So environmentally it's still a loss that's easy to miss, especially if people don't look past the headline numbers. At least the article points this out.
I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I remember when you could see a whole row of logging trucks driving by carrying one tree. As in, each section of the tree filled a logging truck. There are trees where that tree was today, but they represent nowhere near the same amount of carbon stored in the form of wood.
The article failed to point this factor out.
The old trees that they were cutting down would've been hundreds of years old. The growth rate of trees slows down over time.
No, it is accelerating - according to this study in Nature [2].
"reviewed records from forest studies on six continents, involving 673,046 individual trees and more than 400 species...97% of the species surveyed, the mass growth rate—literally, the amount of tree in the tree—kept increasing even as the individual tree got older and taller" [1]
"for most species mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size. Thus, large, old trees do not act simply as senescent carbon reservoirs but actively fix large amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees; at the extreme, a single big tree can add the same amount of carbon to the forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree" [2]
[1] http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/study-shows-older-trees-a...
Metaphor: water as carbon. Thick pipe with faster flow can move as much water as a slower moving fat pipe. You're focusing on the cross section of the pipe.
A lot of the wood gets burned. Either as the purpose of the wood, or as how the forest got cleared. (Fires are particularly common in the tropics on purpose, and fairly common in the temperate zones by accident. As California demonstrated this month.)
In the process of turning tree into manufactured goods, there is a lot of waste that tends to wind up in the atmosphere.
Manufactured goods are themselves vulnerable to fire, decay, beetles, etc, so some of them are released.
Tracking how much is released, and when is very hard. That is why according to the Kyoto protocol, a tree is counted as released as soon as it is cut down.
All told, deforestation is estimated at around 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
When someone from British Columbia says "interior" they mean anything past the coast mountain range. This is a semi-arid climate that didn't readily support any of BC's large tree species, namely red cedar, douglas fir, and sitka spruce.
It doesn't matter how many pictures from a century ago that you have of big trees inland, or on the west side of the first mountain range. That's not the interior, and isn't relevant.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_sitchensis for more, including a map of its range.
Sequoia Gigantis, on the western slope of the mid Sierra, is brittle and not very practical to log.
(please pardon my Latin spelling. English spelling gives me a rough time....)
What I mean is: You look at paintings from 100, 150 years ago of Western MA and it's farmland ... farmland everywhere. Before and kinda-sorta after, it's woodland. Take a walk through and there's dilapidated stone fences from the farms. Beforehand, of course, pure "virgin forest".
If Japan is at least vaguely similar in terms of de- and re-forestation, are there artifacts running through the re-forestation areas of the de-forestation period?
If our greatest environmental efforts can at best end in failure, then those efforts are wasted and we're better off taking no action.
We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors. There was never a promise that planting trees would make carbon emissions irrelevant (or plastic in the oceans or...)
My understanding is that it's like taking a cancer treatment, and the cancer is unaffected, but at least we got free t-shirts from the cancer clinic.
>We are in a worse state not because of the additional trees, but because of other behaviors.
The article says the new trees and forests are not equivalent to the used trees and previous forests:
>Tree cover is not necessarily forest cover. Industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates, and other non-natural "planted forests" qualify as tree cover. For example, cutting down a 100-hectare tract of primary forest and replacing it with a 100-hectare palm plantation will show up in the data as no net change in forest cover: the 100-hectare loss is perfectly offset by the 100-hectare gain in tree cover. That activity would be counted as "deforestation" by the FAO. Therefore, tree cover loss does not directly translate to deforestation in all cases.
To date, this may be true.
But human cultivaiton _can_ result in an increase in biodiversity and ecological productivity vs non-intervention.
This generally looks like gardening instead of monoculture agriculture.
It may be the case that the biodiversity and ecological productivity of the amazon rainforest was greatly aided by human cultivation. See:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/925
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-...
??? "I'm going to die someday, so I might as well subsist on nothing but sugar and alcohol 'til then?"
Anyway, characterizing our efforts as "greatest" is far too generous. They were the efforts we gave. Not the greatest possible efforts that could be given. If biodiversity were the priority, we would have solved this problem.
There isn't. Once evolutionary processes churn out a species capable of pullulating, at the cost of other species, essentially without limit, the die is cast. The notion that 'we' can 'decide' to escape this biological heritage is just another case of the old superstition: that humans magically transcend the physical world. Just as some tree species may be stripped and killed by a beetle new to the region, our planet's current ecosystems will be destroyed by Homo sapiens. New ecosystems will develop over millennia. Human history will cease. There will be no lamentations.