‘Not always’. Sure, trees are enduring, nice to look at, make things cooler and might help with carbon dioxide. Let’s plant them anyway.
Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
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Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#32The biosphere is essentially in steady-state on human lifetime scales. Estimates are that 100 gigatons of carbon are released to the atmosphere as CO2 by fungal and animal and bacterial action on plant material, and an equivalent 100 gigatons are taken up by photosynthesis. There were periods in the geological timeline where photosynthesis >> respiration and the result was massive accumulation of coal and oil deposit…
While it's a good point that plant sequestration of CO2 is slow compared to digging up coal, oil or methane and burning it, it's not meaningless.
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it possible to vent the CO2 into space?
Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that. Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is…
I don't think this is a great explanation. I could build a machine that would get rid of 200 red balls (out of a million) in 30 minutes. It's a linearly parallelizable problem, so with enough machines, I could make it go as quickly as you'd like.
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#34https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon
'Oceans take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis by plant-like organisms (phytoplankton), as well as by simple chemistry: carbon dioxide dissolves in water. It reacts with seawater, creating carbonic acid. Carbonic acid releases hydrogen ions, which combine with carbonate in seawater to form bicarbonate, a form of carbon that doesn’t escape the ocean easily'.
We need to be doing more to enhance the performance of the half of the planet that is covered by water and which is the primary source of carbon dioxide processing imo
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#35Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you, Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could have huge and unknown consequences for marine…
"storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest"
In 2020 "the Lionshead Fire [...] have almost completely engulfed the largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide in the state [of Oregon]". Turns out that Nature may also decide to destroy a forest. Biomass comes and goes. As you stated, geostorage is the only solution that makes sense from a first principles perspective.
https://grist.org/climate/this-oregon-forest-was-supposed-to...
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it possible to vent the CO2 into space?
Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that. Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is…
On that gene editing...
(background on C3 vs C4 plants) https://ripe.illinois.edu/blog/difference-between-c3-and-c4-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3075750/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.71539...
https://innovativegenomics.org/projects/improving-photosynth...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-w...
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#37This looks like an article that wanted to give a particular outcome (that trees are not enough) and backed into that out with a study that “proved” it. However I can’t find a link to the actual study in the article. Has there ever been a study that linked the increase in CO2 to the increased logging efforts in places around the world?
It's linked at the bottom: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16351
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that. Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is…
I don't think this is a great explanation. I could build a machine that would get rid of 200 red balls (out of a million) in 30 minutes. It's a linearly parallelizable problem, so with enough machines, I could make it go as quickly as you'd like.
As you are doing this, you need energy. You either need it from a source that doesn't generate red balls and thus is sufficiently dense energy to be useful, or leave the density of red balls after you've identified 200 to be remove lower than it was before you started.
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#39I recently looked up the difference in CO2 emissions between burning 1kg wood vs 1kg petrol. Surprisingly, the values are relatively close:
Burning 1kg wood releases 1.65 - 1.8 kg of CO2. [0]
Burning 1kg of crude oil releases 3.16 kg of CO2. [1][2]
I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much higher! To me, this suggests that a very naïve approach of growing trees and storing them in the places where we obtained the oil would be a hypothetically feasible way of significantly reducing the CO2 content in the air. And that is before the wood has been turned into charcoal etc. What am I missing?
[0] https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-sto... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca... [2] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Barrels_of_oil_equiv...
Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide
#40So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic carbon, enhanced soil nitrogen availability, etc.
The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out."
One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Anyhow, great research paper, crappy summary.