this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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So it turns out that trees are actually carbon neutral, and aren’t carbon sinks like previously assumed.
The tree does store co2 in a sense, but as much co2 is also produced by the tree during its life cycle, it’s leafs are eaten by bugs, the leaves that fall to the ground decompose and also provide feed to microorganisms.
Now once the tree is dead, it also decomposes releasing co2 as well as providing food for bugs and organisms that all turn it to co2 as well.
Nature is wonderful, but they were completely wrong about trees scrubbing co2 from the atmosphere.
If the tree dies or is cut down and burnt, then absolutely, yeah. But a tree can survive for many decades, which is time when the CO2 is not in the atmosphere. Ultimately, the solution is to plant more trees and not cut them down until enough CO2 is bound.
You can turn it into biochar. (turn it into carbon) the carbon becomes stable for centuries and you can put it in compost to boost beneficial bacteria, use it to filter runoff, etc. You can just crush it and just throw it on the grass. You get about 50% stable carbon from whatever biomass you use.
A solution for a small but notable chunk of the problem perhaps.
There’s no way that we can solve the entire problem that way.
Before human civilisation trees covered entire nations that are mostly bare today. Humanity cut down a lot of trees during prehistory, and it presumably had an impact on the climate. But it was nothing compared to our fossil fuel burning.
And that’s pretty much the upper limit of what we can dream of achieving, realistically it seems unlikely that the UK will ever go back to mostly woodland, what countries will? Its have to be most of the countries in viable climates, and probably means most farmland, and we’d still just make a small blip compared to the scale of the problem.
Once we’re truly carbon neutral, and we’ve covered the world in trees, we’ll still have more carbon in the atmosphere, a lot more, and I guess a few billion starving people since we’ve turned the farms into forests that can’t sustain our population, and we’d still be a few degrees warmer.
We need a way to turn co2 back to solid carbon that won’t decompose, that’s the only way out long term (lower priority than carbon neutral of course).
Not to say that planting trees is bad or anything, it’s just not a solution to the level of problem we’ve created, it never could be.
You could bury the wood underground where oxygen doesn't reach, or as someone else already suggested, turn it into biochar before you do it.
But whatever we do, we need an efficient way of getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere and there's just no way that we're going to beat trees in that, because it is an endothermic process and whatever machine we might build will require building that machine (at large scale) and will have inefficiencies all over the place.
So, planting as many trees as possible is always the first step we have to take.
Of course, trees should be planted, but the notion that they are an expedient way of decarbonizing the atmosphere is plainly wrong. Had nature optimized plant life to remove carbon from the atmosphere, there would be no CO2, no plants, and the planet would be a snowball instead of the vibrant, warm (too warm) climate we have today. Nature maintains stasis - and therefore life - by avoiding carbon sequestration.
You may have seen the Keeling Curve, the "graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day." Notice that it goes up and then down in Seasonal Variation. This is because, during the summer months in the Northern hemisphere, all the plant life decarbonized the air to form new leaves and greenery. Then, in the winter, all the leaves fell back to the ground where they were consumed by fungi and detrivores and converted back to CO2.
Suppose we stopped producing fossil fuels tomorrow. The Keeling Curve would still have seasonal variation, but it would be against a constant mean, rather than the current rising one. If we then just planted more trees, the seasonal variation would increase, perhaps, but the mean would remain more or less constant. While beneficial, none of the planting would make more than a dent in the hundreds of billions of tons of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. The potential for soil sequestration is on the order of 1 Gt/year.[source] That doesn't mean we shouldn't practice sustainable agriculture and forestry, rather we should, but it won't reduce our carbon debt or start to reverse climate change. Believing that it will is just magical thinking, coincidentally an inadvertent implication of the meme.
Given that nature is (almost) perfectly inefficient at long-term carbon sequestration, it would seem that effective, long-term decarbonization of the atmosphere on any scale short of millennia has to include mechanical means, no matter how inefficient such means may appear.
The thing is, you and everyone arguing against me here, have yet to offer a concrete solution that's better. I don't care how futile trees might be, they're the most efficient, most scalable solution that I'm aware of. And not doing anything due to trees being futile, that's completely fucking pointless, too. If we die, we might as well die fighting, even if it merely makes the remaining years just a little less bad.
You make a good point. If there were no potential solution, trees (i.e. sustainable agriculture) would be the best solution. It would take a few hundred years but we would get back to pre-industrial levels at zero emissions.
The potential solution is direct air capture. Although there are many forms, I am fond of the method proposed by Klaus Lackner. By making a large number of CO₂ scrubbers, as opposed to a few very large ones (like Climeworks), the economics of carbon removal get very easy, very fast.
A 1 m² area that gets an average 2 m/s breeze through it sees about a gram of CO₂ pass through every second. This is about 100 kg of CO₂ per day. So let's make a machine that catches CO₂ from a 2 × 5 m area and catch 1 t per day, or 300 t per year. For this machine to pay off its carbon debt, it's going to need to be around for a while, say 10 years. What happened during those 10 years? 3 kt went out of the atmosphere for good. If you liquefied the CO₂, this would fill 3 McMansions.
Lackner seems to think we can build this machine for $100k. Now we have a price of $30/t of CO₂ captured. As it stands, we need to get about 1,000 Gt of CO₂ out of the atmosphere to stabilize the climate, so we need to build $30T worth of these machines. How could we possibly afford that? Well, we would spend ~$1T on this per year for about 30 years.
Where would that kind of money come from? Sacrifices would be needed, it's true. I think the biggest would be giving up on war. Global defense budgets add up to this scale of funding, and if the nations of the world decided to put an end to war, we could use the peace dividend to pay for the restoration of the climate. Perhaps there wouldn't be any other sacrifices needed at all.
If this seems unrealistic to you, that's ok too. We can still keep war and do things the slow way or (more likely) not do them at all. I suppose a decade-long nuclear winter would also do wonders for global cooling and emission reductions. Personally, though, I would prefer world peace and direct air capture to stabilize the climate.
I think, from your post, you would agree. If we are going to fight, we should fight climate change, not each other, no?
But trees naturally die, they can’t last infinitely, that’s a non existent scenario.
Even if it’s cut down and made into housing, most of it eventually decays (25-30 years usually).
It just doesn’t work in the end.
Are you aware that trees can have offspring and even multiply?
And what do you think happen to those offspring? Eventually it reaches an equilibrium where it produces as much as it scrubs, and eventually as it inevitably does it creates more than it scrubs.
Yes the scientist have thought of this and figured out that it’s carb neutral….
Yes, it will reach an equilibrium if the forest stays the same size, but that equilibrium uses more carbon. If you have a forest where before there was nothing, then you have trees at all different stages of life, all made of carbon.
Every dying tree releasing carbon is replaced by a growing tree absorbing it. The forest is carbon neutral if it's static, absorbs carbon if it grows and emits carbon if it shrinks.
Uhh no, a forest doesn’t need to grow in size to create more co2, don’t forget all the other organisms that get attracted and offset the size. As it grows so does the organisms it attracts, it will always reach an equilibrium, if it grows, more organisms come and consume the “extra” which is no longer extra.
Its not as simple as everyone try’s to make it to try and make it work, which is literally why scientists have started debunking it and trying to stop all of these carb offset scam forests.
Sorry,
What makes the vast majority of carbon offset forests a scam is that they existed beforehand and nobody was planning to cut them down, so no new carbon is being removed.
Yeah, the actual permanent solution would have been to not unearth all that fossil fuel in the first place. The second-best solution is to bind it in trees.
We could try cutting down trees and burying them underground without (much) oxygen. But just having more trees alive at a time is a lot less effort.
Burying it does what? It still decays and releases the co2 eventually. All you would be doing is making it future generations problem, like what we’ve always been doing, so maybe we need to do so thing different…?
Do you not think that’s been thought of and deemed not viable?
They're CO2 storages that can provide fruits, shadow, oxygen and other nice things. That's pretty neat.
Yea CO2 storage and also help cool the vicinity around themselves
Yes temporary, making it a future generations problem… because that’s worked out pretty well so far for our previous generations….
An individual tree is neutral, but a forest is carbon negative as long as it exists.
Untrue.
Just letting a forest grow wild is carbon neutral. The soil reaches a point of saturation. Eventually the dead trees get eaten by detritivores, releasing the captured carbon back into the air.
Keeping it sequestered long term requires burying it deep - the trees would need to be cut down and transported to where bacteria, fungus, and so on can't eat them.
It’s net negative as long as it exists. What I said is true.
It reaches an equilibrium where it’s producing as much as much as its scrubbing at some point though.
And as it dies off it will produce more than it can scrub. All its doing is delaying the issue for someone else to deal with.