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Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

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Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#71

Post by justtopost »

airstrike wrote: post #69
mirimir wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture. Also, they're fast growing, so they capture carbon quickly, and store it for a long time. Plus the fact that, if they're harvested, the wood is relatively rot-resistant. So carbon could be stored over even longer periods, if the wood were used for ~permanent structures. Still, there's something iron…

So if I'm understanding this correctly, we're essentially terraforming Earth...

We have been clear cutting for centuries, we have to learn sooner or later. You know, for when we leave this world polluted to terraform the new one. /s?

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#73

Post by jniedrauer »

airstrike wrote: post #69
mirimir wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture. Also, they're fast growing, so they capture carbon quickly, and store it for a long time. Plus the fact that, if they're harvested, the wood is relatively rot-resistant. So carbon could be stored over even longer periods, if the wood were used for ~permanent structures. Still, there's something iron…

So if I'm understanding this correctly, we're essentially terraforming Earth...

The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming."

We could add nuclear weapons to that list, if we ever decided to use them.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#74

Post by samstave »

justtopost wrote: post #71
airstrike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, we're essentially terraforming Earth...

We have been clear cutting for centuries, we have to learn sooner or later. You know, for when we leave this world polluted to terraform the new one. /s?

I deeply hope that the redwoods of marin county can be restored. The redwood forests of marin are still beautiful, but humans decimated them over the lasr 200 years, and we cant really understand just how magnificent those trees were in the past - trunk diameters of 30+ feet were common in the past.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#75

Post by drieddust »

Wintamute wrote: post #47
drieddust wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not make it any better for us. Previous generations bought good and bad both and that's the legacy we have to live with or die. We just don't know yet.

My point was its pointless and borderline disrespectful to project modern standards of ethics and concepts of "greed" onto people of the past that had different norms and extreme hardships to contend with. By all means we should discuss what to do about our present predicament and plan for a better future, but we can do that without denigrating those that came before us for failing against an impossible modern standa…

You have got it backwards. These trees were not felled by individuals who were toiling to make a better tomorrow. On the contrary, greedy industralist made them toil and die for their profit. When Queen Victoria and her chronies were filling their pockets by looting the world, London was still a slum. Henry Mayhew documented this in his publication London Labour and the London Poor[1].

Things like 8 hour work week, health benefits etc were achived in blood.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_P...

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#76

Post by kaybe »

jniedrauer wrote: post #73
airstrike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, we're essentially terraforming Earth...

The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming." We could add nuclear weapons to that list, if we ever decided to use them.

No, the changes in land use had significant and detectable impacts far before that. The albedo change between forest and fields alone is quite large.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#77

Post by chris_va »

matco11 wrote: post #28

“Cloning” here seems the wrong (click-batey) choice of words. They have horticulturally propagated redwood trees - that’s a relatively simple technique, commonly used by your average gardener. What’s special here is that they found which conditions maximize the yield of the redwoods propagation and they are planting colonies of the new trees in areas around the world that offer particularly good/promising climatic co…

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture.

Depends on how you define meaningful.

Worldwide, the total sequestered carbon in plants is equal to about 10 years of human emissions (~45yrs if we are talking net emissions).

If you increase the biomass by a percent or two, you basically buy yourself a few months emissions. Eventually that carbon is going to end up back in the atmosphere, too, but that at least is time shifted out by a few hundred years.

(source: I'm part of a Climate&Energy research group, though this particular subtopic is not my specialty)

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#78

Post by rsync »

matco11 wrote: post #28

“Cloning” here seems the wrong (click-batey) choice of words. They have horticulturally propagated redwood trees - that’s a relatively simple technique, commonly used by your average gardener. What’s special here is that they found which conditions maximize the yield of the redwoods propagation and they are planting colonies of the new trees in areas around the world that offer particularly good/promising climatic co…

"As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture."

Maybe ...

I live on a ranch where redwoods grow and I was interested in reforesting some of it in an attempt to offset the carbon emissions of my family, etc.

My very rough back of the envelope calculations suggested that planting 40 coast redwoods would offset the embedded carbon (carbon cost to manufacture) of a pickup truck and its ten year expected fuel use. I chose a pickup truck as a sort-of-worst-case-scenario.

This is workable and we've already started this project, but of course we have three cars so the number is 120 trees for a single family.

I'm not sure how well that scales. Not everyone lives in redwood climate and not everyone has ~20 acres of leftover scrub woods to reforest.[1]

ALSO, and this has been a challenge, those back of the envelope calculations do not take into account the carbon cost of creating the trees in the first place. It seems like a rounding error, and I hope it is, but planting 40 trees involves a bunch of driving around and some earth moving and usually a chainsaw has to come out at some point and then we're buying supplies from a hardware store which were driven there by a truck .... and on and on and on ...

[1] This land was originally redwoods and douglas firs but was denuded of all large trees sometime before WW2 and is now a scrubby mess of bay trees and dying (SOD) oak trees. Planting redwoods is a return to the original landscape...

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#79

Post by rsync »

Dowwie wrote: post #35

Fun fact: Metasequoia are in New York City and New Jersey. Around the five boroughs are 100 year old, towering Dawn redwood! I have even seen full grown trees in Cresskill, NJ. Recently, a two year art exhibit in Brooklyn [1] concluded that used more than four thousand live, baby Metasequoia. All of the trees have since found new homes, but I am unsure where the recipients are. I now have a baby Metasequoia growing i…

Thank you. Another surprising redwood tree is in the "Rieterpark" in central Zurich.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#80

Post by sgc »

simplecomplex wrote: post #15
jmspring wrote: post #13

Sadly a lot of our forest eco-systems, especially in CA are at risk. Drought, poor forest management, bark beattle, over forestation, etc. Were forestry practices 100+ years ago good, not really - a lot of these ancient trees spawned eco-systems in themselves (evident in the Headwaters groves). That said, modern "do nothing" approaches pushed by environmental "concerns" are the exact opposite of the over-logging. Sad…

Are any of those issues comparable to cutting all the trees down? Fires and beatles and dead wood are natural.

Japanese beetles are not native to the area and wipe out hundreds of thousands of acres at a time. Then it is a tinder box.
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