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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."
When we've turned all the carbon in to trees?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Do not want. I've seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Just imagine what pissing off the trees would do? It'll makes Avatar (err, I mean the original... Ferngully), seem like nothing.
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!
sk8 or oblitor8
Eric
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
I would deeply, deeply love to see this pan out and become a viable approach with scientific evidence to back it up, if only so the rabid Climatology factions would have to eat crow and maybe apologize to Freeman Dyson (you might remember the outrage from the Climate Change community over his book reviews: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/ ). Not because I'm for super-trees, but just because I hate the fanaticism being brought to this whole issue.
He was metaphorically burned at the stake for those comments, but honestly, it made sense--*if* the science backed it up. And I mean "made sense" in that it's a huge issue and that would be an elegant hack to solving some of the key problems we are having. It might even open up other possible solutions--better solutions--but those ideas were dismissed out of hand.
The whole affair reminded me of the outrage over Lomborg (http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html) who basically pointed out that the economics of the the environmental solutions espoused by the Climate Change community just didn't make sense. Or that you could have larger impacts in terms of changing society and the global community by putting your money into other "apparently orthogonal" solutions.
While it has been debated about whether these guys are "climate change deniers" (I think that's a red herring from fanatics), they are pointing out alternatives or uncomfortable facts. Let's do some science, some research, and some testing to make sure they don't have a point. If it's that important to address Climate Change, why are not ALL solutions on the table (as opposed to ones that fit a particular agenda or world-view)?
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
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".
You're an idiot.
With the Ents will come the Entwives, followed by Tree-on-Tree domestic violence, Tree Gangs, and Tree Therapy. Tree abuse will include underage trees in Treesomes, illegal sawmill films, and drug abuse of fertilizers and pesticides. National forests will have to be closed during the Ent Wars. And people wonder why the Entwives took off...
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."
1) Mega-corporations design genetically altered trees to sequester carbon and patent them.
2) Lobby the government for huge tax breaks and subsidies. Then work as contractors to plant the trees. Or plant them to offset environmental damage claims from mineral exploration (The Gulf of Mexico for example).
3) Profit!
Seriously, these solutions are ridiculous. I went to a lecture by a guy from IIRC Princeton. He was researching carbon sequestration using money from.... oil companies. What a crock. It was riddled with wishful thinking, e.g. "we find an unfractured geologic formation...". It was also so complex it look like a ISO standard butt-load of pork for private contractors.
And then at the end "after the sequestration, long term monitoring can be handed off to the public sector." In other words, privatize profit while socializing risk. And we all see how well privatizing profit while socializing risk worked when we bailed out the financial system.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Assuming the trees are planet and the humanity stops to care we might pull out CO2 fast enough to reach a snowball earth scenario, i.e. it gets too cold and more snow reflects more sunlight resulting in a negative feedback loop. And maybe this time we won't come out of it again.
So wait. You're saying that a group of the people most heavily invested in the status quo believe that the status quo is going to continue? Incredible!
"Cleveland Browns Sure to Win Superbowl", says man who bet his house on the Browns.
There are a few valid reasons to question economic impact forecasts of climate change, but "The Bilderberg Group says it won't happen" is not one of them. Time for my favorite quote again:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
The parent post is a goatse link, ignore it /.
it's 100% safe, the same way genetically crops can not affect regular crops... or at least that's what genetically modified crop makers said :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
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.).
What I've always wished for is that cars and boats and other fossil fuel burning vehicles that would concentrate their exhaust into solid pellets. What I have in my mind is a picture of bulldozers crapping charcoal briquettes all over a work site.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I know of a plant that can generate 4 times the cellulose per acre than trees.
It takes less than a year to mature rather than 10-20 years with trees.
It needs no fertilizer or insecticide, and is unaffected by increased UV.
It grows almost anywhere the climate is right, and that covers a big area.
Grow it, cut it down, give the nutrients a few weeks to leech back into the soil then haul away the cellulose and fill old mines with it, use it for paper, plastic feedstock, etc..
No GM needed.
The plant?
Hemp.
(cue old lame jokes about getting high, comments in general opposition, etc.)
_
This is terrifying.
Nature has a nice balance all set up and we've screwed it. The trees have that rate of sequestering carbon for a very good reason.
What we did is that we put more carbon into the atmosphere, we didn't alter any of the 'regulatory systems', we only put in more carbon.
Now if we were to go and alter trees I'm fairly certain that in the long term, once the carbon goes back to pre-industrial-age levels, the trees will then be the problem. I'm sure that the trees will begin to bring about 'global cooling' and we will have to balance against the trees by releasing carbon.
This is not an ideal situation. Don't go altering nature and creating another problem. What they should do is take the excess carbon out and leave nature in it's nice balance again.
Ok, that's all I have to say.
This sounds like something that would be useful for a mission to mars to terraform it.
Just so you know, around here, links to scientists get a lot more respect than links to 'movers and shakers.' Most of us personally probably know more about the situation than those 'movers and shakers' so we don't care what they think. That's why you are a troll (although I wouldn't say troll, I'd say ignorant).
Among scientists, there is no doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the temperature. The only questions remaining are, "how much?" and "what will be the effect?" Personally I am looking forward to global warming and drive my car as much as possible to encourage it, but even I know that CO2 warms the earth (ok that was a joke, but still....)
Qxe4
Now, if this works out, we can ignore the actual problem! Pollution? These trees will take care of most of it...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Those carbon-heavy logs will burn great in my fireplace.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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!
While America seeks to shrink the waist lines of its population apparently we intend to raise some really huge trees. Or as an alternative maybe we could just encourage kudzo vines to grow. We can blanket America with Kudzo with almost no effort at all.
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."
And in politics, the major question is "Are we going to do something about it now or leave it for our kids to deal with?".
And living in a country that has over half of its landmass below sealevel, I'm personally in favor of "right fucking now". ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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.
But if anthropogenic global warming isn't real, then carbon dioxide isn't really a pollutant (it's plant food).
BTW, I almost type anthropomorphic global warming. Now that would be neat.
You don't have to replant trees. Many simply keep growing when you cut them down, and in fact they grow faster because the root system is already in place.
Combined with pyrolysis/charcoal making => agri/biochar for farming gives you an energy positive, economically positive mechanism for sequestering vast amounts of carbon.
As if that really was the problem.
Deleted
And form charcoal, which is mostly inedible.
Google "Terra preta".
Deleted
With the effort put into GM'ing trees, with all the unknown risks and huge costs of any significant deployment, how about just planting more trees that naturally evolved to survive in these ecosystems? Making more things out of wood, and less out of concrete and plastic, sinking atmospheric carbon instead of generating more mines.
That might not sound as sexy, but it does offer profits to the old and powerful owners of large tracts of forests, and countries with historically forested lands that don't have lots of oil and gas deposits, which should benefit from a complete accounting of the costs of carbon pollution vs sequestration.
--
make install -not war
BTW, I almost type anthropomorphic global warming. Now that would be neat.
"His name was James Damore."
Yeah, but there are other harmful effects of pollution than just (supposedly) global warming.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Look here
Lifetime measurements have been made and carbon is increasing in the atmosphere. You are the first person I've seen to actually deny that. Most of the nutjobs stick to attacking the messenger, rather than the science. They don't state it isn't happening, but move on to the second question or accuse the scientist of impropriety (usually unrelated to the science itself) and imply that such issues make their science not just unreliable, but is somehow proof of the opposite. But you actually state that there is no evidence of increasing carbon. That's 100% false. And provably so. Well, unless you lie and state you are comparing it to some unmeasured past.
You'd better work on your denialist rhetoric if you wish to not be called on provably false statements.
Learn to love Alaska
Naw, this just postpones the inevitable. Since this is a man made solution, it will just tip the balance the other way and we'll have way too much O2 in the atmosphere. It will be way easier to start fires to keep warm. And then we'll end up burning down all the genetically engineered super CO2 eating trees in one fire storm, heating the atmosphere back up with the energy released in the fires, compounding it by the greenhouse effect from the burning trees, and we'll all drown when Antarctica melts.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
(assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
Correction: I assumed 30 tons of wood, which is about 15 tons of carbon.
Excessive oxygen produced by a runaway growth of genetically altered trees has resulted in a firestorm that burned up some of the runaway trees, consuming some of the excess oxygen and keeping everything in balance.
Fixed that for ya. Ma Nature is a glorious beast even when you try to beat her at her own game.
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.
I'd be in favor of finding somewhere else to live, just in case the rest of the world doesn't acquiesce to the steps necessary to insure my current locale doesn't flood... but y'know, whatever works for you...
Please go wrong, please go wrong, please go wrong! I want a race of sentient trees!!
I for one welcome our new arboreal overlords!
Stupid question time, but what happens to the tree? I mean, how does it sequester more carbon than a normal tree? Does it simply grow bigger? Is the wood more dense or less dense? Does it become more flammable or less flammable? Will increasing the size of the root system have negative consequences such as reducing the number of trees in a given area?
So, we're genetically altering trees to form diamonds?
FWIW, as a general rule the faster a tree grows, the lighter and weaker the wood it produces.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Excess co2 is a non problem, precisely indicated in the article premise. As we have more co2 in the atmosphere, the existing plants, including food crops, will suck it up. It may lag a bit, but this is what will happen. We don't even need super trees, just more "regular" trees. Excess wood can be turned into biochar to be provided to the planet's farms, for deep plowing in.
CO2 is not a problem, it is an ASSET, a valuable resource. Having a war on carbon is the stupidest thing humans can do right now. That so many greenies have been faked out by this latest wall street cap and trade SCAM is astounding. That is what is behind the war on carbon, those looters want the entire planet to pay for non existent carbon problem "credits" so they have trillions more in free money handed to them. It is a huge con, designed by ENRON, and then run with from the likes of goldman sachs, etc.
Wake up before it is too late, do your own research, see where the war on carbon came from, go find your own links.
I almost modded you up, but then I realized that simply re-quoting you was more effective. Your ideas are worth exploring by anybody who is a little vague or confused by the whole global warming scam. The most loudly marketed idea is generally guaranteed to be a lie. This one faked us out because Al Gore seemed like such a nice and earnest guy, but his science and his connections demonstrated that he is a liar or a fool or both. Putting a believable and apparently trust-worthy leadership figure at the head of a con job, (Obama being another example), is enormously effective.
-FL
We don't want to be _WITHOUT_ green house gases.
I'd take higher global temperature and sea levels over frozen ice ball any year of infinity.
Also snow & ice = reflective = even colder. Good luck with that.
"So what? Then we'd just burn and sprinkle the coal from the trees over the snow and turn it black!"
FFS stop coming up with stupid experiments. Sure, plant more trees if you want to. Almost the whole fucking world has though it was a good idea to get rid of them so they don't have any either (and shitty soil, less water, less wood to burn, ...)
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.
Hemp growing for material in many places is not illegal. Hemp plants that is good for material is not so good for smoking.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
...where's the off button?
The end result was that nuclear power turned out to be more expensive than coal or gas, so nobody wanted to build nuclear plants as there seemed to be no compelling reason to do so.
The latest designs are still proving hard to commercialise (I take part in the UK's consultation, I see the papers) and it is proving hard to get across that dry storage of waste for about 100 years is actually the best solution, because it looks like an excuse for not building a repository.
So, as someone who believes that we do need more nuclear power, I think you are utterly and completely wrong. It would have been better had we not built nuclear plants till around 2000, when we knew what we were going. We would then be able to put them in the right places, and we would not have a horrifying build up of unidentified and hard to treat hot waste. What has harmed nuclear power is short sightedness and gung-ho engineering. By the time nuclear power becomes acceptable, we may well have had to put other solutions into place.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I didn't ignore them, because if you looked at my previous posts, I never said anything about CO2. I merely said that cutting down on pollution (if you think that means pollution, well, you should probably start listening to your own examples) would be a good thing no matter what.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I thought man made global warming was a hoax. Its smart to call it climate change these days.
Ha. So attacking the science is the wrong approach? Yeah, you're a bright one!
Better get that tin foil hat back on smart one, you're brain (such as it is...) appears to be leaking out.
Yes, attacking science as proof of the opposite is, at best, lying. Feel free to "attack" the science with alternate science. But accusing the scientist of something then implying it somehow proves the opposite is irrational.
Please, do attack the science. But stick to the science, and don't lie by implying that proving someone 100% wrong somehow means you are correct. There's nothing you could ever say about someone else's science that lends any credibility to your position, even if you prove it wrong. You have to actually do your own science to prove anything.
Learn to love Alaska
DO NOT hack weather.
It is more harmful and dangerous than you think.
Pollution is still somewhat related, though. I know exactly what the other posts were talking about, but my original post was talking about other kinds of pollution.
"So, I either you are the most uncouth motherfucking poster around or an ignorant motherfucker. What kind are you?"
Both!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!