Let’s address these questions:
Are wildfires a significant source of carbon emissions? Why or why not?
What causes wildfires?
What causes global warming?
Are nature-based solutions a major strategy for global cooling, or are they--at best--an afterthought?
Why don’t media outlets report on nature-based solutions, i.e., revegetating the land and restoring water cycles?
Decide for yourself whether The Guardian is reporting responsibly here.
The Guardian reports: The threatening thaw: climate professor on heatwave risks to tipping point of permafrost | Environment | The Guardian
It’s not hard to make the case that reporting like this is shaped by powerful industries.
The article begins:
“Heatwaves and wildfires are not just scorching forests, they are adding to the tipping point risks in the world’s vast permafrost regions …”
Almost parenthetically, they attribute warming to wildfires. We are to understand wildfires as caused primarily by CO2, and that wildfires themselves are a major source of CO2 emissions.
We won’t talk about how wildfires are largely driven by drought, or that drought is a largely preventable problem, by revegetating our farms, forests and home landscapes.
A land-based approach to addressing climate change is nowhere on the radar. It’s all about greenhouse gases and possibly blocking the sun.
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Parenthetically, carbon emissions are important, but it’s not what you would focus on if you had--say--20 years to cool the climate. Nobody thinks anything is going to happen that fast. If you want to cool temperatures fast, you want to focus on regrowing (some of) the 50% of biomass that humans have destroyed in the last 10,000 years. The good news is that nature will do most of the work. It doesn’t mainly require funding. It mainly requires discipline and self-restraint.
Also parenthetically, I can prove to you that a 10% increase in tree cover would eliminate global warming. Ask me how.
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Now, back to the main topic …
Are wildfires a major source of carbon emissions?
Wildfires are a minor source of carbon emissions. Give the forest a few short years and it will reabsorb all the carbon that it emitted in the wildfire.
Logging, on the other hand, is a major source of carbon emissions not mentioned in the article or anywhere else in the corporate media with any regularity.
Why do we hear endlessly about wildfires--not logging--as a source of carbon emissions?
Add insult to that injury by considering that logging (called “thinning” and “fuel reduction”) is a major source of carbon emissions AND is falsely touted as a solution to wildfires.
How much carbon do wildfires emit?
Wildfires emit carbon representing 1-4% of the tree biomass, according to Chad Hanson in Smokescreen:
“The most comprehensive research reported that, even in large, intense fires, only about 1 to 4 percent of the biomass (and carbon) in trees was actually consumed, on average.2 Even in the highest-intensity fire patches, nearly all the tree carbon remained.”
He cites these studies:
Garrett Meigs et al., “Forest Fire Impacts on Carbon Uptake, Storage, and Emission: The Role of Burn Severity in the Eastern Cascades, Oregon,” Ecosystems 12 (2009): 1246–67;
John Campbell et al., “Pyrogenic Carbon Emission from a Large Wildfire in Oregon, United States,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 112 (2007): article G04014.
What are the solutions, according to the dominant narrative?
The Guardian article suggests that reducing carbon emissions is the only climate strategy worth talking about. They lament that geoengineering (blocking the sun) is not on the table.
The article asks and answers the question, “What can be done?”
“The only way to limit the thawing of millions of square kilometres is to reduce emissions rapidly. We need to act urgently.”
The article hints at the dominant narrative: That we are to rely primarily on technological solutions (solar, wind, EVs and geoengineering) and that natural solutions (e.g., ecosystem restoration, regenerative farming and reforestation) are--at best--an afterthought.
For solutions to climate change, don’t look down, look up
All of the problems and solutions are above us, in the atmosphere. None of the problems or solutions are on the ground, in how we treat our ecosystems, our forests and our farmland.
None of the solutions involve demonstrated projects that actually cool the earth, such as these reports from Andrew Millison from Africa and India:
How Refugees are Greening the Edge of the Sahara ... Senegal
How an Abandoned Village was Reborn in the Spanish Desert … the Mediterranean
5 Most Epic Earth Healing Projects! ... India
2 BILLION Acres of NEW Farmland ... Saltwater farming in Spain.
And it’s not just in the deserts of Africa or India.
This study (A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States - Barnes - 2024 - Earth’s Future - Wiley Online Library) shows how the Eastern United States is substantially cooler due to reforestation in the last 100 years:
“Ground- and satellite-based observations showed that EUS [Eastern United States] forests cool the land surface by 1–2°C annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest cooling effect during midday in the growing season, when cooling is 2–5°C.”
How do bare crop fields affect the climate?
This video (Hot Earth Is Not Cool) claims credibly that “bare agricultural soil can become significantly hotter—up to 5–10°C hotter—than asphalt, because porous soil acts as an insulator that traps heat at the surface (1:44-2:42).”
We have bare agricultural soil all over the world acting as a hotplate, not because that is the only way to farm or the best way to farm, but because--in the US and elsewhere--we subsidize bad farming at taxpayer expense.
The video (Hot Earth Is Not Cool) also demonstrates how the heat generated by bare fields destroys the soil biology and the soil organic matter and therefore the soil structure, creating erosion.
Estimates of worldwide erosion are in the tens of billions of tons per year. This seriously impacts cooling/heating patterns, but no mention of it in The Guardian article.
Nor will it mention that federal policy in the US subsidizes logging (“fuel reduction”) as a false solution to wildfires.
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Continuing this conversation:
If you would like to continue this conversation, here are two great opportunities, one of them free, the other one well-worth the price.
Next Friday, August 28, you are invited to this presentation and conversation:
https://harthagan.kit.com/cf98ecbe19
And then in September, you have an opportunity to interact with some of the world’s true experts on wildfire, including wildfire ecology and how to keep people safe from wildfires:
Wildfires Mythology vs. Reality – Fall 2026 - Biodiversity for a Livable Climate
https://bio4climate.org/course-offerings/wildfires-fact-fiction-fall-2026/
This course addresses what could be the primary threat to our climate and environment: Out of control logging, paid for by taxpayers, often with the claim that this logging (“fuel reduction”) will protect people from wildfires.
In truth, logging typically increases wildfire activity, and large-scale firefighting efforts distract us from what needs to be done, i.e., the much less sexy and less photogenic work of home hardening (fireproofing) and defensible space pruning.
These humble activities require legislation, regulation, enforcement and assistance for low-income homeowners. This is what actually keeps people safe, and yet it is not what gets funded.
I hope you will join us.
And by the way, the only way to understand what we should and shouldn’t do with wildfires is to understand forest ecology.
That’s why we have University of Montana ornithologist Richard L. Hutto and--a bird expert in his own right--Chad Hanson from the John Muir Project.
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