After looking over your responses to reviewer comments and the associated revisions you proposed I would encourage a re-submission. I agree with reviewers that, after some re-framing, the paper will make a valuable contribution to scientific understanding.

Reviewers agree that the narrative on impulse response functions as well as the paper's critiques about offline modeling approaches both need to be substantially altered. I would also tend to agree with reviewer comments raising concern about a lack a realism of a globally-punctuated large pulse of fire activity as a representation of the carbon-climate system response to the real fire process active in the earth system today. I see some value of such a model experiment to explore the fossil-vs-fire contrast, but wonder about how it translates to representing effects of a single, local fire event. It appears as though the proposed revisions will address some of these concerns, and encourage this direction.

I do sense that proposed revisions may not fully address reviewer concerns regarding how the paper interprets and discusses the climate effect of co2 emissions from fire as if it is fundamentally different from that of fossil fuel emissions. It seems we all agree that the radiative effect of CO2 molecules from the two sources does not differ but this is idea gets somewhat twisted in the wording adopted in the original paper and seems to linger in the responses to comments. Post-fire recovery of carbon stocks does indeed alter the net and cumulative effects of these two co2 emissions processes by introducing an additional carbon sink mechanism in the case of fire, which acts in addition to the land and ocean sinks that sequester CO2 emitted from fire or fossil fuel combustion sources alike. The fire process also alters land surface albedo and has an associated effect on climate, as you have simulated, however this effect seems to be interpreted as implicitly altering the effect of fire-derived CO2 emissions. This conflates two different process level effects that reviewers and I seem to agree should be kept separate. In my opinion these critiques go beyond issues of semantics and there may be need for further consideration to arrive at accurate and thoughtful wording in the revised paper.

As another point, I would suggest that emissions from decomposition of fire-killed biomass are a component of "fire emissions" being the result of the fire process albeit not from direct combustion, and I would encourage additional consideration of how that should be framed in the paper's revised version.

Follow-on reviews are split. We all agree that the fundamental science would make a useful and valid contribution and thus hope to see it through to publication. However, the main original concern remains. The interpretation and writing mischaracterize the key differences between the climate impacts of fire and fossil fuel CO2 emissions processes. Indeed, the effect of the emitted CO2 is not different between the two sources, but the effect of the two processes per unit of CO2 emitted does differ between the two sources for exactly the reasons the paper highlights: different atmospheric lifetimes because of a regrowth uptake in the case of fire, and their different effects on albedo, which has direct effects on earth's radiative fluxes and follow-on effects on the temperature-dependent elements of the carbon-climate system. Revisions did not fully address the need for a more accurate characterization of these differences. Referees provided some specific guidance on how to address this issue and a few other details. Authors are requested to follow this and earlier advice before the publication can be accepted, with revisions to the title and abstract and other elements in the main manuscript regarding the phrasing and interpretation of the "Key differences in the climate impacts of fossil-fuel versus fire derived CO2-emissions processes" (a candidate title?).