Slashdot Mirror
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?
It'll eventually (in a few million years) end up being some really bad-assed coal?
It does bring up a point, though - for a movement that utterly detests genetically-modifying things like food, I wonder how the overly-eco crowd will react to genetically modified trees... 'course, I'm thinking they'll just turn around and complain that humanity should instead modify its own behavior.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A global ice age hits the planet resulting in the death of the trees. Once the temperature becomes low enough and CO2 is allowed to build up in the atmosphere after millions of years, vegetation growth and the effects of the CO2 build up will end the ice age. This has happened before and it will happen again.
When we've turned all the carbon in to trees?
The human body has a large amount of carbon. Long story short, the trees will start hungering for us!
..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.
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."
... 'course, I'm thinking they'll just turn around and complain that humanity should instead modify its own behavior.
I for one am ready to pay my air breathing tax to Monsanto.
How to use the Pay As You Breath (PAYB) Calculator:
To predict your monthly PAYE tax, please enter: "Total lung capacity (TLC) is measured by adding together Inspiratory Reserve Volume (IRV), Tidal Volume (Vt), Expiratory Reserve Volume (ERV), and Residual Volume (RV) to come up with the formula, TLC=IRV + Vt + ERV + RV. Tidal Volume is the amount of air normally inhaled or exhaled. Inspiratory Reserve Volume is the amount of additional air that could be inhaled in order to completely fill up the lungs." Please enter these values from you spirometer readings, along with your age, weight, and physical condition - then hit next.
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+
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...
The parent post is a goatse link, ignore it /.
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.).
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.)
_
Pretty sure I'm below average on all of those metrics. Finally it pays off to be a smoker.
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
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."
Yes, humanity absolutely should modify its own behavior. The perils and pitfalls of our way of life have been known for a long time. Anyone who wants to claim ignorance can cry me a river. I made the decision to change my ways over 20 years ago and, yes, it did absolutely fucking suck - for about 3 months.
After that, it just becomes part of day to day living - no big fucking deal.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Look here
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.
The fact that they use violence doesn't mean they'll succeed. Those who lack vision, which is most of humanity, fear change. That doesn't mean we must kowtow to them simply because they may turn violent and have superior numbers.
Techno solutions play a part but are NOT and will NEVER be the only answer. We've used tech solutions on our biggest problems and there is always a significant drawback which takes years or generations to overcome.
The use of petroleum vastly improved the human condition, but the side effects of burning vast amounts as fuel has given us a challenge that may fundamentally alter the planet. Where our energy usage is concerned, I've seen numerous studies and articles that demonstrate that the single most effective way to get a 40% reduction in household energy use is through a change in habits. To think that we can invent our way out of every problem without altering the way we live is frankly, idiotic.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
I would love to see someone invent the Shipstone tomorrow but I'm also mindful of the fact that 40 years ago, fusion was supposed to be only 10 years away. Mandate isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can cause a rapid shift. It would be dreadfully ironic if China ends up ahead of the West in energy efficiency and renewable resources simply because they can do things by mandate.
I'm not sure why you resist people changing habits if they are bad ones. But, that aside, it doesn't have to be one or the other. We're told to eat better, exercise more, etc but doctors and researchers haven't stopped looking for cures.
As for nuclear, the cost has now become exorbitant and it takes such a long time to get from breaking ground to generating power. And what about the waste?
I'm not dead-set against it but the design, the amount of waste produced and the sticker (shock!) price are why I'm hesitant to support although I don't activele oppose it.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body