An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
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An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
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Re: An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
#2It seems like a deceptively easy way to solve global warming. Anyone see any holes in it?
Re: An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
#3It seems like a deceptively easy way to solve global warming. Anyone see any holes in it?
If the old tree sequestered carbon at the same rate as the new tree, replacing it doesn't accomplish anything. You'd have to focus on chopping down the least efficient trees.
Actually I don't know whether trees are optimal. Something like kudzu might have higher carbon/arable land throughput, alarming as that prospect might be.
Re: An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
#4Okay, I know I should go do some research instead of writing an HN comment, but let's face it, I'm not yet a perfect person, so I haven't done that research, so here goes the HN comment instead. To be clear, my goal here is to provoke someone into convincingly explaining how wrong I am.
What is the dilly with carbon sequestration? How can this make sense? Isn't this ideally mostly snake oil?
Once upon a time (say 800 years ago?) we had huge quantities of carbon trapped deep below the surface of the earth (coal, oil, maybe I'm missing something else), AND ALSO huge quantities of carbon fixed in solids on the surface of the earth (large forests). Now we've taken as much coal and oil as we could find, and put it all in the atmosphere. Plus we've also chopped down lots of trees, and much of what was chopped down was burned.
Let's just acknowledge that with 7 billion people needing food grown (not to mention living space), we as a race will not be replanting more forests than existed 800 (or even 100) years ago. At best, we'll replant some of them. So what happens to the carbon that's in the atmosphere from all the coal and all the oil? It won't be going into trees, will it?
Re: An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
#5It seems like a deceptively easy way to solve global warming. Anyone see any holes in it?
If the old tree sequestered carbon at the same rate as the new tree, replacing it doesn't accomplish anything. You'd have to focus on chopping down the least efficient trees. Actually I don't know whether trees are optimal. Something like kudzu might have higher carbon/arable land throughput, alarming as that prospect might be.
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Re: An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
#6Okay, I know I should go do some research instead of writing an HN comment, but let's face it, I'm not yet a perfect person, so I haven't done that research, so here goes the HN comment instead. To be clear, my goal here is to provoke someone into convincingly explaining how wrong I am. What is the dilly with carbon sequestration? How can this make sense? Isn't this ideally mostly snake oil? Once upon a time (say 800…
Let's just acknowledge that with 7 billion people needing food grown (not to mention living space), we as a race will not be replanting more forests than existed 800 (or even 100) years ago.
Growing forests and growing food is not mutually exclusive. See the organisation I link to at the bottom of the article. They plant trees as part of agro-forestry projects, which provides both trees and food for those who carry out the projects.
As far as living space for even 10 billion people... the trend is for people to move to cities, which almost by definition have a very high population density per unit area. Which is to say, the living space will take up a very small percentage of land.
Can we sequester all the carbon in the atmosphere that we release by replanting forests? I don't know. But I'm sure there have been studies done, with hard numbers on what kind of resources it would take.
Re: An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming
#7It seems like a deceptively easy way to solve global warming. Anyone see any holes in it?
If the old tree sequestered carbon at the same rate as the new tree, replacing it doesn't accomplish anything. You'd have to focus on chopping down the least efficient trees. Actually I don't know whether trees are optimal. Something like kudzu might have higher carbon/arable land throughput, alarming as that prospect might be.
The easiest thing to do would be to plant trees in areas that have been denuded, instead of expending energy and time (e.g. money) to cut down existing trees.
Assuming there is no more (cheap) space to plant trees, replacing mature trees still accomplishes something: you have a multi-ton tree with ~half the content being carbon. As long as you don't convert the carbon back to CO2, you can use it for economic gain and keep the stored carbon out of the atmosphere: use it to make houses, furniture, bury it so it eventually becomes topsoil (where the carbon stays in the soil), etc.
I'm sure there are people experimenting with various plants that have the highest rates of CO2 removal. Besides kudzu, there's bamboo, and probably other plants. In fact, it would be a neat software algorithm that calculates a group of plants that would remove the maximum amount of CO2 for the given area.