31–40 of 64 posts
This is why I always laugh when people yell that we just need to plant more trees to solve climate change. I've even debated on twitter with published scientists on this issue. It's odd how susceptible to naturophilia even very well educated people can be, to the point of denying what seems like an obvious conclusion.
Forestry carbon credits have always been a bad joke, comparable to 'clean zero-emission coal plants' in terms of their effectiveness in slowing the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere. Such concepts are really borderline, if not actual, scientific fraud. The guilty parties here are politicians, bureaucrats and corporations who wanted to be seen as 'doing something' or selling 'responsible stewardship' to the publi…
Note that most of the carbon offsets offered by airlines are forestry-related. Any time you see offsets for less than $50/ton, proceed with an abundance of caution. I do think the general state of offsets is improving. There are more high-quality offsets hitting the market every day. They're much too expensive, but I'd rather see "real" offsets at a high price than the complete make-believe we've had up until recentl…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate_rock
The sci-fi approach that would be great is pulling atmospheric CO2 out of the air and making diamond from it. The technology is sort of there already but the costs are ludicrous. The pathway is atmospheric CO2 + water -> methane -> synthetic diamond production. That last is a slow energy-intensive process, but such diamonds would be easily distinguishable from the 'real' geologic diamonds (as they'd have the same amount of carbon-14 as the atmospheric CO2 does). Worth someone writing a business plan I think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
surveying the actual forests is ongoing, with certain old-fat-bureaucracies trying to control the budgets, with over-caffeinated do-gooders on their backs. However some good news is that an individual researcher got a Nature publication credit for a drone+machine learning method to detect dead trees, a few years ago. The majority of pine-beetle related deaths are in the southern range of the Sierras, south of Yosemit…
What's the scoop on the US Forest Service? Obstruction, grift, or waste?
Forestry carbon credits have always been a bad joke, comparable to 'clean zero-emission coal plants' in terms of their effectiveness in slowing the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere. Such concepts are really borderline, if not actual, scientific fraud. The guilty parties here are politicians, bureaucrats and corporations who wanted to be seen as 'doing something' or selling 'responsible stewardship' to the publi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide links? I’m very curious to learn more about real offsets even if expensive.
Sure! I usually point people at Carbonplan's CDR database: https://carbonplan.org/research/cdr-database
This is why I always laugh when people yell that we just need to plant more trees to solve climate change. I've even debated on twitter with published scientists on this issue. It's odd how susceptible to naturophilia even very well educated people can be, to the point of denying what seems like an obvious conclusion.
Quoted post unavailable.
Even if you continued to believe that they did, you'd have to point to evidence that volcanic eruptions happen to have drastically increased at a smooth rate in line with global industrialization and fossil fuel burning. https://www.co2levels.org/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Volcanoes emit a fraction of CO2 that humans do, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits... Even if you continued to believe that they did, you'd have to point to evidence that volcanic eruptions happen to have drastically increased at a smooth rate in line with global industrialization and fossil fuel burning. https://www.co2levels.org/
Here in Northern California there are huge swaths of firs that are dead or diseased as a result of drought. When they burn (which they will, at high intensity), they'll release their carbon back into the air. Seems to me that there's an opportunity for someone to sequester a lot of carbon by burying these trees ( https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0... ) or by turning them into biochar/bio-oil…
In the SF area, the redwoods are dying off from heat/drought. The pines and oaks are being hit with disease. On balance, the oaks seem to be replacing the redwood forests, but everything is thinning out. The mountain forests in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc) have been burnt out hellscapes for years. Of course, this is all rounding error vs. the loss of 90% of the kelp forest, which many people didn't notice…
In what universe is Yosemite in Southern California?