Noob question here: what is stopping nature doing this, seeds and all that?
Most often its grazing livestock, they like to eat seedlings.
Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
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Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#22Noob question here: what is stopping nature doing this, seeds and all that?
I guess it depends on the location. Some have cattle and deforestation. Natural reseeding can be slow. Though in England if you leave a bit of land alone it'll pretty much be woodland in 30 years or so.
If anyone fancies donating to plant a few 100 or 1000 trees https://donate.trees.org/campaign/trees-for-the-futures-eart... does good stuff for about 15c/tree. It doesn't take very much to cancel out your personal CO2 load that way. I donated I think $100 for 1000 trees a while back.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#23This makes me wonder - could trees be modified genetically to handle more CO2 in order to make this number lower? Could we, instead of trees, have huge walls made of plants that would consume our CO2?
We have been genetically modifying plants to maximize CO2 utilization for millenia.
Plants try to minimize CO2 utilization becase it’s energy intensive. We could design something that stores more carbon, but with real tradeoffs as it would have less energy for other things.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#24"Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690382
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#25That's a lot of trees though and it cancels out only a decade. EDIT: I just looked it up: there are roughly 4-10 trillion trees on earth right now.
And lots of land. Suppose you can plant them in say 4m rows with 4m separation, it would be approx 60K trees per 1km2 or 20million km2 in total. Twice of the size of the US?
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nor the emissions when those trees burn because they were planted in a place where waterbed can't support their density. This is happening in CA nearly every year.
> the emissions when those trees burn We'd probably have to sequester them somewhere anaerobic. Bottom of a deep-sea trench or underground. Which also reduces the net carbon footprint of the activity.
The best way for sequestering wood is turning it into biochar. You even get some energy out of it.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#27Its hard for me to plant a tree, but I could expand my garden or add a bush. How many gardens are needed to equal a tree?
166 trees per living person, so however many gardens that is, multiple by that
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#28It doesn't look like they factored in the CO2 emissions from planting that many trees. The actual presentation: https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744 Under a business-as-usual climate scenario our model suggests that warming would drive the loss of ~55 gigatons of carbon from the upper soil horizons by 2050. This value is around 12–17 per cent of the expected anthropogenic emissions over this p…
Nor the emissions when those trees burn because they were planted in a place where waterbed can't support their density. This is happening in CA nearly every year.
nor the small emission from natural decay of dead wood
That said it could also:
- absorb some heat
- create new wind / rain cycles
- provides a lot of material (construction/furniture) to replace cement and plastics
- kill millions of people of exhaustion from planting that many trees
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#29 Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#30This makes me wonder - could trees be modified genetically to handle more CO2 in order to make this number lower? Could we, instead of trees, have huge walls made of plants that would consume our CO2?
Just use a bunch of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
It worked 49 million years ago.