This is only true if you look at short term. In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE.
For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever. For these sequoias the future is either they burn or they fall down and rot. In both cases the carbon is released.
If that spike further prevents the cycle from continuing (because the Sequoia can no longer grow in sufficient time scales) then you suddenly have a net release that will not be recaptured.
Which is, of course, exactly the point of the article: keeping the carbon trapped in the cycle is the sink.
I don't know your intent, but this seems like a deliberate framing of a technical truth in a particular light in order to downplay consequences. If this isn't your intent; great! But if it is, it's not a responsible way to foster discourse.
We should all exercise maximal humility in dealing with climate change because we are dealing with incredibly complex systems with truly catastrophic implications of making the wrong choice. We need to engage with each other as constructively as possible to any chance of minimizing the harm.
Breaking the cycle is a source, and
strengthening the cycle (increasing its depth) is a sink.
Another common process is run off from rivers getting buried under a continuous stream of silt, and a significant portion of that biomass comes from trees.
Based on this, the more healthy thing to do is plant more and cut down more. And repeat.
In the long term, in other cycles, everyone alive will die, humanity will cease to exist, the sun will supernova, and the universe will contract to a single point (is the last one accurate?).
Meanwhile, sequestering carbon for 2,000 years seems like a useful cycle, and only a "short term" if your community functions on geological timescales. This isn't the grass in your lawn.
> For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever.
This is actually a thing. We just need to stop digging up those old trees.
They participate in a cycle but the cycle grows with time, because you have more organic carbon trapped in alive beings and less in the air, so can trap more and more.
And at long term this trees will move part of this carbon to the soil. Unless we will keep burning the soil like idiots, of course. Anything that will work at short term is extremely valuable at this moment.
CCS (carbon capture & sequestration) is still needed. Even if we stopped emitting GHG today we’ll be above the 1.5 degrees target, but CCS is not a technology that “buys us time” It’s something we use in conjunction with renewable energy resources. CCS isn’t even operating at a large enough scale yet to begin to mitigate or lessen the effects.
I don’t mean to harshly criticize. This idea that carbon capture is a time buying technology is often used as a greenwashing narrative to discourage the adoption or solutions we already have.
Really? What are you thinking of? Wikipedia makes it all sound pretty speculative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
Forests also have excellent effects on local climate and the water cycle, and provides habitat for wildlife and biodiversity. More forests gives us a healthier world.
Forests do use land(that could go to solar energy farms or food farms) and do not sequester as much carbon as CCS. Not that I’m saying “no forests!”. We need them for a lot of other important reasons besides capturing carbon. We could always use policy that discourages wasteful uses of land since we’re definitely not making the best of it in the US at least currently.
I believe there were some efforts to turn oil rigs into carbon capture stations? Might have just been an idea I heard at a research conference though. There’s always more ambitious solar geoengineering methods that if(huge if) pans out require no land.
There's no point in looking at individual trees.
I remember some statistics that humanity is emitting more new carbon into atmosphere every decade that entire mass of biosphere.
So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere.
Even if we somehow got it to double its entire mass (nobody even dreams of that), this would amount to pausing our emissions for a decade.
Didn't understand your point here initially but I think what you mean is - we've significantly outpaced the biosphere's ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not irrelevant, it's overloaded.
It is not overloaded. Trees are not concerned by the extra CO2 in atmosphere.
Biosphere is a cycle, which means that it has net zero effect on the amount of CO2 in atmosphere.
Any CO2 removed from atmosphere is at the same time counteracted somewhere else. Maybe it is burning or rotting or maybe it has been eaten by a breathing and farting camel.
More biomass just means there is more CO2 taken out as well as supplied in.
The only way it can have non-zero effect on the atmosphere is if we are interacting with what is called sequestered carbon.
Humanity is taking out carbon out of long term storage that has been sequestered for millions of years, but there exists no natural process that would counteract it efficiently.
There only exists a number of buffers -- an atmosphere as well as oceans.
A forrest stores carbon as long as the forrest exists, dead trees emit carbon as they die/rot/burn away, living trees store carbon as long as they are alive (and they help maintain the soil where carbon gets stored also)
Once a forrest reach maturity , it will be a store like any other carbon store (but perhaps a fragile one , it can easily be cut or burned down).
Basically, if you remove a forrest (e.g. burn it down), most of the carbon is released into the atmosphere - thus it's a storage keeping the carbon it stored away from the atmosphere.
Forrests store about 400 billion tons of carbon in total , and we emit about 9-10 billtion tons of carbon per year.
(most numbers you find will be of co2, but those 2 oxygen molecules account for quite a bit of the volumn/weight also, so make sure to not mix numbers that account for just carbon with numbers that represents co2 )
Trees and plant matter typically turn into peat and eventually coal.
Basically, they need to be turned into tomorrow’s coal or oil.
You can still get coal made from trees, when a forest fire turns some wood into charcoal and that gets buried in the soil, or under unusual circumstances where a tree gets buried somewhere inhospitable to the microbes that can decompose lignin.
All of these things happen at massive scales, so even though the vast majority of wood does decompose before it can be preserved, even a few percent is probably enough coal to power some future post nuclear apocalypse society's industrial revolution in a few dozen million years time.