The growing field of ​“firetech” is reinventing the age-old practice of prescribed burns and devising other novel methods of preventing and suppressing fires.

  • Again, carbon is carbon. It doesn’t not effect the gobal climate just becuse it came from a tree instead of a car. While the effect may be small, so are most sources of carbon on their own. Keeping it out of the air might very well make between earth having a few small sickly coral reefs, and none at all. We can’t afford to pump carbon into the air just becuse that’s the way we’ve allways done it and change might be scary.

    If nothing else, modern forest fires aren’t natural. We made them by drying out and heating the forest, by changing wether patterns, and a thousand other local environmental factors. Modern forest fires are hotter, faster, and far larger than they were at any point in the ten thousand years.

      • If you could explain why co2 we produced by makeing more frequent forest fires doesn’t insulate the world in the way the same molecule does when it comes from cars i’d love to see it.

        • Fine. It’s a matter of scale and a matter of homeostasis. The environment is stable without humans burning hydrocarbons. The carbon exists in a cycle where it is released by dying animals and plants, and by natural fire cycles. When humans dig up millions of years of sequestered carbon, then it throws off the balance of natural ecosystems. The carbon is all mixed up in the atmosphere, where it collects PCBs and other pollutants from industry. Some of that carbon is re-sequestered by growing plant life. Any human efforts at burning the carbon that’s actively being used by ecosystems are purely masterbatory and distract resources from actual solutions like decreasing dependence on oil.