip...

2023: https://globalnews.ca/news/9673400/arson-alberta-wildfires-i...

And: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/17/climate/canada-conspiracy...

This is an attack to the country and must be stopped as soon as possible.

Link to the paper (annoying not found in the Reuters article): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07878-z

This is a good page showing just how bad last year's fire season was compared to the previous 10 years: https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/wildfires-track...

And many of those wildfires are criminal activity, so maybe the laws should be updated to include the carbon released on big provoked wildfires as an aggravant punishable. Boycotting the future of the humanity for money shouldn't be scott free

> Canada wildfires last year released more carbon than several countries

You should have seen oil fields burning in Irak in 2003. /s

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