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Trees vs. Atmospheric Carbon: A Fight That Makes Sense?
StartsWithABang writes Yes, carbon levels in our atmosphere are rising, it's causing the Earth to warm and the climate to change, and our dependence on fossil fuels isn't going away anytime soon. Yet even if we ceased all carbon emissions today, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already high enough that it is likely to result in long-term catastrophic effects. But getting that carbon that's already in the atmosphere out of it isn't a pie-in-the-sky dream, it's a solvable problem that's as easy as planting a tree, something every one of us can help do with very little time, money and effort.
http://forestry.about.com/library/bl_us_forest_acre_trend.htm
European Settlements Impact Forest Area
Growth of the very earliest European settlers in North America initiated large land clearing efforts which had a great impact on forest acreage - especially in the new colonies. Lumber was one of the first exports from the New World and these new English colonies produced great quantities of quality wood for England, mainly ship building.
Until the mid-1800's most of the wood cut was used for fencing and for firewood. Lumber was only made from the best trees that were easiest to cut. Still, there were nearly one billion acres of forests in what was to be the United States in 1630 and stayed that way until the end of the 18th century.
The 1850 Timber Depletion
The 1850's faced a major boom in cutting trees for lumber but still used as much wood for energy and fences as ever. This depletion of the forest continued until 1900 at which time the United States had fewer forests than ever before and less than we have today. The resource had been reduced to just over 700 million forested acres with poor stocking levels on many, if not most, of the Eastern forest.
Fledgling government forestry agencies were developed during that time and sounded the alarm. The newly formed Forest Service surveyed the Nation and announced a timber deficit. States became concerned and formed their own agencies to protect remaining forest lands. Nearly two-thirds of the net loss of forests to other uses occurred between 1850 and 1900. By 1920, the clearing of forests for agriculture had largely subsided.
Our Present Forest
About 30 percent of the 2.3 billion acres of land area (745 million acres) in the U.S. is forest today as compared to about one-half in 1630 (1.0 billion acres). Some 300 million acres of forest land have been converted to other uses since 1630, predominantly because of agricultural uses in the East.
The forest resources of the U.S. have continued improving in general condition and quality, as measured by increased average size and volume of trees. This trend has been evident since the 1960s and before. The total forestland acreage has remained stable since 1900.
Glaciers are a major part of the planets main water supply - they buffer precipitation. Let them melt away and you will see plenty of extra flooding in the wet seasons and rivers drying up the rest of the time.
You may or may not increase biodiversity on the site of the old glacier, but everything downstream will be fucked.
By default, when the tree dies, it will rot and return all that CO2 back to the air. So it's not really a solution unless you sequester the wood after the tree dies.
One of the more crazy ideas I have read is to make charcoal then bury it in old coal mines!
Parent beat me to this, but has score zero. Trees are great. But trees (and plants) are not carbon sinks. To be a carbon sink, you got to cut it down and bury it so deep that it'll never come out again in geological timescales. Like the abyssal ocean. Into a subduction fault. Turn it into limestone. Clathrate.
Some dead plants turn into peat. This is a great carbon sink, for millions of years, until some humans find out you can burn it. Or global warming melts the permafrost and it starts to rot. Most plants don't keep for millions of years, they just rot right away.
Plants are carbon neutral. That's why bio-fuels are a (marginally) good idea, if you can, grow, harvest, and transform the plants into biofuel using only biofuel and renewable sources.
They are very inneficient carbon sinks. The problem is that they do eventually die and decompose. Decomposition is essentially a very slow fire, and most of the carbon is converted back into CO2. It takes millions of years for the trees to capture enough CO2 to make a difference. The idea that we can grow trees over the necessary time span to make up for the current burn rate of petro-chemicals is a bit naive.
Gap in your thinking. The carbon is sequestered the instant it gets into the tree. Short-term, at least - as you note a good chunk will return to the atmosphere after the tree's death, the exact amount depending on a lot of details. But you don't have to wait 150 years for the benefits. A 150 year old redwood can be as tall as the Statue of Liberty. That's an awful lot of carbon held in there.
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
Isn't it funny that the people pushing so hard for the climate change meme stand to make a killing off of it? http://www.forbes.com/sites/la... Pay Al Gore money and the scarry carbon can't hurt you.
If the greenies and those making billions off of CO2 hysteria, like Gore,
1) Citation needed.
Well, let's see. You could start by comparing the expenditures of a single "green" lobbying group, the "Environmental Defense Fund" of $120 million with the TOTAL lobbying dollars for all of the oil industry, which came in at about $71 million. Of course, we've left out all the big ones like the Sierra Club, SELC, Greenpeace, etc. To see what it's really like here is a handy chart for you.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Living in a temperate rain forest, after 10000 years since the glaciers left, there's only a few inches of soil over most of the ground. Exceptions are in depressions and such where you have the cycle of ponds slowly turning into meadow and then forest but most of the trees seem to rot pretty quick. Then there are fires that periodically go through (90 years ago here since the last big fire). Vancouver Island as an example seems to get thoroughly burned about every thousand years based on the shade intolerant tree species.
As for the municipal dump, the one here is now in the business of building and selling soil. Huge chipper chips all green waste as well as lumber and reduces everything to small particles when it is mixed with chicken shit, composted fast in big plastic tubes with huge fans driving air through so it rots in a couple of weeks. I'd guess much of the carbon would go back into the air but a good chunk would get sequestered, especially if the soil is laid down thick. There are a lot of bacteria, fungi and such that will eat the soil and release the carbon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Biochar converts roughly 1/3rd of the dry woody input to charcoal through pylorisis, the rest is consumed-- often as the fire that heats the retort. Biochar is charcoal that preserves the microstructures of the plants. Of itself, when added to soil, it is basically chemically inert and stable for 10k+ years. However its physical structure retains water and many plant nutrients like a sponge, and it acts as a slow release reservoir that benefits crops.
The biochar structure also acts like a reef providing microenvironments that foster rich and complex soil ecologies. So in addition to the carbon directly "sequestered" in making biochar, there is also the increased carbon absorbed by the enriched soil ecology.
A deciduous forest dumps tons of dead leaves every autumn. These leaves naturally compost, in a process broadly similar to biochar production but over a period of a couple of years where biochar batches are done in a couple of hours. The end result is the same though: a fraction of the carbon in the fallen leaves becomes a chemically inert but highly structured physical ammendment to the forest soil.
So far as I know, no one has attempted as yet to quantify how much more biomass biochar or compost produces when it is added to a soil. As a wild ass guess, perhaps in a poplar forest every year every 10 tons of autumn leaves produces 1.5 tons of finished compost (with the rest of the carbon leaving as CO2 during the winter rotting period). Between the inorganic soluble nutrients retained as the leaves rot, and the physical improvements with respect to drainage and environments conducive to soil microbes, the compost will at least double the amount of carbon that is "sequestered". So (again as a WAG) an acre or so of poplar forest that produces 10 tons of dry dead leaves each year could be sequestering 3 tons of carbon each year. Every year. For thousands of years.
"Sequestered" as used in the above refers to carbon that is removed from the daily CO2 cycle to some longer term cycle that is measurable in tens of thousands of years. These would be the lifetimes of entire forest ecologies. What we have been doing for the last century or so is moving carbon from very long term cycles of millions of years and pumping it into the daily CO2 cycle. What we can do (we've got the technology yaddayadda) is move more carbon from the daily CO2 cycle into cycles of 10k+ years. It is a matter of identifying the forest types that are best for over-all carbon absorption and then getting down on our knees and planting some trees.
Will