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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

In theory younger trees should consume more CO2 as they are still growing. Older trees that are maintaining a steady state should consume a net of almost 0 CO2.

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Exactly. That’s why sustainable forestry is a great way to capture both CO2 and building materials, which will store the carbon for decades.

It's not all about CO2, preserving habitats and biodiversity is another concern.

There’s a lot of underhandedness in how climate change is marketed to mass audiences that I think we could do without.

We’re in the midst of the 6th known extinction event, which is caused by human activity. I’m sorry if the “marketing” seems underhanded.

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.

But the 100 year old tree that was removed (and everything growing on it and in the soil near it) added a lot of CO2 to the air, and it's unlikely that was grows back now will be as rich in biodiversity and CO2 binding capacity than the old one.

Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon is in the 100 year old tree and when it's cut down and turned into something it's still there. So that carbon is sitting the walls of a house, furniture, or sheafs of paper, isn't it?

Disregarding cutting the tree down to just burn it for heat, obviously.

Yes, if it's in a house or furniture it will be safe for a while longer.

> Older trees that are maintaining a steady state should consume a net of almost 0 CO2.

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.

The CO2 is only released if we burn them. If we use the wood for building materials or other goods with long-term storage, the carbon continues to be locked up.

And if we let them growing and rooting for another 100 years instead we would have a much faster CO2 sink.

Many trees grow continuously until they literally kill themselves with unsustainable weight.

Big trees likely add more biomass per year than young trees

I would expect plants to genetically encode growth limits, because a mature tree that continues to stand and produce seed will reproduce more than one that falls over prematurely because it never stopped growing.

Does any life form on Earth grow indefinitely?

This would not matter, because a dozen of those trees still weight like 0,00001% of what the old tree has stored.

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