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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."
Yes by all means let's genetically alter tree's instead of changing our own behavior! There's just something more than a little wrong with, we can't change our own behavior so lets change the world around us so it can take our abuse more effectively!
What's the difference between planting trees that capture X% more carbon and planting X% more trees?
..they were called rain forests, we decided we didn't need them and wanted to raise cattle instead...
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
What next: "Majority of US politicians say that there was no oil spill this year"?
Or maybe: "You know, toxic chemicals are actually good for you".
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?
Altering our behaviour isn't really that hard or expensive. Installing extensive insulation, an efficient boiler and solar PV, and converting a small patch of wasteland into a vegetable patch, has reduced our carbon usage by around 30% in little more than a year. Many people could achieve much more; a lot of people in the US and the UK still don't have double glazing, which reduces heating and aircon loads alike, and there are still far too many single-occupancy SUVs and light trucks on our roads. What's more, these things actually save money - if AGW turned out to be a myth tomorrow, the financial crisis would still be here and I would still be better off because of the actions I've taken.
Messing with plants should be a long way down the list, after simple things that can be done with established technology have been fully utilised, and not before.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Catalytic converters take the toxic products of unburned fuel and convert them into CO2 + H2O + N2... If we want more CO2, the last thing we need to do is ban Catalytic converters...
A simple comparison of the size of the biological carbon reservoir on land (2000 gigatons C) and the rate at which it exchanges carbon with the atmosphere (120 gigatons/year) suggests that growing trees is a terrible way to store carbon in the long term: extra stored carbon will return to the atmosphere in a couple of decades.
This is confirmed by a variety of real-world experiments in forest artificially enriched with CO2 and in naturally growing forests.
You may call a dead tree "sequestered carbon", but there's a whole ecosystem full of organisms that call it "lunch". If you want to get rid of carbon, you need to either store it in a place where organisms can't get to it (for example, in the deep seafloor) or in a form that's not tasty (for example, as CO2 or carbonate rock.).
Pollution is still a harmful thing even if global warming isn't real. It's true that we don't know much about our environment, but cutting down on pollution would be a good thing no matter what.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The point is that we have workable approaches in a short timescale - consumption reduction using insulation, legislation and smaller vehicles. We have workable approaches in the 5-10 year scale (wind and offshore wind), and in the 10-20 year scale (nuclear and replacement of coal with gas fired plants). All the bio and geo engineering approaches have huge potential downsides and would be unlikely to be proven safe for use, or workable in much under 20-30 years. And then we have fusion, which in 1960 was 10 years in the future and now in 2010 is reckoned to be 60 years in the future, if you believe the reports in that treehugger rag Scientific American.
Lomborg now seems to be significantly backtracking on his earlier views, and Dyson is simply negligible - he is a retired physicist, from a generation when physicists were generally quite ignorant of statistics, not a climatologist or a mathematical modeller. It is hard to find any qualified people who would support him.
The issue here is that you AGW deniers simply have a new tack - the argue that we need to do "some science, some research" because you don't like the results of all the science and research so far, and so simply extend into the future the time when we actually need to do anything. You are like people who are trying to prove that a coin isn't biased. Every time it's tossed it comes up heads, and you keep asking for one more toss in the hope it comes up tails - somehow imagining that the one tail will somehow negate the long sequence of heads. It is human nature - but it is not science, or a good basis for public policy.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."