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Arborists Are Bringing the 'Dinosaur of Trees' Back To Life (qz.com)
Arborists are cloning saplings from the stumps of the world's largest, strongest, and longest-lived trees -- felled for timber more than a century ago -- to create redwood "super groves" that can help fight climate change. "Using saplings made from the basal sprouts of these super trees to plant new groves in temperate countries around the world means the growths have a better chance than most to become giants themselves," reports Quartz. "Their ancestors grew up to 400 ft (122 m) tall and to 35 ft in diameter, after all, larger than the largest living redwood today, a giant sequoia in California's Sequoia National Park." From the report: Already, super saplings from the project are thriving in groves in Canada, England, Wales, France, New Zealand, and Australia. None of these locales are places where coastal redwoods grow naturally, but they all have cool temperatures and sufficient fog for the redwoods, which drink moisture from the air in summer rather than relying on rain. [David Milarch, founder of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a U.S. nonprofit that propagates the world's largest trees] calls this "assisted migration." Last month, his organization planted another such grove in the Presidio in San Francisco, California. The park lies along the U.S. west's redwood corridor, which runs from Oregon to California, home to the stumps the saplings were cloned from. But 95% of giant growths there were cut long ago. Many of the redwoods along the corridor now are young trees. Milarch notes that as the local climate is getting hotter and less foggy, it's no longer as conducive to producing the mega growths of yore. Now, 75 saplings created from the basal sprouts of the most rugged and massive ancient tree stumps of the coastal region will grow in the Presidio. They may eventually become the hardiest and tallest trees around, if their ancestors are any indication.
"None of these locales are places where coastal redwoods grow naturally...". Does that not make them imported invasive species and should be removed immediately from those areas?
It's not just absorbing carbon, but also sequestering it. These will live quite a long time and mostly just need to be left alone to do their thing.
If these guys want to try tackle the problem this way, may as well let them. If you've got other ideas or a different approach, then you should be free to do that. Sure this isn't going to magically solve everything overnight, but it's better than just sitting around expecting someone else to do something. It's also kind of cool in its own right, so who cares if you think they have silly motives.
They said "dinosaur" just to get everyone's attention, but this is more like a selective breeding of an existing species, and transplanting into alien habitats, which may or may not result in more big trees.
With most large species, the same thing that makes them big also makes them specialists. And they tend to be most prone to dying off with slight changes, because the environment changes faster than they can evolve - a problem simple and small organisms don't have. There's no particularly good reason to think that just because these trees grew old and huge under ideal conditions that they are any better at tolerating less-good conditions (like getting transplanted 12,000 miles away in a different hemisphere).
We'll see, I guess, in about 2000 years...