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

https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22541/essoar.175874118.83695562/v1

by bikenaga • 10 months ago

164 55 10 months ago

barbazoo• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

The climate change self reinforcing loop

gmuslera2• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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.

gmuslera2• 10 months ago

I’m not meaning that ocasional/limited forest fires can or not be healthy for forest. Just that the mentioned ones were all record breaking, and had a significant contribution to long lasting CO2 in the atmosphere, all of them were in similar orders than the 2024 fires.

And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.

bobbylarrybobby• 10 months ago

The 2019–2020 fires were so hot that eucalyptus trees actually struggled to reproduce. Trees with pyrophilic seeds that normally like a good scorching were instead totally consumed by the fires, and the soil got so hot that seeds already dropped and buried were burned to death. Trees that store energy in their wood (either underground or shielded by bark) got so hot that their normally safe wood burned.

Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.

Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.

woliveirajr2• 10 months ago

"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• 10 months ago

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.

woliveirajr2• 10 months ago

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).

xgkickt• 10 months ago

Recent collective decisions around the world suggest an impairment may occur at concentrations already exceeded.

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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.

TSiege8• 10 months ago

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

wat100002• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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".

TSiege8• 10 months ago

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

blueflow2• 10 months ago

Eocene temperatures: 6-15 kelvin above current. Would take another century or two of coal-burning to reach.

ghm2199• 10 months ago

Without the trees, more rain may erode the soil, the Amazon river might flood more easily causing more erosion.

HappyPanacea• 10 months ago

How hard is it to plant it back?

TSiege8• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

A lot harder than just not burning it down in the first place.

boccaff• 10 months ago

hard, and expensive, but doable as long as carbon credits are a thing: https://re.green/en/?force_locale=1

there are a few others in Brazil, like Biomas and Mombak

r2ob• 10 months ago

the northern hemisphere burning coal for data centers, electric cars... but, yes, the problem is definitely the deindustrialized southern hemisphere

TSiege8• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

We had just that. But we accidentally banned it by banning sulfur in cargo ship fuel.

jvanderbot• 10 months ago

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.

softwaredoug3• 10 months ago

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.

gsf_emergency_2• 10 months ago

The upping was most clearly down 1940-1950. When shipping and/or industry took a hit. Together with the sulfur emissions debacle, it's clear that most interventions (either radiative cooling or at-source capture) need to focus on shipping.

But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!

https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation...

Joel_Mckay2• 10 months ago

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

TSiege8• 10 months ago

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_Mckay2• 10 months ago

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

metalman• 10 months ago

As soon as we decarbonise we will see an imediate reduction in atmospheric CO² and global temperatures will follow quickly. Given how bad and likely some of the failure modes of climate change are, decarbonisation is our only reasonable way forward that guarantees our continued technological progress as a species, vs a dark age.

bmitc• 10 months ago

As soon as we decarbonise

And there it is, because when is this going to happen?

thehappypm• 10 months ago

My dad used to have a term for this.. “Saint Never’s Day”

blondie9x• 10 months ago

We need to halt the AI rollout and focus on using engineering talent to help make sure afforestation works and forests conditions are monitored carefully. We need to make sure that the forests we have can be sustained and the carbon we have emitted can be successfully sequestered back into the forest.

Most importantly we need to drastically change our consumption patterns to prevent emissions from continuing to rise.

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

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