TIL that this year's forest fires in Siberia have burned an area of 63,200 square miles, nearly the size of the state of Washington.
We're not hearing about it because it's in thinly populated areas in the very far north, but carbon going into the atmosphere is carbon going into the atmosphere, no matter where it happens.
The vastness and inaccessibility of Siberia makes these fires difficult to fight, and the lack of nearby towns leads Russia to minimize its resources devoted to the problem.
Obviously fixing the emission imbalances that have led to climate change is the right long term solution, but I wonder what medium-term solutions for this look like to prevent it from happening every year while we work on the long term solution. What if they clearcut a grid of firebreaks across all of Siberia in 1-square-mile increments?
The Russian government has no incentive to care about climate change at all because a warming climate will make huge parts of their country agriculturally fertile. Russia would become a breadbasket.
And, right now albedo offset changes make it so that reforestation in boreal areas changes the albedo in a way that results in net warming: the reverse is therefore true (in theory): DEforesting boreal areas should lead to albedo changes that result in net cooling.
One of the issues in reforestation is that above a certain latitude (roughly the line of the US/Canadian border, which also happens to be where most of Russian is north of; this is referred to as boreal regions), forests have lower albedo such that turning a non-forested area to a forested area will lower the albedo enough that the cooling from enhanced CO2 sequestration is more than offset by the warming due to the change in albedo.
The "logical" upshot of that ("if X causes warming, then we should do not-X") would be then that you should deforest these regions, i.e. raising the albedo and thus induce cooling effects that more than offset the warming effects from the re-release of the carbon from those trees into the atmosphere.
