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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim that they would be even more effective because they can grow incredibly fast.

I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really solve the problem. We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuri…

> I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber.

This is why hempcrete is ideal. But hemp, by comparison, doesn't result in a root-bound tree farm for wind break and erosion control; hemp can be left down to return nutrients to the soil or for soil remediation as it's a very absorbent plant (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil and into the plant)

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe we could use a massively scalable set of machinery that uses sunlight to produce energy and sequester carbon. Seems like the machinery could be nature inspired… or maybe just natural. Plants could just be the answer we are all reaching for here.

You want to find an answer? I believe the solution (if any is to be found) is going to be a combination of dozens of different actions. So grow plants and build machines and dump iron in the ocean and cut down on oil use and move people away from coasts around the equator and come up with some type of global basic income and build nuclear reactors and windmills and geothermal and move to electric cars and redesign cities to reduce the need for cars and come up with a plan for colonizing the stars and embrace GMOs to reduced the impact of agriculture and encourage people to eat less meat and so on.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#93

The 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.

It's not meaningless, but it's an example of humanity chasing its own tail.

Photosynthesis is not the most efficient process in the equation by far. It is competing against two things; a system that can use lots of oxygen as an oxidizer to release energy, and titanic stockpiles of hydrocarbons waiting to be burned. An animal can either consume plants after they've done their job or consume other animals, and use animated lungs to consume a constant stream of oxygen that can be used to oxidize the energy substrate. Plants can only use photosynthesis, which is much less efficient of an energy transfer than respiration (creating molecules instead of breaking them apart). Because plants are stuck with photosynthesis as a food source, they are limited by its speed. Plants still need oxygen to respirate the food they create for themselves, but they cannot afford lungs and a cardiovascular system to utilize more oxygen. If they could, then they might as well be eating other organisms that already performed the hard work for them.

What I'm saying is that humans, being respiration animals, are always competing with plants, and do even more so when they release carbon from reserves in the earth. The ability of artificially propagated plants to compete against that system is minuscule. It can only compete with surface area, and for humans to be able to even make a dent in atmospheric CO2 by planting trees would mean planting way more trees than is likely worth their own expended energy. In such a scenario, the tables are flipped, and the animals (humans) are competing against the inefficiency of photosynthesis and must use enough energy to compensate. That is neither a proven strategy nor sustainable. Just as body fat can in theory be lost entirely through exercise, it is orders of magnitude more efficient to simply not introduce more energy into the system (i.e. consume less food, and eat food with fewer if any deleterious side effects).

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim that they would be even more effective because they can grow incredibly fast.

I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really solve the problem. We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuri…

I think the idea with kelp would be to harvest it and use it for soil creation, but again this is from vague memory of an informal conversation with some biologists

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giant Sequoias need forrest fires to reproduce. Their pine cones won't open without sufficient heat. This makes sense, if you consider the dense forests these trees create.

Older / larger redwoods can survive intense fires. Their bark is fire resistant.

That is less and less true. The intensity of the fires has changed due to the recent history of excessive fire suppression and the resulting fuel accumulation.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/wildfires-kill-unprecedente...

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#96
post #86

My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather he's given countless times. The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series…

I bet your friend would be into mass "Earl comes by every year with a few buckets of native seed"- no closure, and definitely not sexy

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we could use a massively scalable set of machinery that uses sunlight to produce energy and sequester carbon. Seems like the machinery could be nature inspired… or maybe just natural. Plants could just be the answer we are all reaching for here.

You want to find an answer? I believe the solution (if any is to be found) is going to be a combination of dozens of different actions. So grow plants and build machines and dump iron in the ocean and cut down on oil use and move people away from coasts around the equator and come up with some type of global basic income and build nuclear reactors and windmills and geothermal and move to electric cars and redesign ci…

One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Kurzgesagt and they recently (looking at date, well, last year - still recent in the scale of things) had a video on global warming - Can YOU Fix Climate Change? https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc

There's also

Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change? - https://youtu.be/EhAemz1v7dQ

Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated. - https://youtu.be/wbR-5mHI6bo

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#98
post #88
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil - but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more available'.

Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil. Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through…

Thanks for that explanation. I assume by "free living" you mean they can exist by themselves in soil apart from plant roots (or at least for part of their lifecycle)? I'm more familiar with the ones that are symbiotic with plants, especially the ones for woody plants (Frankia, etc), which I think are largely of a different type than the ones that live on cover crop plants like clover.

Soil and decomposing organic matter aren't necessarily oxygen poor environments, and in ideal conditions they aren't at all. Depending on factors like soil porosity, and rate/frequency of precipitation, there can actually be quite a lot of gas mechanically exchanged between the soil and the atmosphere (water fills up soil pore spaces and pushes out air, then water drains out of soil pore spaces, pulling air back in). Plant roots can respire atmospheric gases into soil as well. Part of the reason why compacted (ie minimal pore space) soil is harder to grow in than the same soil made friable, is because the lack of porosity causes the soil to go anaerobic, which is inhospitable to a lot of beneficial soil microorganisms.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#99
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in the meantime.

Good point! I wonder if a 1000 year old tree would gather more or less carbon over it's lifetime than 20 separate 50 year old trees?

I recall reading somewhere that trees follow a sigmoid growth pattern, reaching a maturity where they no longer create a whole lot more biomass. I think the 20 separate trees would do better.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#100
I don't understand people who like to point out the planting trees is not always as green as people think it is. Planting trees is always good in my book. We can plant trees and do the better thing.

"quitting smoking is not always an effective way of avoiding cancer"

"walking in nature is not always effective in preventing heart attack"

"quitting gambling is not always an effective way of avoiding bankruptcy"

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