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Anyone want to weigh in on the validity of this "science"

2606 square miles of CA burned... which is an area larger than Delaware. Couldn't say what the volume of carbon dioxide is... but it's huge.
 
https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/n...ires-emitted-much-carbon-dioxide-entire-years

I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong. But it's a little odd that it came out so quickly and with no links to actual papers nor data. Also interesting the actual USGS webpage says nothing about this.

But they were huge fires, no doubt.

The wording may be correct, but it is dishonest to suggest they are equivalent. The CO2 from generating electricity used carbon that would otherwise remain stored millions or even billions of years. Most of the CO2 stored in the forest would have been released sometime in the near future. Even "storing" it in the form of wood products would require burning fossil fuels.
 
"As much carbon dioxide as an entire year's worth of electricity". Yup. 68 million is exactly as much as 76 million.

What about the annual fires in the Serengeti? Or all the slash and burn in the rainforests? Because it's California, all of a sudden it's important. Never mind that there are fires every year, and most years covering far more area than these.

The reason there is no link to any actual science is that this was most likely a back-of-the-envelope guess, based on satellite opacity data. In today's science, the words "carbon", "greenhouse", or "climate change" are synonyms of "fraud". Notice nobody uses "global warming" any more, once the models for that fell apart. Sure, there is some good work out there, but there are so many completely bogus "studies", completely invalid from a scientific viewpoint, that it makes even the best research suspect. Real science is based on a hypothesis, verified or not by data, and a conclusion is drawn from what the data show. Climate change research starts with a conclusion: OK, we know for sure that humans, specifically Americans, are causing climate change, and everyone will die horribly in just a few years. What evidence can we scrape together to support that? It's completely bassackward from real science. News flash, folks. Climate changes. It's what it does. Humans have probably affected it, like we have affected everything else, but climate does not stay the same. Fifty million years ago, Montana's climate was roughly the same as Borneo's is today. Ten thousand years ago, most of the planet was just coming out of a series of major ice ages. A thousand years ago, the Vikings were farming on Greenland.

Forests burn. It's a part of the natural system. Whether or not rich morons build palaces at the tops of brushy canyons, the fires will still come through. Likewise floods, and hurricanes. Even after all we have done to it, the Earth is still a natural system, and natural systems are prone to natural disasters. The only way to manage wildfires is to harvest enough wood to have the same net effect. Get the dead wood out of the forests, and the damage will be much less. I suppose the same could be said for Congress, come to think of it.
 
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What are you trying to point out with this post?

I saw it posted on another site as fact. Like the sun rising every day fact. But the deeper I looked into it the more skeptical I became. The other site isn't one where discussion can take place to a asked here. There are certainly smart informed members here that often as WAY more in the know on various topics than I am. So I through it out there to see if others felt that it was also suspect "science" or if there was other background studies I wasn't aware of.
 
The wording may be correct, but it is dishonest to suggest they are equivalent. The CO2 from generating electricity used carbon that would otherwise remain stored millions or even billions of years. Most of the CO2 stored in the forest would have been released sometime in the near future. Even "storing" it in the form of wood products would require burning fossil fuels.

One of my thoughts was simply how can they have the kind of data to make that determination, how was it collected, what assumptions were made. I mean the various kinds of plant material that were burned give off varying levels of CO2, was that factored in, did they already have vegetation mapping for that area making the analysis quicker, did they actually monitor air quality, or use some remote sensing method. I honestly don't know.
 
The wording may be correct, but it is dishonest to suggest they are equivalent. The CO2 from generating electricity used carbon that would otherwise remain stored millions or even billions of years. Most of the CO2 stored in the forest would have been released sometime in the near future. Even "storing" it in the form of wood products would require burning fossil fuels.

Yup.

If you truly want to sequester carbon in wood it has to be turned into a stable form that will last thousands of years. Biochar.
 
The wording may be correct, but it is dishonest to suggest they are equivalent. The CO2 from generating electricity used carbon that would otherwise remain stored millions or even billions of years. Most of the CO2 stored in the forest would have been released sometime in the near future. Even "storing" it in the form of wood products would require burning fossil fuels.

Not true Rob. Here is an example of non fossil fuel sources being used to generate electricity, and provide the energy to run a dry kiln in N W Montana. California could reduce their carbon footprint and clean out the deadwood if they implemented technology like this.

http://woodbioenergymagazine.com/bl...umber-using-sawmill-leftovers-to-power-homes/
 

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