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Genetically Altering Trees To Sequester More Carbon
An anonymous reader writes "Forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming, according to estimates published in the October issue of BioScience. The study, by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlines a variety of strategies (PDF) for augmenting the processes that plants use to sequester carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into long-lived forms of carbon, first in vegetation and ultimately in soil."
The parent post is a goatse link, ignore it /.
Thanks to xpnd.it I don't have to rely on being warned. Just have to hover over any shortened link to see where it ends up.
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Easy with the shouting there, buddy, I'm an environmentalist like yourself, I just care enough to do the math to find solutions that will actually work.
To sequester enough carbon to offset the 7 gigatons of carbon burned annually, you'd have to build an American-sized house for every family on Earth every 4 years or so, and never, ever demolish them. (assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
That's kind of a little more housing than we need: there's no way housing can suck up the necessary amount of carbon.
But hey, at least we'd solve the housing problem right? No. If you look at all the folks living in hovels in the middle of rainforests, it should be clear that the problem with housing isn't lack of wood, it's the cost of labor and energy to chop down all those trees, move them to where people live, and make houses out of them.
As for burning trees for biomass power, it should be clear from my other posts that I'm in favor of this. But TFA, and my reply, were specifically about *sequestering* tree carbon, not burning it.
Oh, also, even if your dangerous trees consumed every drop of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, oxygen levels would only rise by a tiny fraction of a percent.
This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Are you shitting me? If a biologist wants some R&D dollars, she takes an interest in cancer or alzheimer's research and writes grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health. The NIH's research budget ($32 billion) is five times the *total* budgets of either NSF or NOAA -- and of course, environmental science research makes up only a small fraction of those programs.
And don't even get me started on the amount of *private* R&D money available for biology from the pharmaceutical industry. The idea of a biologist getting into climate mitigation to pad her research budget is ludicrous.
Rainforests might not be the carbon sinks people thought they were.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rain-forests-release-carb
What if the damage will come in 100 years? Do you go back in time to sue?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
The Amazon soil, normally red, is scattered with dark patches. These are charcoal residues from human occupation, some of them thousands of years old. Elemental particulate carbon is a good cation exchange medium - it sequesters nutrients - and it makes these patches extremely fertile when compared to untouched soil.
A good plan might be to is to char biomass and simply plough it into soil, if carbon sequestration is what you are about. This can eb combined with conventional agriculture. (NB by the way, that a field covered in soya or sugar cane exchanges as much carbon as a tropical rain forest: it's just and energy-in energy-out issue. Standing tropical forest holds about twice as much carbon as uncharred sugar cane, but less if the residue bagasse were to be charred and storred.) The issue with forests is biodiversity, not net photosynthesis.
Consider another practical CO2 sequestration project. Provide the simple, locally-sourced technology and then pay India small holders to set up cheap windmills, not for power but to grind chunks of the immense Deccan Flats to a powder. Why? Because these hundreds of cubic kilometres of rock are made of a basic basalt, one that rapidly absorbs CO2 when it is ground up and so exposed to air. What you get from the residue are new rice paddies.
It is thought that the reason that the climate got cold after the 15C-hotter-than-now Eocene is that the newly-forming Himalayas began to erode, fixing CO2 as they did so. The resulting carbonates are under Bangaldesh and in the Bay of Bengal.
Another good scheme is to use biomass-based carbon as a spine on which to hang solar (etc) derived hydrogen. The result is called diesel or gasoline. Doing this uses 1950s technology, and is a lot cheaper than many alternatives. You can of course burn it in cars, using established technology and known, safe handling systems. You have tens of millions of trained technicians already on stream. Hydrogen is, by contrast, a nightmare fuel: low energy density, hard to store and with a tendency to embrittle anything in which it is stored, essentially explosive in any contact with the atmosphere. And as to electricity! Has anyone seen a Lithium battery on fire? Think disruptive crash - fizz, crackle, boof.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rain-forests-release-carb
Very, very good link and worthy of a bump. Granted, it doesn't mean we need to cut down trees to reduce CO2 but it does demonstrate that we can't just view the situation in such a simplistic "more trees -> less CO2" viewpoint.
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