Vegetation fires are only a long term contributor to atmospheric carbon if the land is cleared and no replacement vegetation regrows to pull the released carbon out of the atmosphere.
It’s a really important distinction, one which is often abused by the denial side of the debate. CO2 is not a universal good that helps plants grow, but neither is it a universal bad. Fires are normal and part of the carbon cycle, not adding anything new to the system. Fossil fuel fires are not normal and push new carbon into the system.
Yeh you wouldn’t want to pull all the fossil fuels out of the ground at once, but maybe what were doing currently could be preventing us heading the other way and going towards a ice age as predicted by climate scientists in the 70’s.
China has reduced the fossil fuel usage massively. has to be a good thing.
Does the science know what happens once stop using it.
This was never the scientific consensus. The current patterns of climate change were predicted as far back as the 1800s, and became scientific consensus in the 1950s.
China has tipped over 50% renewables this year from memory, but yes their fossil fuel footprint continues to grow. It’s a positive trend, but they’ve got a huge amount of energy demand and are throwing everything at the problem to try to keep up.
I know this isn’t germane, but there’s a 2-parter on SBS about The Great London Smog of 1952 that’s worth a squiz.
The Poms sold all their good coal to fund their WW2 war debt, and then they had a high-pressure system, but absolutely no wind for 4 days. The cold weather of December meant that you had a low-pressure system locked inside a high-pressure cover, not being blown away by the wind.
And then the coal that was spewing out of millions of London fireplaces was second-rate and full of sulfur (I think the spelling has changed for the element), so you had this poisonous gas and a fog that cut visibility to feet.
Bad times, but they were going to cheat us with a dodgy ball change 70 years later, so advance karma.
No you can not fairly say that. There is no carbon in the atmosphere. You are made from carbon. Carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and it’s 4 parts per million. It has been way higher in the past, and the world didn’t end. You do know people used to burn wood for energy yeah? Take a look at what Mao did in China when he asked his people to chop down trees to build back yard steel furnaces. We moved on from burning wood to coal, because it was less destructive to the environment and way more efficient. I would rather a couple of open cut coal pits like we have in the Latrobe Valley as opposed to deforestation. Or maybe better still we can transition to gas with our vast reserves, and ultimately start using that yellow cake we seem to have in abundance. Burning wood is just dumb.
