[HN Gopher] Role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO2 g...
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Role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO2 growth in 2024
Author : bikenaga
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-09-27 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (essopenarchive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (essopenarchive.org)
| barbazoo wrote:
| > The Amazon contributing 741 +- 61 teragram of carbon-its
| highest level since 2000 and more than half of the global fire
| emission anomaly. This surge, driven by exceptional heat and
| drought, offset two decades of declining deforestation emissions.
|
| That's rough, whatever gains we thought we made, puff gone. The
| next sentence paints us a picture of what the future holds. Many
| of us are going to be here for pretty drastic events I could
| imagine.
| tomComb wrote:
| The climate change self reinforcing loop
| gmuslera wrote:
| In 2023 there was also massive fires in Canada covering a similar
| area, 2021 Siberia, in 2019/2020 in Australia, 2015 in Indonesia
| (peat fires, less area but similar emissions)... there is a long
| list of extended fires with weighty emissions all in the last
| decade that nullifies and add a big share to every trial of
| forestation as natural carbon capture method. And things will get
| worse as that is in part a positive feedback loop.
| guidedlight wrote:
| Australia has long had fires. Fires are an integral part of
| Australia's historic natural environment.
|
| So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire
| dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is
| why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los
| Angeles.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| "Tree trunks in the Amazon are getting 3.3% thicker every decade
| as the plants absorb extra carbon dioxide, suggesting they are
| more resilient to global warming than previously thought."
|
| https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/amaz...
| Nevermark wrote:
| It should be no surprise that at the margin virtually every
| plant gets a small boost from higher CO2.
|
| Plants don't get the optimal amount of any component, because
| they balance the components they take from the environment
| against the energy costs of acquiring them and other
| constraints.
|
| If any component gets a little easier to aquire, the plant will
| do a little better. If it's a long term change, the plant will
| evolve a new balance that will improve it slightly more.
|
| But rising CO2 (in addition to making animal life dumber*) is
| contributing to a slow but radical rearrangement of local
| conditions through the globe.
|
| Temperature changes, precipitation levels, wind and storm
| prevalence, sea encroachment and season lengths being the
| biggest. And both have tremendous impact on plants.
|
| The faster the change. The worse the damage. When changes
| compound, they can happen very fast.
|
| * CO2 levels have gone from 240ppm to 420ppm. At 1,000 ppm
| there are clear measurable impacts on human cognition. Given
| cognition is such a critical capability, it begs the question:
| what is the actual curve of CO2ppm to cognitive effects. Same
| goes for metabolic efficiency related to our need to expel CO2.
|
| Because even small consistent subtle effects over time are
| likely to have practical effects. And also because raising the
| floor of CO2 outside, also raises the bar inside where CO2
| notoriously collects, and decreases the rate that enclosed
| spaces can renormalize levels when given a chance. Both of
| which raise the indoor CO2 expected and ceiling values.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Perfect. It should be no surprise but sometimes it is: some
| people get really surprised when they discover that higher
| temperatures, extra light and more CO2 make plants bigger. Or
| when they find out that pre-historical times had less oxygen
| and more CO2.
|
| CO2 is so demonized that people forget that it's essential to
| life (at least, to some forms of life).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I don't think any credible person is saying CO2 is
| dangerous to life.
|
| The changes to the climate can disrupt things like ocean
| currents to disastrous effect. Atmospheric gas won't kill
| anyone, we'll kill each other over access to resources like
| food and water.
| wat10000 wrote:
| CO2 isn't demonized. People focus on the harms because the
| beneficial aspects are well known, not argued, and not
| particularly relevant when making pretty much any real-
| world decision.
| TSiege wrote:
| It's not that more CO2 is bad it's that the rate of change
| is faster than any time in the geologic history of earth.
| And every mass extinction including the dinosaurs involved
| abrupt changes to CO2 levels. Every living thing is made
| out of carbon that came from CO2. Every scientist studying
| climate change knows this. But every organism on this
| planet evolved for ice age like conditions and in the span
| of 200 years we turned the earth's thermostat from Ice Age
| to Hot House
| xgkickt wrote:
| Recent collective decisions around the world suggest an
| impairment may occur at concentrations already exceeded.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This hasn't seemed to help with
|
| https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
|
| Or if it is helping it's certainly not enough and the limits of
| the biosphere to accept more CO2 are being exceeded.
| ck2 wrote:
| I find it hard to believe anything can top the non-stop burning
| of natural gas the past two decades from the Bakken fracking
| fields in North Dakota
|
| Think about how much fuel they waste, tons of CO2 and heating the
| atmosphere just to get to the oil
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...
|
| > _Today, 29 percent of the natural gas extracted in North Dakota
| is just burned away. This wasted amount represents enough gas to
| heat half a million homes_
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Combining the data in the article that was posted (741 +- 61
| teragram of carbon annually) with a single Google search about
| the Bakken fields (4 tons of carbon daily), yields a result
| that this contribution from the Amazon is _507,534 times_
| larger than the contribution from the Bakken fields.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I knew someone would inevitably try to find a way to refocus
| the blame on America. Thanks for illustrating just how
| ridiculously wrong it was in this instance.
| TSiege wrote:
| The misconception here is that the carbon in the Bakken is
| locked up geologically and essentially removed the
| biosphere's carbon cycle but the Amazon is not. Even if the
| entire Amazon rainforest were to burn it wouldn't change
| that. The problem with fossil fuels is that we are added
| sequestered to our biosphere at rates it cannot adapt to.
|
| So while absolute terms are less it isn't the same and we
| should be worried about what OP is discussing
| wat10000 wrote:
| That last sentence should give you an immediate idea of the
| scale, and that it's not going to be near the top. Half a
| million homes is tiny when we're talking about the entire
| globe. Thats like one medium-sized city, and just the heating,
| not any other energy use. It would be nice to capture that
| energy instead of wasting it, but there are far bigger fish to
| fry.
| htamas wrote:
| The Amazon forest is unique in many ways but most importantly
| because unlike other forests, it CANNOT grow back. The reason for
| this is that it is a leftover from when the planet was covered in
| rainforests because it was a lot warmer and wetter in the Eocene
| epoch. The forest is sustained by the rain it creates from
| itself. Once the trees are gone, the water will be gone. [1] We
| also have reasons to think this self-sustaining climate is going
| to collapse soon [2]
|
| So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the
| Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to
| purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies
| would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
|
| [1]https://youtu.be/hb3b-A6QAc8
|
| [2]https://www.nasa.gov/earth-and-climate/human-activities-
| are-...
|
| [3]https://www.rainforesttrust.org
| woah wrote:
| > The reason for this is that it is a leftover from when the
| planet was covered in rainforests because it was a lot warmer
| and wetter in the Eocene epoch.
|
| Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits,
| allowing the rainforest to grow back?
| XorNot wrote:
| Global warming will not reforest the planet with a
| substantially different biosphere to set the conditions for
| the Amazon to regrow and then persist.
|
| I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be
| things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial
| extinction of human population centers".
| TSiege wrote:
| Not necessarily, (or even according to climate models I've
| seen). The feedback the OP mentioned is because trees near
| the coasts catch rain that they then respirate back up and
| create an atmospheric river that moves inland and falls as
| rain thus continuing the cycle inward. This cycle is
| disrupted by deforestation and can stop during a state change
| where it turns into Savannah. Savannah's are much drier and
| don't cycle through water like the rain forest would. We'll
| also see abrupt changes in global climate which will lead to
| completely different global rainfall patterns than we know
| today. For example the Sahara desert will likely turn into
| grassland/forest (which has happened in the past). The
| rainforest being a holdover from the Eocene is news to me,
| but my understanding was that the climate of the Holocene
| that we are leaving had weather patterns that facilitated a
| positive feedback with the Amazon rainforest expansion. From
| my understanding a thriving Amazon also necessarily depended
| on a desert Sahara as they drive weather/nutrient patterns
| that helps the Amazon
| blueflow wrote:
| Eocene temperatures: 6-15 kelvin above current. Would take
| another century or two of coal-burning to reach.
| TSiege wrote:
| We are already at Eocene levels of CO2 it's just that our
| climate hasn't caught up yet
| ghm2199 wrote:
| Without the trees, more rain may erode the soil, the Amazon
| river might flood more easily causing more erosion.
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| How hard is it to plant it back?
| TSiege wrote:
| My understanding is very challenging for a few reasons. 1. A
| forest is not just a bunch of trees. It's most healthy and
| robust with mature trees and right animal life that supports
| and propagates them 2. The short term economic incentives
| towards rehabilitating the forest aren't there and are
| actively counter productive for soy and beef farming 3. It
| might already be past a tipping point as some parts of the
| forest are dying out and setting on fire through natural
| causes. The Amazon rainforest is NOT an ecosystem that is
| used to burning and it cannot recover from it since it
| destroys the ground cover and soils rainforest plants depend
| on to grow. Plants that like wet conditions need wet
| conditions to prosper, dusty charred clay ain't that
| lokrian wrote:
| A lot harder than just not burning it down in the first
| place.
| u8vov8 wrote:
| Can't wait until the human infestation is snuffed out and this
| beautiful planet can heal.
| r2ob wrote:
| the northern hemisphere burning coal for data centers, electric
| cars... but, yes, the problem is definitely the deindustrialized
| southern hemisphere
| TSiege wrote:
| Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about
| climate change and CO2 levels is that it's not the level so much
| as the rate. We're on the path to doubling (or have doubled if
| you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely
| any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels
| equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn't have ice
| caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.
|
| Every organism and ecosystem you've ever encountered in your life
| is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we've recreated the
| conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on
| much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this
| abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do
| nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history
| that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it's lead to a mass
| extinction. Yes it's been hotter before but that change happened
| gradually. It's like the joke about poison vs medicine, it's the
| dose that kills you.
| hammock wrote:
| What is the temporal resolution of the ice cores or whatever
| else is being used to measure when the last "hot house" periods
| were? Because today we are measuring CO2 with minute-level
| resolution. But I feel like an ice core might be a year at
| best, probably much worse. Which if I'm right would mean we
| really don't know _how fast or slow_ we entered into the last
| hot period (the rate)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| So it's pretty clear we need to adopt solar radiation
| management r&d asap. Because that is the only feasible way we
| will stabilize the heat balance in the next few decades.
| po1nt wrote:
| We had just that. But we accidentally banned it by banning
| sulfur in cargo ship fuel.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is
| terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine
| doing anything effective about this.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes
| away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad
| administration or one country's government. And there is a
| lot of progress happening.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Fires are part of a natural short-term Carbon cycle at around 5
| years on average. These events have little impact on global
| climate change, and highlights the absurdity of planting trees
| for carbon credits.
|
| Long-term carbon cycles last about 30000 years, and the majority
| of climate change is driven from burning old carbon sources deep
| in the earths crust.
|
| Fossil oil is incredibly useful stuff, and it is wasteful burning
| it as fuel. Something to consider between the floods, fires,
| droughts, and contrarians. lol =3
| TSiege wrote:
| The Amazon rainforest is not an ecosystem that burns. It's not
| adapted to it and it effectively destroys it permanently on a
| human time scale. It requires wet conditions that are fostered
| by trees and heavy organic forest litter like leaves. Even if a
| fire in the Amazon only burns the ground litter it will kill
| the that part of the forest because the trees have adapted to
| those leaves being there.
|
| The Amazon rainforest is close to a tipping point at which
| point it will almost entirely die off and convert to Savanah.
| And if you think fossil fuels are incredibly useful wait till
| you learn how useful a stable climate has been
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The Amazon rain forest creates its own local wet climate, and
| when that cycle is broken the place will be far drier than
| many would expect.
|
| Mismanagement is ultimately a self-correcting problem, as
| local extinction events are also natural. If I recall the
| rain-forest floor organic layer is rather thin when compared
| to other ecosystems.
|
| However, China economic interests in South America
| agriculture and resources is a complex issue. All world
| donations sent to help preserve the forest was negligible by
| comparison. =3
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