Or about one air passenger trip to Europe.
("just plant trees" is not a viable solution to climate change unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity)
("just plant trees" is not a viable solution to climate change unless you can plant a very large number of trees which live to maturity)
and what, then? When plants die, their matter is decomposed by fungi and all their carbon is released back into the atmosphere (unless the dead plant matter is buried).
The act of planting trees, in itself, is carbon neutral. Not good, not bad, just irrelevant to the presence of carbon: the carbon is still in the cycle of life within the biosphere.
To reverse the burning of fossil fuels, all that new carbon that we introduced into the biosphere needs to be buried back to where it came from. For example, by cutting trees and burying their wood in sealed mines several kilometers underground.
It's at least a method of buying time, but maybe not so reliable. It presumes no one will find a way to cut them down for profit later. So maybe we'd need to add each tree planted to a growing count of trees "never to be cut" in the country.
Isn't this a little like saying that humans in a confined space don't actually use up any of the oxygen, because it's still technically present in the CO2 they exhale?
> For example, by cutting trees and burying their wood in sealed mines several kilometers underground.
What would be the net benefit of treating it like radioactive waste versus using it as a construction material? Yes, a small percentage of the carbon would escape, but most of it would stay locked up in the wood, and one wouldn't create the massive amounts of CO2 necessary to build and operate those hypothetical mines.
Not the same as Sequoia wood, which is famously wonderful for construction!
Man, that was just a silly example to illustrate the absurdity of the situation. We are currently unearthing millions of years worth of sequestered carbon per year and dumping it all into the atmosphere. Talking about planting trees is ridiculous at this point. Like pumping water out of the sinking titanic with a champagne glass. If we don't want to increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere we just need to stop putting it in!
I wonder how feasible it would be to put wood (from particularly dense species ?) on the bottom of the expanding anoxic ocean zones ? That seems to be one of the rare locations where the only thing that could possibly degrade it are sulphur-"breathing" bacteria, which seem to have trouble digesting lignin ?
But even here, it might still be easier to just stop burning fossil fuels ? EDIT : ninjaed
P.S.: For an opposite example, see how concrete reabsorbs over decades back up to half of the CO2 exhaled during its production.
P.P.S.: Supposedly, soil-buried charcoal is also decently stable, I guess even fungi find it unpalatable ??
Why does every measure have to solve the problem? Buying time is just as important. We start mammoth groves now. Buy time for measures that solve the problem and win huge ressources (building wood, recreational space, erosion prevention) for the future.
It's planting the entirety of the UK, every year, indefinitely. It's employing a few million people with heavy machinery to walk from one side of the planet to the other and bulldoze every farmhouse they find, leaving behind mixed saplings at a wide spacing in the fields.
It's just way easier to decarbonize most of our society than it is to spend the land on forest carbon fixation. It's a lot of land, more land than we'd ever agree to dedicate.
And I would point out that planting trees and then sequestering that carbon periodically with charcoal production is by far the easiest way. Every other technique is ten or a hundred or a thousand times lower payoff.
If you want to slow things down, you have to mostly stop burning fossil fuels. We need to tax the hell out of them, we need to shut down new projects, we need to electrify anything feasible, we need to heavily subsidize and aggressively plan for rapidly scaling renewables. When we're at a 90% reduction in fossil fuel usage, then we can re-assess priorities because we've both "bought some time" and eliminated all the low-hanging fruit that's easier than deliberate carbon fixation projects.
More likely, we'll keep on steamrolling ahead, and something like sulfur geoengineering will be put forward as a way to stave off the worst effects for a while.
Redwoods can give us a few thousand years to sort that out before they decompose.
And this is technologically a big problem because...? Dig a hole and put a seed and pay somebody to watch it for several years is too difficult when our societies are at stake?
Because some people can't avoid to satisfy their chomp-burn-boycott-my-own-future rash?... No problem. This people needs mental help, and society can provide it. Keep them far away from nature.
Ecological systems don't show linear responses. Tiny increases or decreases in a variable can trigger huge changes. Even a partial improvement counts. In the worst case could give us a lot of extra time to have a second chance to try.
Planting trees will not mean that we will survive, just that our chances to survive will increase. It still seems a valuable goal.
OP says 85 kg/year of Carbon per really big tree.
The first calculator I tried said a one way trip from NYC to London on a 787 is over 1000 kg of CO2: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=67960...
Now, C is about 25% of the weight of CO2, so this would be 250 kg of Carbon. Is the calculator overestimating? Is my math wrong? Am I interpreting you wrong? Or are you low by a factor of 3?
Maybe. My own calculus gives a first approximate value of 50Kg of Carbon for the same trip NY-London (approx 5570Km) in optimum conditions. The calculators forget also that sometimes tail winds can help, so is just an unsophisticated raw average.
In any case nothing prevent us to design hybrid planes to reduce the fuel consume. A turbine is just a motor so can be built in several different ways. And we could try also both things, hybrid planes and helping forests at the same time.