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The role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024

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164 points bikenaga | 2 comments | 27 Sep 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Joel_Mckay ◴[27 Sep 25 22:03 UTC] No.45399712[source]▶
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

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1. TSiege ◴[27 Sep 25 22:11 UTC] No.45399781[source]▶
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

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2. Joel_Mckay ◴[27 Sep 25 22:49 UTC] No.45399997[source]▶
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