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On the positive side, and maybe surprisingly so given the flak that Twitter / X has correctly received as of late, the discussion thread below this tweet / post
by DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
On the positive side, and maybe surprisingly so given the flak that Twitter / X has correctly received as of late, the discussion thread below this tweet / post is rather diverse, faceted, and informative. There's your Climate Change DOUBTer alright, but there's also supplementary info on how you shouldn't throw burns of annual fuels (grasslands) into one bucket with wild fires in long-standing forests for several reasons (volume of biomass, CO2-neutral vs source of CO2). There's also two tweets / posts that call the author a well-known liar and payed propagandist. There's a real smorgasboard of additional data, and I actually find this tweet / post should be shown to people who don't understand the potential of and reason for having something like Twitter / Not-X.
- defrost 3y agoThe raw NASA data is that: Open savannah, grasslands, managed area burns are greatly reduced - yes. Wildfires in dense forest areas that have not seen massive fires for decades have increased. Total square area burned per annum has been trending downwards for a few years now, a bland 2D figure that doesn't capture the increase in intense burning of very 3D woodlands.
- DemocracyFTW2 3y agoTotally OT but this is the 2nd time I'm reading 'square area' and—shouldn't that be either 'square footage' or else 'area'? Area is already measured in power-of-two units, so why 'square area'? 'Cubic volume' anyone? 'Linear distance'?
- defrost 3y agoI'm leaving it for context but you're correct it should be something else - I commented too fast and came back for review. The intent is to convey the reality - the "fires decreasing" trope (in relation to climate change) is based on total global area - a flat measure. It's true the total area of sparse relatively open grass fires has decreased. As a number it doesn't reflect the increase in volume of material being burned in dense older growth heavily wooded areas seen in California, Australia, Canada, etc. At some point NASA (or anyone else that wants to pull the raw data) might look at removing periodic annual burn from their fire data sets and look at the differential on "new area burned" that hasn't seen fire for a decade (perhaps).