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Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

nature.com

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Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#61

Post by xyzzyz »

ph0rque wrote: post #56
weepingprophet wrote: post #26

Every time an article on this topic comes up, I read the same responses in the comments, here or on Reddit. Yes, it's cheaper not to emit than it is to reclaim, but how does this comment contribute to the solution? Even if everybody stopped emitting CO2 today, we still need to remove many Gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere to save the planet. Planting trees is cheap and is PART of the solution. Similarly, every time…

Actually, it's possible to remove all the extra CO2 just by planting trees (not to detract from all the other things we should be doing). Furthermore, it's affordable: $15/average US resident/year. I wrote a blog post about it recently: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-chang...

So, to offset his carbon emissions, American must plant 150 trees a year, ensure that they grow for at least 10 years, and then ensure that the CO2 captured by them doesn’t get rereleased. This means that we need space for at least 3 trillion trees, which is three times the space available, based on the figure in your link. Ensuring that the CO2 doesn’t get rereleased means that all that lumber needs to be buried or sunk, since this is way more lumber than the humanity actually uses productively. Additionally, this would mean doing heavy industrial management of all this immense forest area to cut and bury all these hundreds of billions of trees a year. This would require digging huge pits, transporting lots of heavy material to them, at extra emissions. And that’s for American emission only, which are only a fraction of global emissions. And of course we ignore the question why would you want to bury all this wood while keeping digging out all the fossils, when you could be using the same wood to generate energy instead.

So no, while this might work to pacify the conscience of an individual, it makes absolutely no sense to do it at scale.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#62

Post by usrusr »

dahfizz wrote: post #43
seveneightn9ne wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I'd heard the Amazon consumes at least as much O2 as it produces; it's basically in equilibrium. Unfortunately I don't remember the source but it was something like Planet Earth. I found a lot of sources quoting your 20% number, but it seems like that's not net produced O2 but rather gross. I'd be interested if anyone can find a source that says either way about the net O2/CO2 of the Amazon.

With absolutely no expertise in the subject, I would expect any sufficiently large land area to have no net oxygen production. It's not like oxygen levels fluctuate wildly, and it seems unlikely to have such a uniform O2 level on Earth if it's coming from just a few big producers.

Basic chemistry: the only ecosystems that can continually produce net O2 are those that permanently stash unoxidated C away (aka new fuel). This was the norm A Very Long Time Ago when plants were briefly ahead in the chemical arms race against everything that lives off decaying plant matter (and thus caused an imbalance which created the chemical energy we now use as fossil fuels). But in more recent history (e.g. anything dinosaur or younger) it only happens in very rare conditions. Peat-producing bog marshes are the rare exception now.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#63

Post by ph0rque »

xyzzyz wrote: post #61
ph0rque wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's possible to remove all the extra CO2 just by planting trees (not to detract from all the other things we should be doing). Furthermore, it's affordable: $15/average US resident/year. I wrote a blog post about it recently: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-chang...

So, to offset his carbon emissions, American must plant 150 trees a year, ensure that they grow for at least 10 years, and then ensure that the CO2 captured by them doesn’t get rereleased. This means that we need space for at least 3 trillion trees, which is three times the space available, based on the figure in your link. Ensuring that the CO2 doesn’t get rereleased means that all that lumber needs to be buried or…

Actually, if the trees are burned or otherwise re-release their carbon, the subsequent re-planting will take care of re-re-capturing that carbon. If any of the trees die or are cut down, a new one can be planted in its place. If it still living and thriving, it should be naturally left alone.

Also, for ten years, 327 million Americans each planting 1.5k trees comes out to half a trillion trees. The link in my blog says there is room for 1.2 trillion trees to be planted, so the math works out.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#64

Post by ph0rque »

_rpd wrote: post #60
ph0rque wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's possible to remove all the extra CO2 just by planting trees (not to detract from all the other things we should be doing). Furthermore, it's affordable: $15/average US resident/year. I wrote a blog post about it recently: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-chang...

> Actually, it's possible to remove all the extra CO2 just by planting trees The linked, peer-reviewed paper in Nature says otherwise. Perhaps you could review it and point out their mistake?

Here's a paper saying there is room for 1.2 trillion more trees to be planted: https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/ez-pcc021119.php

Perhaps you could track down the discrepancy in the statements?

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#65

Post by dragonwriter »

umvi wrote: post #48
dragonwriter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Structures composed of wood do not remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Why not? > Why not? On average, does wood in structures release carbon through decay, fire, etc., faster or slower than if the wood was left in a living tree? Intuitively, I don't see any reason to expect effective sequestration. Your analysis seems to suppose that if wood was not used to make a structure, the trees would instantly rele…

> On average, does wood in structures release carbon through decay, fire, etc., faster or slower than if the wood was left in a living tree? Trees don't grow at the same rate forever. They sprout up quickly and rapidly sequester carbon until they reach maturity, at which point there are diminishing returns in terms of carbon sequestration. Treated wood is much more resistant to decay and fire than untreated wood. > Y…

> Take a mature tree, turn it in to a building. Grow another mature tree in its spot and you've now sequestered effectively twice as much as having never turned the tree into a building.

It takes several (in many cases 5+) decades for a tree to mature (in the sense of growth levelling off.) The average proportion of original wood building remaining after 50 years is, well, less than 100%.

Probably significantly, more than if the old tree died and fell, so you could have some net gain, but it's not going to be 100%. (And its going to be even less if you are clearing land for the building.)

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#66

Post by philipkglass »

vkou wrote: post #40
bg4 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both?

Because emitting less is an order of magnitude cheaper then sequestration, and there's only so much economic/political capital that we can marshal for this problem. Optimize the critical path. When your patient is bleeding from a severed arm, don't waste time with slapping a bandaid on their little toe.

This would be good advice if there were a unitary "we" who had already agreed to pursue the least-cost route to climate stabilization. But Californians can't force Wyomingites to cut their emissions, the EU can't force Americans to cut their emissions, and so on. Human emissions are going to continue beyond the point where feedback loops can be damped simply by cutting back on combustion. When the warning is "only 12 more years" to finish a decarbonization process that should have started 30 years ago, you know that the problem won't be solved optimally.

It's tragic that everyone is going to pay more because humans couldn't coordinate soon enough to just do the smart thing, but that's how it is. The IPCC is discussing negative emissions strategies not because they're cheaper than cutting emissions but because humans are not implementing deep emissions cuts fast enough.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#67

Post by chupasaurus »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #55
b_tterc_p wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this true? This is something I question a lot. Intuition tells me that the greenhouse effect of CO2 and other gasses determines derivative of climate change, but its often presented like it sets the absolute average temperature. That is, if we stopped producing CO2 completely back to pre-industrial levels (somehow), would we expect the globe to get warmer? Or are both statements true because excess CO2 naturally l…

Part of the problem with climate change is that some of the effects are self-sustaining. For example, snow and ice reflect light back into space. If the temperature increases then more of the ice melts, so more light is absorbed by the earth which raises the temperature. Then even if you get rid of the carbon, the temperature stays higher because the ice is gone and is no longer reflecting light back into space. And…

> Then even if you get rid of the carbon, the temperature stays higher because the ice is gone and is no longer reflecting light back into space. And the ice is from the last ice age, it doesn't just refreeze on its own -- especially now that the temperature is higher.

Check the historical data on CO₂ levels from antarctic ice. It correlates perfectly with the ice ages (we had samples of ~400K years covering 3 previous), and guess what, we are now on the brink of a next one.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#68

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chupasaurus wrote: post #67
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem with climate change is that some of the effects are self-sustaining. For example, snow and ice reflect light back into space. If the temperature increases then more of the ice melts, so more light is absorbed by the earth which raises the temperature. Then even if you get rid of the carbon, the temperature stays higher because the ice is gone and is no longer reflecting light back into space. And…

> Then even if you get rid of the carbon, the temperature stays higher because the ice is gone and is no longer reflecting light back into space. And the ice is from the last ice age, it doesn't just refreeze on its own -- especially now that the temperature is higher. Check the historical data on CO₂ levels from antarctic ice. It correlates perfectly with the ice ages (we had samples of ~400K years covering 3 previo…

Were on the brink of a next one, on the geological timescale. Before we started burning all this carbon and went hard the other way.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#69

Post by strainer »

yellowapple wrote: post #41

Why natural forests? Would it not be more effective to focus on the plants/trees that consume the most atmospheric carbon? There are certainly ecological arguments for natural forests v. artificial carbon-sequestration-optimized forests, but if maximum carbon sequestration is the goal, then the rational answer is to focus on those plants which sequester relatively large amounts of carbon instead of waiting for maybe…

Besides climate change, we also have a huge problem with natural habitat and species destruction. Its really quite irrational to ignore the opportunity for combined solutions.

Its irrational to continue to neglect natural systems in a world where their capacities to sustain diversity have been overloaded by anthropological targets.

Re: Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

#70

Post by Matticus_Rex »

dharma1 wrote: post #52

Anybody here buying forest just to leave it to grow? It's not so expensive to buy a few dozen hectares, something I've been wanting to do for a while

For tax reasons you'll probably want to find a nonprofit to do that on your behalf.
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