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Massive Forest Fires Could Be Cooling the Earth
Massive Forest Fires Could Be Cooling the Earth
Wait, what? A forest fire may not sound like a great way to cool off, but Earth's climate is a complicated beast. It turns out that some of the world's fiercest blazes are actually lowering our planet's temperatures. The remote boreal forests that blanket massive swaths of Canada and Alaska aren't just lush and gorgeous.
Wild fires are showing up in strange places like the southeastern U.S. Are wildfires natures answer to global warming? Should we just stop trying to put out the fires and let them burn? We all know that the matrixes of the climate are complex and intricate, but we have inadvertantly created more problems trying to fix the planet from our destruction because we do not have clue one when it comes to the earth and our interactions with the environment. Case and point: Cutting down on CFCs to fix the ozone layer, we replaced them with HFCs which in turn have the ability to trap infrared energy on our planet more that CO2 emmisions by 3770 times. (https://www.britannica.com/science/hydrofluorocarbon)




That title is so annoying. Some forest fires may have a cooling effect but that doesn't mean that they are cooling the earth. Plus, there is a big difference between natural forest fires which don't unlock surplus carbon vs forest fires in the Amazon/Indonesia which unlock carbon that wasn't meant to be in the atmosphere.