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Comment by matco11 | Hacker News Reader

“Cloning” here seems the wrong (click-batey) choice of words.

They have horticulturally propagated redwood trees - that’s a relatively simple technique, commonly used by your average gardener.

What’s special here is that they found which conditions maximize the yield of the redwoods propagation and they are planting colonies of the new trees in areas around the world that offer particularly good/promising climatic conditions.

As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture.

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A plant grown from a cutting is indeed a clone. It is the actual tissue of the original plant, just grown out. Same DNA as the original plant. Only, you use clever techniques to stimulate undifferentiated cells to produce roots.

One of the linked articles, however, shows plants growing in little plastic jars. This looks like "tissue culture", which takes a plant cell sample and causes it to grow in a culture medium. But, still, it's cells from the parent plant grown out.

Exactly. There are many ways plants and even animals reproduce that result in genetically identical offspring and this is generally referred to as cloning.

For bacteria this is usually the normal way of reproducing but it happens in animals like famously sharks. But it happens in chickens, turkeys, reptiles, snakes.

There's also a cool intermediate form, like with plants. Trees and flowers are of course famously both male and female, but usually require sex to reproduce (sex in the sense of contact between male and female reproductive organs, through insects mostly)

There's even controversy because the list of animals that haven't been caught cloning themselves has been growing shorter and shorter over the past 30 years. But of course as soon as anyone points out "given this long list of animals where females can clone themselves, isn't it pretty likely humans do this as well, on occasion", everyone loses their minds (and no, the Jesus argument makes no sense: of course a natural clone is always female).

"As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture."

Maybe ...

I live on a ranch where redwoods grow and I was interested in reforesting some of it in an attempt to offset the carbon emissions of my family, etc.

My very rough back of the envelope calculations suggested that planting 40 coast redwoods would offset the embedded carbon (carbon cost to manufacture) of a pickup truck and its ten year expected fuel use. I chose a pickup truck as a sort-of-worst-case-scenario.

This is workable and we've already started this project, but of course we have three cars so the number is 120 trees for a single family.

I'm not sure how well that scales. Not everyone lives in redwood climate and not everyone has ~20 acres of leftover scrub woods to reforest.[1]

ALSO, and this has been a challenge, those back of the envelope calculations do not take into account the carbon cost of creating the trees in the first place. It seems like a rounding error, and I hope it is, but planting 40 trees involves a bunch of driving around and some earth moving and usually a chainsaw has to come out at some point and then we're buying supplies from a hardware store which were driven there by a truck .... and on and on and on ...

[1] This land was originally redwoods and douglas firs but was denuded of all large trees sometime before WW2 and is now a scrubby mess of bay trees and dying (SOD) oak trees. Planting redwoods is a return to the original landscape...

You might also consider that the vast majority of the offset provided by those trees is in the 9th, 10th years of them being planted. The 20th-30th years for those same trees may be offsetting substantially more (site dependencies not withstanding, etc..).

This usage of the word "cloning" is widespread in the horticultural community, and it's indeed used by your average garden as well.

Yep, even the act of rooting stem cuttings is often referred to as "cloning".

Plants are just a hell of a lot easier to clone than animals.

One of the reasons, there is always some murderous gardener lurking by the greenhouse door, when you visit any botanic garden.

Green thumpers are notorious for taking samples - even from forbidden fruits to grow them at home.

I believe the original meaning of cloning was indeed to grow a plant or a tree from a cutting and such plants are identical to the original — this term is still used in gardening.

Clone is from the Greek klōn, for "twig".

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture.

Also, they're fast growing, so they capture carbon quickly, and store it for a long time. Plus the fact that, if they're harvested, the wood is relatively rot-resistant. So carbon could be stored over even longer periods, if the wood were used for ~permanent structures.

Still, there's something ironic about that way of thinking. Or at least, something anthrocentric. I recall seeing a huge tree in ~coastal Washington, perhaps this Sitka Spruce.[0] And I recall a large sign, which explained how much could be built with it. Arguably the same attitude, but with different goals. Funny.

0) https://www.americanforests.org/big-trees/sitka-spruce-picea...

So if I'm understanding this correctly, we're essentially terraforming Earth...

We have been clear cutting for centuries, we have to learn sooner or later. You know, for when we leave this world polluted to terraform the new one. /s?

I deeply hope that the redwoods of marin county can be restored. The redwood forests of marin are still beautiful, but humans decimated them over the lasr 200 years, and we cant really understand just how magnificent those trees were in the past - trunk diameters of 30+ feet were common in the past.

The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming."

We could add nuclear weapons to that list, if we ever decided to use them.

No, the changes in land use had significant and detectable impacts far before that. The albedo change between forest and fields alone is quite large.

Yeah. The North American "indigenous peoples"[0] transformed huge areas of the Midwest from savannah and sparse forest to open prairie. Basically, they burned every spring. It improved habitat for their game of choice, and made hunting them more convenient.

0) Rather, the first known settlers. But then humans have arguably been settlers everywhere, except for particular parts of Africa.

These are all localized effects. A lot of localized effects can add up to global changes, but they're not the same thing. Terraforming implies global changes.

> The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming."

I must be misunderstanding you; the majority of places in the world today are radically different than they were pre-human. That seems pretty inarguable.

It's death by a thousand cuts though. A bunch of localized effects that add up. That's not "terraforming." No one thing has impacted the entire planet except for fossil fuels. We dispersed a lot of lead globally in the mid 20th century, but that was also fossil fuel related. Plastic buildup in the ocean is also fossil fuel related. And of course the atmospheric changes.

The Romans also did a pretty good job with lead.

Yes, we've been "terraforming" it. But not in a way that's good for us, I think. Not to mention all the other species that have evolved for pre-human conditions. And have increasingly experiencing conditions for which they're not well adapted. Worse, conditions that have been changing far too fast for evolutionary adaptation. Or even mass migration. So they're getting screwed. What we're now calling the Anthropocene Extinction Event.

So perhaps "terraforming" isn't the appropriate term. Maybe more like "un-terraforming". If CO2 goes runaway enough, we might even wipe out enough photosynthetic capacity (especially in the oceans) to undo the Great Oxygenation Event. And make the planet safe for anaerobes again.

It might have also been this one: http://www.oregonphotos.com/Sitka-Spruce.html

-- it was destroyed by a windstorm in 2007, but I believe it did have such a sign before that. Probably all of the "worlds biggest" trees do.

Yes, it was that one. Thanks.

I sort of remember that it was in Oregon, but doubted myself when I found the one in Washington.

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture.

Depends on how you define meaningful.

Worldwide, the total sequestered carbon in plants is equal to about 10 years of human emissions (~45yrs if we are talking net emissions).

If you increase the biomass by a percent or two, you basically buy yourself a few months emissions. Eventually that carbon is going to end up back in the atmosphere, too, but that at least is time shifted out by a few hundred years.

(source: I'm part of a Climate&Energy research group, though this particular subtopic is not my specialty)

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture.

Surely it's not size but speed of growth that matters? Wouldn't forests of Leylandii (a fast-growing conifer that can grow as fast as 1m/year) felled and resowed every few years/decades capture more carbon?

I guess it matters a lot what happens to the grown out wood as well. If it's burned after cutting it down, you're back to zero for that particular tree. So assuming you're not storing large amounts of cut-down wood, the relevant metric is amount of bound carbon per surface area, and I think larger trees might have a higher density (in the long run) than smaller ones.

Coastal redwood lives for a looong time, up to 3000 years. All that carbon is eventually going to go back to the atmosphere one way or another, but the time scale looks long enough to keep some carbon safely sequestered until after we've figured out how to live in harmony with our planet -- assuming we don't manage to kill all the trees in the meantime.

But clones are not the right way, because genetic variability is zero and is easy to obtain and germinate seeds that make a better root system.

No - a large tree grows at lower rates, but puts on much more mass (sequesters much more carbon) per year.

edit: see figure 6 in https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., for example. And http://science.time.com/2014/01/15/study-shows-older-trees-a... (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12914) specifically for redwoods. Key quote: "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"

Found this googling

>Coast redwoods can grow three to ten feet per year.

pretty impressive!

This technique, taking cuttings is surely a form of cloning?

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