121–130 of 147 posts
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Well, the oldest Sequoia in the UK are 160 years old. The article says they keep up their rapid growth throughout their potential lifespan of 3,000 years - so they are babies.
General Sherman is 2200 years old for example. Which is pretty incredible
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Or about one air passenger trip to Europe. ("just plant trees" is not a viable solution to climate change unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity)
> unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity and what, then? When plants die, their matter is decomposed by fungi and all their carbon is released back into the atmosphere (unless the dead plant matter is buried). The act of planting trees, in itself, is carbon neutral. Not good, not bad, just irrelevant to the presence of carbon: the carbon is still in the cycle of life within the biosp…
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> The act of planting trees, in itself, is carbon neutral. Not good, not bad, just irrelevant to the presence of carbon: the carbon is still in the cycle of life within the biosphere. Isn't this a little like saying that humans in a confined space don't actually use up any of the oxygen, because it's still technically present in the CO2 they exhale? > For example, by cutting trees and burying their wood in sealed min…
You seem to be assuming that the carbon will stay locked in the construction materials. But I doubt that it will, what will happen to it after the building is destroyed ? Either it will have been by fire, or as waste, will likely be back in the atmosphere after wood-eating life is done with it. I wonder how feasible it would be to put wood (from particularly dense species ?) on the bottom of the expanding anoxic ocea…
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The wood is somewhat brittle. When they felled lots of them in the US 100 years ago, the loggers found to their great disappointment little use for the resulting wood, and turned most of the giant trees into... matchsticks, and that sort of scrap thing. Possibly the trees can be harvested more delicately today, though.
Fiddlesticks. Redwoods are a fabulous building material. If you’re in the Bay Area, go check your houses joists. Quite a number of old houses here are made of redwood. AFAIK it makes a great wood for joists and structures because it it’s resistant to pests. My nearly 100 year old house’s joists are in fantastic condition. Big, beautiful beams, nearly completely clear and free from knots. The reason it’s rarely used t…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691875
Giant Redwood is not good for construction apparently
Coast Redwood on the other hand is very good.
I wanted to point out to anyone interested that European Redwood is unrelated totally. It is available in building supplies as a joinery timber, but is not a kind of tree. Redwood is from pine. Whitewood (construction timber) is from spruce .
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Or about one air passenger trip to Europe. ("just plant trees" is not a viable solution to climate change unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity)
What exactly are you saying is equal to "about one air passenger trip to Europe"? OP says 85 kg/year of Carbon per really big tree. The first calculator I tried said a one way trip from NYC to London on a 787 is over 1000 kg of CO2: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=67960... Now, C is about 25% of the weight of CO2, so this would be 250 kg of Carbon. Is the calculator overestimating? Is my math w…
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> these seedlings will die as the duff dries in the summer Again the myth of Prometheus, "they need fire, burn, burn, burn"... Yawn. may die --On California-- UK is a little more humid. Sequoiadendron grows happy in most temperate areas, including most of Spain. Segovia has some of the tallest trees out of USA, and is a hot place on summer. We have also a few small Sequioadendron forests on the North of Spain since 1…
Do these redwoods in Spain also reproduce naturally?
We can plant any tree that we need, were we need it. And we, for sure, will need a lot in the near future.
After all, we put any road that we need where we need it. It was not an obstacle for the last 200 years, so all is needed is the political will to do the same with forests.
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Or about one air passenger trip to Europe. ("just plant trees" is not a viable solution to climate change unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity)
What exactly are you saying is equal to "about one air passenger trip to Europe"? OP says 85 kg/year of Carbon per really big tree. The first calculator I tried said a one way trip from NYC to London on a 787 is over 1000 kg of CO2: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=67960... Now, C is about 25% of the weight of CO2, so this would be 250 kg of Carbon. Is the calculator overestimating? Is my math w…
Maybe. My own calculus gives a first approximate value of 50Kg of Carbon for the same trip NY-London (approx 5570Km) in optimum conditions. The calculators forget also that sometimes tail winds can help, so is just an unsophisticated raw average.
In any case nothing prevent us to design hybrid planes to reduce the fuel consume. A turbine is just a motor so can be built in several different ways. And we could try also both things, hybrid planes and helping forests at the same time.
Now re-forest the whole Scottish Highlands please...
The haggis requires very specific ecological conditions for its eggs to mature.
The introduction of non-native tree species is not without its own controversies as these may support very different biodiversity landscapes. In central Europe there is, e.g., a debate about the role and future of the Douglas fir, which was also introduced from North America centuries ago: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2022.84458...
An example I could find: