> That is the problem. You are not including time as a variable in your mental model of how this works.
People are absolutely including time as a variable here. What they're not doing is pretending that time is the only variable.
I can't tell what you're arguing here at this point. This thread seemed to start with you disagreeing (in a very long winded and winding way) that trees are a materially different sort of contribution to the carbon cycle than fossil fuels, but that's precisely where time matters. Every subthread you go on a different tangent with the only unifying theme being "fuck it we can't do anything even if we try" which, sure, that may be true but it has little to do with whether there's a short term carbon cycle.
50 year old trees can only contribute carbon back from 50 years ago or less. They slowly absorb and, given the total biomass of the planet vs the amount burning at any given time, also slowly release it back.
Short of burning down every tree on a continent and preventing any regrowth (probably an even harder project than carbon capture tbh), there are limits to how much carbon surface cycles can add to the system.
Even taking a pessimistic view of how long it takes for a burned tree to have its released carbon captured, the calculus we're faced with (if we insist on burning anything at all at scale anyways) is:
Burn trees: add carbon to the atmosphere that will be reabsorbed by a roughly equivalent amount of plant matter in a century, or
Burn fossil fuels: add carbon to the atmosphere that requires a net increase in planetary plant matter to be reabsorbed.
One of these is clearly better than the other by quite a bit, and saying otherwise is verging on nihilism.
Also you keep saying that no system is 100% efficient but planetary atmospheres are about as close to one as you can possibly get. If the carbon cycle weren't extremely efficient, earth would be like Venus by now.
You are arguing against things I am not saying at all. Not sure how to respond. Please don't misrepresent my position. If you don't understand it, because, perhaps, I am not being clear enough, ask and I'll try to clarify.
We don't "insist" on burning anything. For lack of a better explanation, it just happens.
In the last week in Southern California we probably had somewhere in the order of 20,000 acres burn down. That CO2 isn't going to be recaptured by trees for, more than likely, centuries. Those 20,000 acres are not going to be repopulated instantly. A fully grown tree can capture about 25 kg of CO2 per year (species dependent). Yet, that takes time. A seedling can't capture 25 kg per year. The capture rate is likely closer to a sigmoid curve, likely without a flat top. That sigmoid curve for CO2 capture does not start until way after the 20,000 acres burned down. It is probably fair to say the capture rate is insignificant for a year or more. Add this to the fact that atmospheric CO2 hangs in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and you have a cycle that isn't as squeaky-clean as these arguments about trees make it sound.
In CA, annual fires produce the equivalent of 1/4 of the CO2 produced by the entire transportation sector.
We are in a drought. What do you think the regrowth rate might be here? I have no clue. Yet, I think I can guess: Not great.
We engage on all of this hand-wavy-ness about trees being great and ignore all other variables. Time seems to be the most egregious one. Most discussions seem to assume a seed is capturing carbon at 25 kg/year. That's the only figure I see quoted when searching for this kind of information. Actually, no, I've seen numbers all the way up to 40 kg/year. This is preposterous. Once you get past that, then there's rate of growth and the realities of achieving a rate of growth (for example, burn down 20,000 acres in CA and you have no water to encourage rapid growth).
Of course, there's more.
We now know, with a great deal of certainty, that we have very large forests that are actually net CO2 contributors, rather than what we used to believe. These are important revelations that nobody is talking about, because, if you dare mention these things you are labeled as a nut. Well, it is a matter of well documented science. Not sure what else to say.
What everyone is ignoring in the general climate change debate is that we cannot materially improve the natural rate of change of atmospheric CO2 reduction, which sits at about 1 ppm per thousand years. Any purported solution out there quickly dissolves into nothing once having to pass the test of physics at a planetary scale. And yet here we are, pretending that we can accelerate this process by many thousands of times with nothing to support the assertion.
The baseline from which every single proposal has to be measured is something that is both extreme and known to be true. We have this data from atmospheric ice core samples going back 800K years. What it says is very simple: We know what would happen if humanity did not exist at all.
The best we can do for the planet is leave. Talk about carbon neutral! We cannot do any better than that without requiring insane amount of energy and materials, which, of course, likely means we add CO2 to the atmosphere, which defeats the entire purpose.
The ice core data shows us exactly what would happen if we were not here. That rate of change is in the order of 1 ppm per 1000 years. Any purported solution has to explain how it is better than us just leaving the planet. If it can't, it isn't a solution at all, it's a fantasy. Solar panels are not going to do it and trees sure as heck can't. We are living in a fantasy and everyone is buying it without question.
This is not to say that we should not clean-up our act. There are excellent reasons to do that. We just need to stop this madness about saving the planet. We can't.
People are absolutely including time as a variable here. What they're not doing is pretending that time is the only variable.
I can't tell what you're arguing here at this point. This thread seemed to start with you disagreeing (in a very long winded and winding way) that trees are a materially different sort of contribution to the carbon cycle than fossil fuels, but that's precisely where time matters. Every subthread you go on a different tangent with the only unifying theme being "fuck it we can't do anything even if we try" which, sure, that may be true but it has little to do with whether there's a short term carbon cycle.
50 year old trees can only contribute carbon back from 50 years ago or less. They slowly absorb and, given the total biomass of the planet vs the amount burning at any given time, also slowly release it back.
Short of burning down every tree on a continent and preventing any regrowth (probably an even harder project than carbon capture tbh), there are limits to how much carbon surface cycles can add to the system.
Even taking a pessimistic view of how long it takes for a burned tree to have its released carbon captured, the calculus we're faced with (if we insist on burning anything at all at scale anyways) is:
Burn trees: add carbon to the atmosphere that will be reabsorbed by a roughly equivalent amount of plant matter in a century, or
Burn fossil fuels: add carbon to the atmosphere that requires a net increase in planetary plant matter to be reabsorbed.
One of these is clearly better than the other by quite a bit, and saying otherwise is verging on nihilism.
Also you keep saying that no system is 100% efficient but planetary atmospheres are about as close to one as you can possibly get. If the carbon cycle weren't extremely efficient, earth would be like Venus by now.