Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dismalaf 574 days ago
15 million hectares burned in Canada alone in 2023. We average over 2 million hectares of burnt forest per year.

Some quick maths. 15 million ha is 150,000km2. Tsar Bomba blast area was 16km2. It would take over 9000 Tsar Bombas to burn as much forest as only Canada's 2023 forest fire season.

Maybe provide some source for your assertion...
1 comments
JumpCrisscross 574 days ago
> Tsar Bomba blast area was 16km2. It would take over 9000 Tsar Bombas to burn as much forest as only Canada's 2023 forest fire season

The fire burns beyond the blast area.

Also, urban fires produce

> Maybe provide some source for your assertion

Sure [1][2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219184/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00794-y

link
dismalaf 574 days ago
Link 1 is talking about blast effect which is a different topic altogether, link 2 is paywalled and is a magazine, not anything scholarly.
link
JumpCrisscross 574 days ago
> Link 1 is talking about blast effect which is a different topic altogether

One, no—it’s about fire effects. It’s in the title.

Two, you literally cited blast area to estimate burn area.

Three, do you need a source for fires being able to spread? If I toss a match into a dry forest, is the area of the matchhead a predictor of particulate volume?

link
dismalaf 574 days ago
What I'm saying is... Tens of millions of hectares burn all the time, far more than all the nukes on earth would likely set on fire (since most of the populous cities on earth are on the coasts, and there's roads, farms and prairies surrounding most, not forests), so this idea that nukes would start forest fires that launch soot into the air that end civilization is pure fiction. There's zero basis for it, tens of millions of hectares worldwide burn yearly and it's barely noticeable if you don't live next to it.
link
JumpCrisscross 574 days ago
> Tens of millions of hectares burn all the time, far more than all the nukes on earth would likely set on fire

Totally wrong. You’re still comparing forest and urban fires, and assuming you’ve calculated a burn mass from blast effects alone.

> There's zero basis for it

So you still haven’t read the first source. The one with “superfires” in the title.

link
sabbaticaldev 574 days ago
comparing forest burning with a city of millions of people burning is such a nonsense, it is funny how you keep doubling down
link