4 ms·

Serious question. Why not just plant a shit load more trees?

• dalbasal 9y ago
  Costs at scale, mostly. Algea grows faster and doesn't require land.
  • bamboozled 9y ago
    Honestly, how expensive is it to plant trees? I'm sure a LOT of people would be interested in volunteering for that and while the military is not fighting people they could be fighting climate change, with trees!
• DennisP 9y ago
  There's not enough room to plant that many trees. There have been studies on just how much it would take, and it would have a huge impact on food production and biodiversity. Meanwhile, worldwide we're losing trees to deforestation, drought, forest fires, disease, etc. I'm not saying trees can't be part of the solution, they should be, but we can't "just" plant trees.
• hwillis 9y ago
  The total amount of CO2 we have added to the atmosphere is ~1 trillion tonnes[1], or 280 billion tonnes of carbon. That's roughly equal or at least similar to the mass of all of the carbon in plant and animal life on land. Obviously it's impossible to double the amount of plants, animals and bacteria on land. If you add in oceanic biomass, we'd only have to increase biomass by 25% overall. This is is still practically impossible and we are at a historic loss of biomass and biodiversity. Ocean acidification also makes this impossible. The scale of global warming is entirely beyond planting trees or anything else. There are 3000 tonnes of CO2 in the air for every person on earth. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#Current_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...