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."

Comments

We had these...

[RadioheadKid]

..they were called rain forests, we decided we didn't need them and wanted to raise cattle instead...

Re:Why not plant more trees?

[plopez]

You can't patent unaltered trees.

Re:What happens ..

[TheKidWho]

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...

Land biomass is a lousy carbon sink

[goodmanj]

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.).

Time and cost

[Kupfernigk]

Unfortunately many economists seem to fail to take into account the actual difficulties of developing and introducing new technologies. They like to use the example of wartime, but in fact that isn't a good one - as military technology gets more advanced, it too is taking ever longer to get into production.

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.

Re:Subjective perspective exaggerated

[Black Gold Alchemist]

>>>We should change our behaviour,

Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy. They are responsible for global warming, not SUV drivers. If they were gone, we would have no CO2 from electricity today. We already have the technology to make gasoline and diesel in nuclear powerplants, it just needs to be put together and scaled up. So, we would likely have no CO2 from cars today, either.

Doomsayers have been saying we'd starve by 1980, then 1990, then 2000, then 2010, then 2020. When will they realize that the principles of Malthus are simply wrong at their core? Julian Simon, a man before his time, took a bet about resource scarcity with doomsayers. The doomsayers lost, big.