Nobody focuses on “black carbon,” because we can’t prevent wildfires, as they are a natural occurrence even without climate change. They are happening more frequently due to climate change, and firefighters try to control the burn in various ways, but it’s a lot easier to work on the human-sourced CO2 and Methane than it is to address wildfires. The frequency and effect is a symptom of our own output.
If we can get a hold on our own emissions, wildfires will become less frequent as well.
Actually, we can limit wildfires with controlled burns
That’s one of the things I meant by “various methods,” but a controlled burn isn’t preventing the burn itself, just (hopefully) its spread. The fire is going to happen regardless, because it’s a natural and necessary occurrence.
If our various governments could be bothered to actually penalize the worst polluters and invest in actually clean energy sources, the wildfires would sort themselves out; we’re the ones that are making them worse.
Yeah but the wildfire situation won’t get better any time soon, even if we stopped all emitting today. You need controlled burns. A small controlled burn is a hell of a lot better than a massive uncontrolled one.
Right. I agree that controlled burns are necessary, and firefighters already do them. My point is that those things are addressing the symptom of increased wildfires, and people are “ignoring black carbon,” because it’s not a viable path towards meaningfully addressing that specific issue.
Wildfires won’t ever completely stop just because we switch to 100% green energy, but this article is looking at the problem from the wrong end.
But they haven’t been doing controlled burns, that’s part of the issue. At least in the USA, controlled burns stopped for a long time. Now we have forests that are too dense
Controlled burns do produce less carbon though. They burn the lighter underbrush at lower temperatures while leaving lots of the carbon dense older growth (relatively) untouched.
And sometimes it’s used to create a barrier so the fire encounters a span of spent fuel to contain its spread. It’s still just addressing the symptom. The author seems to be under the belief that people are ignoring “black carbon,” when in reality, things like controlled burns never stopped. Nobody is ignoring it, and its increased intensity and frequency is a symptom of the climate change we’re causing.
It’s like arguing that we need to cool the oceans. Duh. We’ll do that by focusing on the core problem of our emissions, and we’ll still have work to do as the climate recovers (should we make it that far).
Agreed, just wanted to point out that controlled burns are good and not as bad as uncontrolled ones :)
yeah I would say a bigger deal is we could stop our emissions but if we still destroy our ecology its not going to matter much.
The worst kind of carbon is humanity
