Is there a morbid excitement among ecologists that climate change is no longer hypothetical?
It’s scary that we’re entering what was once the future. I think there’s a fear now that we’ll lose a vision for the past. Living in your neighborhood, you forget that it used to be something very different because it changed so gradually. We’re getting further and further away from the world before all these climate change projections. What sort of relationship or feedback is there between fire and climate? It depends on where the fire is. In boreal systems [forests just below the Arctic circle], you end up burning the carbon dioxide. But then you have regeneration through photosynthesis taking up all the carbon. You move into places where the land use changes—specifically the Amazon, where you’re taking forests that don’t burn very often and you burn that biomass. In that case, you’re not regenerating any of that structure, so you end up with more of a net emission of carbon into the atmosphere. The effect is largely unaccounted for in any of the climate modeling that goes on. It’s a
