The timeline is of course different. But the timeline of a centuries-old tree is also different from the timeline of a fireplace fire
I'll pretend as if you really don't understand this and give the hint to calculate in geological epochs. The age of a tree is irrelevant. A few million years, on the other hand, are very relevant. Coal is a long-term storage of CO2 from a climatically completely different era. What you add from coal, you cannot really compensate, whereas what you add from wood you can compensate by letting biomass regrow simultaneously. You cannot compensate the CO2 from fossil fuels with plant growth. That is the meaning of the timeline.
The climate neutrality of a tree burned purely for optical reasons is and remains a myth.
Burning wood is not climate neutral. If you consider a small cycle and you produce the biomass per year that you remove and burn, the climate damage remains within narrow limits (provided this biomass would not have grown anyway) – of course, it would be better for the climate to simply avoid energy consumption (whether wood or otherwise) just for fun. But I definitely won’t become a fundamentalist about that.
In terms of calorific value, wood—especially wet wood—is worse than coal. Taking all effects together (there are many more), the advantage of wood over coal shrinks immensely.
Coal has great energetic properties – no question. But the mere fact that we are breaking down ancient CO2 storages and pumping it massively into the atmosphere disqualifies coal as an acceptable energy source – it doesn’t matter at all whether the energy density is better than that of wood – wet or dry. You happily mix levels here and thus hit the zeitgeist. There is no longer a good argument for coal if you focus on climate-friendly energy. Quite simply. For wood, it is different – although wood consumption also has problematic effects.