Tree <> Tree
Meaning: a 4 year old tree in the Amazon is not equivalent to a 100 year old tree in the Amazon.
We might have more trees, but I doubt we have the same CO2 recycling capacity that we had 35 years ago.
Meaning: a 4 year old tree in the Amazon is not equivalent to a 100 year old tree in the Amazon.
We might have more trees, but I doubt we have the same CO2 recycling capacity that we had 35 years ago.
Oil is predominately captured algae that died, sank to the bottom of the ocean, and was sealed in by salt deposits/other nonpermeable layers. Coal is carbon captured by trees, but it only formed in a relatively narrow period after cellulose evolved but before bacteria/fungus evolved to eat it. Oil will continue to form, but it's unlikely any new coal will form in the future.
Disregarding cutting the tree down to just burn it for heat, obviously.
Big trees likely add more biomass per year than young trees
Does any life form on Earth grow indefinitely?
If humans don’t mitigate climate change and habitat destruction, life on earth will get a lot harder.
I’m sorry that the marketing isn’t convenient for you.
They are a storage of CO2. If we replaced all old trees with new ones we will gain a lot of potential for CO2 capture but at the cost of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere.
You are right. But I think that the point was to notice that we may have lost many good trees even if we are trying to add new ones.
Is canopy reasonable enough after a certain percent increase (say, 5% increase)? We are talking about percentages of the Earth's dry land, so nontrivial certainly.
Does not seem like an impossible task, I see two preliminary ways at least to attack the problem, but probably both will be wrong and is not my job to measure this without resources in any case
Ah, I misunderstood. I thought perhaps you had some insight here based on your insistence that canopy is a bad metric.
So canopy is definitely measurable at low-ish cost via satellite monitoring. I would presume it wouldn't be hard to add reasonable time-series based assumptions on new growth and make calibration adjustments that take into account the evolution.
Going into a forest and sampling, everywhere, is going to be cost inefficient relative to a model that can be based on canopy and calibrated on sub-samples of forest sampling, both historical and recent expeditions.
At least, that's how folks who would do this kind of job would likely approach it, based on my experience in similar domains. When it comes to funding, academia is a brutal place where resources are slim. Obvious adjustments are the next-best low hanging fruit to original development -- so a direct canopy measure would next likely be iterated to account for new-ness of forest and carbon sequestration calibration.
eg, Younger forests are not as productive as older forests when it comes to carbon sequestration.
Maybe not.