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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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of the older buildings in the cities in the EU have wooden beams to hold up everything. They're pretty solid and have been in place for centuries.
But even more, Amsterdam is built mostly on wooden beams, going into the ground for at least 10 meters, and most of the times 20 meters. Just the palace on the Dam alone has a foundation of 13659 wooden beams. There most be millions of trees underpinning the foundations of Amsterdam.
So while I agree it's not the majority, there is still a lot of old timber being used today.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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.
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.
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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)
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