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Its 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
Noob question here: what is stopping nature doing this, seeds and all that?
My money is on humans.
That'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.
That is a lot of trees, but a decade’s worth is a lot of emissions
Earlier 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.
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
Also, more rain means more clouds, and this is something the current climate models can't really model accurately, believe it or not. There's not even "consensus" on whether clouds are beneficial or detrimental.
It 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This 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?
Ironically, they grow much faster on the other side of the world (New Zealand) due to its wetter climate but the wood is not as hard due to this so they aren't useful in construction. Basically the ultimate carbon sync and useless for humans.
That'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?