You're mixing some stuff up here. Land area "burned" isn't literally deforested, don't be ridiculous. You're right and that doesn't change the basic point. Tha

You're mixing some stuff up here. Land area "burned" isn't literally deforested, don't be ridiculous. You're right and that doesn't change the basic point. That is: California and the West broad has an excess of trees and tree-density so keeping a given forest as a carbon sink is ridiculous and impractical. In fact in a healthy forest, total carbon uptake significantly increases after a fire (as younger, faster-growing plants rush into the voids left by the removed cover). California has insufficient wetland and grassland. Some of a given burned forest will become that. The ultimate, stable California ecology has a substantially lower density of trees than the existing ecology and so the fires that happen in that context tend to just clear the existing brush, leaving the trees, etc. And still, doesn't change the basic point. Edit: Reading my original post, I can't see where I claim fires "deforest" a region. Fires do lower tree density, how could they do otherwise? Edit again: there's a limit to how much carbon a given landscape can absorb, determined by its ecology broadly speaking. Through fire suppression, California and the West have managed to go past that limit. It's biting us, I'm wearing two masks outside and this is the present reality. How hard is that grasp?