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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.
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.
Soda (Pop).
Air guns.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
....r you are doing propaganda for the CO2 industry.
I am in the CO2 industry and I need to clear my conscious. We supply the CO2 for soda, dry ice, beer, and many other uses.
I assure you that the parent is correct. Panting trees will lower our margins or even ruin our business.
Before you go and plant a tree, just please, PLEASE, think of the beer!
The linked article is a plug for the Arbor Day Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day_Foundation) and comes complete with "inspirational music" from John Denver. There is no research or even coherent presentation of facts at all, but rather a thinly veiled attempt to get readers to join the foundation by emotional manipulation. All the usual suspects are here, touching music, stock photos of old and young saving the Earth together and the excuse that, "while the foundation might not be the solution to all problems, I feel good doing something, and so should you!". I read the TFA; now someone please explain what reason is for this article has to even be CLOSE to Slashdot. It has no scientific value, presents no research, does not inform the reader in any meaningful way and does not try to systematize the idea of capturing carbon through planting trees. I guess the domain name "medium.com" should be a warning in itself. My guess is that this is simply the new face of advertising; paid link-bait articles.
Sure, a few trees would help. But do you want to twerk around and do a dinky bit of dis and a little of dat, of do you want to get the job done?
We're not lost lambs in the field trudging around looking for tender shoots of clover and going "Baaaa!" when we cannot find any. We are human sheep! We harnessed and domesticated clover, made it grow in rows where it is sucked into great machines and stored in tanks and all we do is stick our muzzles into clover dispensers and glorious compacted clover product shoots into our mouths! Then we spill hot clover juice on our lap and we SUE!
We can do the same for energy, because that's really all that matters, finding new and better sources. With a grand surplus of energy anything becomes possible. Want to absorb 50 POUNDS of carbon a year? Plant a tree. Want to absorb several TONS of carbon per day? Then build a single carbon sequestration plant on the edge of town. Why are people on a technological forum discussing planting trees to solve a simple problem of chemistry and applied industry?
You should be ashamed of yourselves!
I see folks advocating solutions like re-terraforming the Earth with invasive monocultures to make fuel, sequester CO2 or perhaps just to annoy the locals, because everyone on Earth is presently surrounded by plant species they cherish and are evolved to their own area. Or by proposing efforts that might get off the ground in a miniscule way and doing practically nothing, people are just pushing walk-away solutions for salving their conscience.
1. develop and scale a massive, reliable source of carbon-nuetral energy
2. do anything you want with it, including capturing CO2
3. If you make synfuel with captured CO2, at least you break even when it burns.
If you're proposing wind and solar as that energy source, you may as well start planting trees. For all the good it will do. And there's only one possible source of energy that could scale and meet these challenges:
Thorium has become sort of a in-joke around here and suggesting anything besides wind and solar tends to get a flood of Beavis and Butt-head responses. Perhaps we are seeing the human race split into two races --- the Eloi, their numbers few, devolved into wandering berry and leaf eaters as they graze in overgrown fields among the rusted wind turbines and vine-encrusted solar panels... and the Morlocks, proud stewards of mankind's technological heritage as we whiz around in our electric cars powered by clean, boundless energy.
Proud to be a Morlock. That cannibalism thing is just a rumor we spread around to keep them off our lawns.
___
For the straight poop, watch Thorium Remix and see my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
well, what it really is, is a good reason to cut down as many trees as you can and make buildings, furniture or whatever using the wood instead of letting it decompose - and then plant new trees. so tree farms to rescue! and landfills where paper diapers are buried.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There are few scientists with maths as poor as gweihir.
He DID bring "Hope and Change", just not to us. "Hope" for the the NSA to do whatever they want, and the "change" of making it all legal.
You didn't think he was talking about you, me, and the rest of the peasants did you? HAHAHA
Compared to iron filing "seeding" in the ocean. Seeding is a REAL solution and could fix the CO2 issue overnight. It would probably have all sorts of unknown side-effects too, but it could solve that one.
I'm actually curious about the balance here. When a tree dies and is left on its own, what percentage of its carbon ends up permanently in the soil vs. returning to the atmosphere after decomposition? I'm sure it varies greatly from forest to forest, of course - things like peat bogs having little decomposition, but probably much more efficient decomposition in rain forests. And how does this compare to, say, grassland? Or perhaps more to the point, how does it compare to the typical modern practice of sending your grass clippings to the municipal dump where they'll be entombed in a low-oxygen environment?
And back to trees, are there processes one can use to increase the amount of carbon stays in the soil? For example, does making biochar increase or decrease the sequestered carbon?
I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her.
Then there's the matter of lignin. I'm no expert on this, but as I understand it, the plants that eventually became fossil fuel grew during a period in which lignin had been invented by them, but microbes hadn't yet figured out how to break lignin down. So, imagine trees piling up over a long period (millions of years?), not rotting, and their carbon being sequestered. Now, wind things forward a few million years, and imagine that one big-headed creature figures out how to release all that carbon back into the atmosphere, and proceeds to do so over a short period of just a few hundred years. That's gonna have a big impact, and it's going to be irreversible using plants alone.
You make a valid point. A large percentage of the carbon absorbed is placed back into the air (I would venture a guess of 80% since about 80% of the tree is above the ground). But this solution is a stop gap until other means of carbon reduction can be implemented. Also, if tree farming is used for crop's IE: wood products with a life span of 30 years, then we have locked in carbon for; growth time + usable life span of products.
I, myself, have planted trees all my life, and my dream retirement goal is to create a forest somewhere near the Mississippi River. Lots of trees, all different breeds, providing a rich environment for wildlife. Nothing fancy, lot's of southern pine ( that can be used for telephone poles, or sunk in the mud to support buildings in Louisiana ). Some hardwoods, and if possible, some trees that grow very fast for natural wind breaks.
With over 1 million users on Slashdot, I would venture that if we all planted 1 tree in our life time, the net effect would be in excess of 20 million tons of CO2 removed in our lifetime. While that is just a drop in the bucket, it's a start. I recently read that your basic tree removes in the range of 30 to 40 tons of co2 over 30 years. So I ask you all to plant a tree, think before traveling to find the most effective fuel route, recycle both sides of your paper if possible (I save 20 reams of paper every year that way) and use your bikes if you can.
Thanks for your comment.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Cut down the forests to save the planet! :) There's even math that shows if your area has significant snowcover (Canada-on-up) that you shouldn't even plant the trees at all because the IR reflected out into space due to the albedo is worth more for reducing warming than the CO2 that can be absorbed at those altitudes. Not everything that's true is immediately intuitive (science, bitches).
Not that I necessarily trust that particular math nor anybody's math which claims to account for all variables and reveal the truth, but it makes sense that what we need is more biomass at the equator where it can grow denser and sequester more. Such as if the desertifying of the Sahara could be reversed, as "its" water is being gradually locked up at the southern pole. But to melt those ice sheets and put the humidity back into the atmosphere would required ... dun, dun, dunnnn!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Agreed that "greenies" aren't the only ones making billions off of CO2 hysteria -- see the Koch brothers in the article below:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
but there are lots of people seeking to make money in the carbon and carbon trading game, and IIRC Gore is indeed one of them. A description of the billions at play already can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
where the number given is "60 billion dollars" which certainly counts as "billions" in any marketplace where people make a margin on all trades. The bulk of the people making money of of CO2 hysteria are, however, not Greenpeace volunteers or the like -- they are the same extremely wealthy individuals and companies who both "run civilization" and incidentally own the big energy companies worldwide. If you looked at where directly invested money intended to combat CO_2 goes (e.g. research money) a substantial fraction goes directly to the energy industry in the form of research grants, another substantial fraction goes to the energy industry in the form of subsidies. But the real payoff for the big carbon-based energy companies is, paradoxically, in the artificial inflation of carbon based energy costs to the consumer. Again, power companies make marginal profits, generally at what amounts to a fixed (publicly regulated) margin. The only way for them to increase profits at fixed production is to raise prices. The only way to raise prices in a world where coal is plentiful and cheap is to create an artificial scarcity, which has the added benefit of stretching out the lifetime of profitability of the resource to the owner. I would argue -- although it is difficult to put specific numbers to this since it is difficult to see just what fraction of the cost of a kilowatt-hour is directly attributable to the global warming hysteria, and because the media is strangely reluctant to follow the money (perhaps because they are predominantly owned by the same wealthy people, perhaps because they profit from things that rouse strong feelings, like an impending global catastrophe) -- that the increased marginal profits to the global energy industry due to catastrophe-driven price increases dwarfs all other money being made in association with the hysteria and is the great invisible elephant in the debate.
As Br'er Rabbit once said, "Don't through me into that briar patch, oh please no no no..."
I am, however, curious as to why you'd ask for citations and then refer to the billions being made off of "denying" climate change by (specifically) two large oil companies. Surely you understand that oil companies are nearly irrelevant to global warming, a small fraction (around 13%) of greenhouse emissions relative to coal fired electrical plants, industrial energy production, etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
and
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
The oil companies are perfectly happy to skim billions off of the artificial renewables industry that has been created by the hysteria, and until this year have been both investing and making billions from it. But the bottom has apparently fallen out of this:
http://www.eenews.net/stories/...
very likely driven by the increased supply of oil and gasoline that is reflected in oil prices dropping by nearly 1/3 this year. They are suffering far more from a SURPLUS of oil that leads to low prices and hence a serious hit on their profits than they ever suffered from global warming hysteria in a world where demand is nearly copmletely inelastic and generally growing. It also appears that the profitability of sustainables is taking a (in my op
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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
I have a full mathematical base education and some advanced subjects like logic and algebra.
If you think logic and algebra are advanced subjects then you are just as mathematically challenged as I said. But you clearly don't realise it.
so perhaps two party systems no longer serve democracy.
Most democracies don't have two party systems. Those that have proportional representation, or some other system that encourages multi-party democracy, don't seem to be doing any better. There is little reason to believe that the "two party system" is at the root of our problems.
You looking on Wikipedia is convincing nobody.