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Canada's forests emit more carbon than they absorb
- xeromal 8y agoI wonder if petrifying trees after they absorbed CO2 would help our emissions problems?
- vkou 8y agoYes, it would. But if you are turning trees into coal, and burying them, why on Earth are you also digging up coal, to burn it? Sequestration is going to be far more work then simply not generating emissions in the first place.
- maerF0x0 8y agoTell me if this is incorrect thinking: An advantage of sequestration is location. Something like you can emit the CO2 in a distributed manner (think car tail pipes) and then sequester it nearby but in aggregate (think a facility just outside city limits)
- vkou 8y agoThe problem is that, in a market economy, like the one we live in, we can dig up and burn coal much faster then we can grow and bury trees. Coal can be mined for $30/tonne. That's 3 cents/kilogram. At that price point, it's nearly free. How can you keep up with sequesteration, when you are competing with nearly-free? Sequestration makes sense when we are talking about an economy that derives ~5-10% of its energy from liquid fossil fuels, and everything else from renewables. It doesn't make much sense when 50% of energy generation comes from fossil fuels. It's just too labour intensive to make it work.
- int_19h 8y agoNot just a market economy - a market economy that does not account for externalities, like carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
- benchaney 8y agoWe need to do both in order to prevent a civilization ending catastrophe. Sequestration has the advantage of allowing our net carbon output to be negative. Obviously getting to zero is the first goal, but we are already past the point where that would be enough.
- loeg 8y ago> why on Earth are you also digging up coal, to burn it? That is a good question regardless.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- throwaway5752 8y agoIf you could do that in a net energy negative way that would be something.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- saalweachter 8y agoNo; petrified wood is the same as other fossils: it is minerals, such as silica, which has filled in the void in the earth left after the organic material has decayed. You can still bury the wood in an environment that does not allow it to (quickly) decay, or you can simply make a lot of stuff out of wood. (If you go the second route, you'll want to ensure that your wood structures last a long time, you'll want to increase the total wood sitting around in the world, and once you reach a new plateau in the amount of wood products in semi-permanent existence, you'll stop sequestering new CO2 via the process of consumerism, new products and structures will just be re-sequestering the carbon lost from old structures and products as they decay or are destroyed.)
- int_19h 8y agoHow long they decay wouldn't matter that much if you have the disposal process. The amount you'd end up processing every year would still be the same (reflecting total usage at any given isntant) once you get past the initial ramp-up.
- saalweachter 8y agoThe duration is important because you can only grow and harvest a finite amount of wood each year, because trees can only grow so fast. So if you harvest the maximum amount of wood possible each year, W, and it lasts for 10 years, you have sequestered 10 x W units of carbon; if you use it in ways that lasts 20 years before it needs to be replaced, you have sequestered 20 x W units of carbon.
- papercrane 8y agoYes, one of the proposed sequestering techniques is to produce and sequester biochar, essentially charcoal produced from biomass.
- opwieurposiu 8y agoIn the Carboniferous period[2], plants evolved lignin which made their cell walls stronger so they could grow taller. Fungi that could eat lignin had not evolved yet and so the the dead trees just built up layer after layer. This build up eventually turned into the coal we mine today. Turning trees into charcoal[1] is one way to slow down the processes of the wood turning back into CO2, but it would be difficult to do it on a large enough scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous
- ainiriand 8y agoWell, then it is not the forest itself. It is the humans managing the forest, if I've understood correctly.
- sometimesijust 8y agofta, recent fires and pests.
- Varcht 8y agoCaused by global warming (human?), fta.
- sometimesijust 8y agoThe term "global warming" appears nowhere in tfa. That of course does not mean it isn't the case but it does mean that you are mistaken.
- Varcht 8y agoYou are correct, I misattributed the top comment as part of the article, was an honest mistake. "Old growth forests tend to exist in a carbon steady state; younger, growing forests tend to be net carbon uptakers. This situation is due to natural disturbance regimes in forests, like fire and pine beetle, having historically signifiant impacts in large part because of climate change."
- csours 8y agoSemi-serious question: should a country have to account for volcanos in its territory as well?
- tomp 8y agoDo volcanos emit CO2?
- sometimesijust 8y agoYes but they also emit ash which has cooling effects.
- gotocake 8y agoMore critically, they emit huge amounts of sulphuric compounds, which are what really sick around and tend to cooling. Unfortunately when those same compounds don’t reach high altitudes, you get a lot of acid rain. All told however, their net effect is strongly cooling over the first few years, and then milde cooling over longer time frames.
- airstrike 8y agoFantastic, thanks for the explanation. Can you please point me to a source? Need to send it to my dad who taught me everything I know but has now turned into a climate change denialist who says it's all a globalist / marxist / leftist plot to make money off solar panels.
- gotocake 8y agoAbsolutely, and I wish you the best of luck in representing your views to your father. I know how painful such a disconnect can be. This is a good intro to the broad issue of volcanoes and climate: http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volcanoes/vclimate.html http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volcanoes/vclimate.html A more in-depth treatment of sulfur aerosols in the upper atmosphere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosols https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosol... Here’s a breakdown of all the gasses typically releases during eruptions and their various effects: http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/gas.htm If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.
- GhostVII 8y agoI don't think this should be too surprising. Forests don't destroy carbon, just store it in the form of trees. When the trees decompose, or burn down, it is released again. So for a mature forest you would expect it to have around net 0 emissions. As far as I know the main way a forest can be a carbon sink is if it is expanding, which I don't think Canada's forests are doing.
- gumby 8y agoApparently most people don't understand this! There's a net loss of planting new trees, but then as you say you get stasis.
- munk-a 8y agoYou don't get stasis, but the rate of carbon absorption drops, when trees die in the forest some of the carbon that was sequestered gets retained in the soil, most will decompose back into the atmosphere but the slow growth of soil in a forest is tied to nutrients that are being isolated out of the environmental cycle.
- mpg33 8y agoYou'd think large forest fires would have an impact though in terms of the regrowth.
- CGamesPlay 8y agoTree growth and forest fires are just moving carbon back and forth between the air, soil, and trees. You can’t simply “destroy” the carbon, you have to keep it somewhere. Similarly, humans aren’t “creating” carbon, we are just taking it out of the oil it was in and putting it into the air.
- agumonkey 8y agois it ? I thought it was mostly digested by fungi / bacteria / insects without re-emitting it
- praptak 8y agoPeservation of mass holds as it always did. The forest only absorbs CO2 if the total mass of the trees grows. For a mature foest this is usually not the case.
- asdff 8y agoTrees don't stop growing. Trees also die, fall to the forest floor, and a % of the carbon is released as CO2 during decomposition but the remaining % is retained as soil. The coal we mine to burn is from the retained % of ancient forests. The oil we drill to burn is from the retained % of algae and plankton that ended up trapped under rock and essentially pressure cooked into oil.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- soVeryTired 8y agoTL;DR: stock vs. flow.
- nakedrobot2 8y agofun fact: many trees at around 30 years of age, become carbon positive, releasing more carbon than they absorb.
- itry2develop 8y agoGlobal warming and rising sea levels predicted in the 90's hasnt happened. We won't all die because of the gas you are currently exhaling and what makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere....
- hackbinary 8y agoI'm not sure what the author is playing at, but I think at the very least he is trying to be a bit clever. His argument is based upon that forest biomass is shrinking and therefore forest are causing CO2 emissions: "When you add up both the absorption and emission, Canada's forests haven't been a net carbon sink since 2001. Due largely to forest fires and insect infestations, the trees have actually added to our country's greenhouse gas emissions for each of the past 15 years on record." Forest only reduce CO2 when they photosynthesising, so if the forests are being killed by fire or insects, then the forests are not ingesting CO2 but are expelling. They way this article is titled leads one to believe that forests are causing the problem and that it is implicitly okay to be reducing forest biomass. I think the title is misleading and disingenuous.
- mywittyname 8y agoIt's difficult to fit nuance into such a small title. And titles are not supposed to convey the entire message -- if they did, what would be the point of the article? I understand where you are coming from, but that title is pointed, topical, and expanded upon in detail throughout the article.
- airstrike 8y ago"Damage to Canada's forests makes them emit more carbon than they absorb" T,FTFY
- jfrankamp 8y agoAnd the forest fires and beetle vulnerability are not unrelated to current climate change (at least in California last I read), so that might help close the non-anthro-centricity argument they are using for different accounting methods.
- mywittyname 8y agoYeah, I'll concede that's pretty good.
- ElijahLynn 8y ago