131–140 of 180 posts
Far too little, far too late. It may have helped fix climate if we had stopped deforestation in 1992 after the first UN climate summit, used only sustainable wood from that moment on and cleared no mature forest for pasture or palm oil. Oh, and started migrating to zero carbon economies when it would have taken a percent or two reduction a year, rather than the throw ourselves off a reduction cliff required now. Than…
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I thought about this and had an idea that I don't know if it can work, but I couldn't find any major problem with it. Specifically, what if we start burying dead trees or those who reached peak mass in places where conditions will transform them into coal in 100(00..) of years? That way carbon is captured and stored until we burn them again.
If deforestation is still occurring (net result that we are cutting down more trees than we are planting) then cutting down more trees doesn't solve the problem. We do in fact need people to just start planting trees.
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FTR, many tree species can live for hundreds of thousands of years.
"FTR, many tree species can live for hundreds of thousands of years." The oldest known tree in the world is 5000 years old. No individual trees are known to live hundreds of thousands of years. There are clonal trees, like aspens, that could live as a colony for hundreds of thousands of years, but that's not quite the same thing (and our oldest verified example is only 80k years old). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li…
$3T each year (4% of world GDP) for 20 years still sounds like a lot.
That only "fixes" climate change as long as the trees continue growing and do not die. When dead, trees release their CO_2 that they've sequestered back into the atmosphere due to decomposition. Therefore, assuming those forests stay around, you've only delayed the problem by sinking a fixed amount of CO_2 away into the living biomass of the trees. The only way to make that a permanent sink would be to biochar the tr…
I thought about this and had an idea that I don't know if it can work, but I couldn't find any major problem with it. Specifically, what if we start burying dead trees or those who reached peak mass in places where conditions will transform them into coal in 100(00..) of years? That way carbon is captured and stored until we burn them again.
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If soil continues to accumulate in a healthy form, as it did on the Great Plains over millennia of grazing by bison herds, then yes. Old growth forests often grow on rocky land, and have little long-term depth accumulation. Source: hiking old growth forests over decades, and being a farmer.
Literally survivor bias. The old growth forests that survived loggers were the ones they couldn’t get to for a profit. Those will be in or near geographic barriers like swamps or rocky terrain.
I've rarely hiked in harvested and replanted forests; these are boring. I did most of my hiking in central/northern BC and Alberta, Canada. These are some of the largest tracts of old-growth timber in the world.
The many old-growth forests I've hiked (sample: >1,000km, mostly dominated by conifers), with last burn times ranging from decades to centuries, have rarely boasted deep soil levels. This hypothesis is supported by existing research: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225314103_Soil_Carb...
Old-growth coniferous forests are great -- but they're not a big "carbon store".
If you want land-use based carbon storage, I'd recommend investigating where the continent-wide, massive, deep, healthy carbon-rich store of topsoil and humous came from -- grazed grasslands and scrub brush.
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That's basically, well, not true. When trees break down they contribute to soil organic matter. Approx 58% of SOM is carbon (SOC) making soil one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_organic_matter
There is an upper limit to the amount of CO2 that soil absorbs - it's clearly not infinite. There is an equilibrium in the Earth's natural Carbon cycle. Once a soil matures (a process that might take many decades), the amount of CO2 retained vs emitted reaches equilibrium.
Does that series cover eliminating Rupert Murdoch? I know that this is taboo to discuss, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head.
> There is no one single clever solution to the climate problem. There is. Just stop emitting greenhouse gases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064741.