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Very interesting article. Quote: Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers
by oori 7y ago
Very interesting article. Quote:
Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled.
Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.
- mrob 7y agoEven if there's no demand for wood, the trees should still be harvested because they can be pyrolized to produce fuel gas/oil and biochar. About 50% of the carbon can be converted to biochar, which is both a valuable soil amendment and a way to long-term sequester carbon such that it can't be easily extracted. And the carbon released by burning the remainder would have been released to the atmosphere away as the trees decayed, so it's better it does something useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
- YayamiOmate 7y agoDo you say its an efficient battery for solar power?
- mrob 7y agoMy guess is probably not, because photosynthesis is not very efficient. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency But if the trees are already grown then I think we should use them, and not just leave them to rot.
- quixoticelixer- 7y agoThat's not quite true, it takes a lot longer than 80 years for forests to stop sequestering CO2, even for fast growing species.
- ARandomerDude 7y agoI don't think that was the argument. OP was saying after maturity the scales tip to being net emitters.
- quixoticelixer- 7y agoThey don't really ever change to be net emmitters, and it takes a long time for them to stop absorbing carbon ( a few hundred years)
- benj111 7y agoDo you have a source? Because you're directly contradicting the article.
- aukust 7y agoAnecdotal evidence suggests to me that European spruce stores more CO2 than it sheds way over 80 years old as a spruce grows in mass significantly decades after reaching that age. However here is a study that tries to bring some light to carbon pools on over-mature 167-213 year-old trees: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf
- bryanlarsen 7y agoAnecdotal evidence tells me that spruce trees are really good at suppressing undergrowth due to their acidic needless so claiming a mature first is a net emitter makes sense to me. The trees may be growing, but nothing else is.
- quixoticelixer- 7y ago
- YayamiOmate 7y agoIts an obvious tautology to me. If you allow decomposition then obvioisly net must be zero. If you createa object and destroy it, it pretty much has to release its source material in some form. If tree stops growing it obviously has to have zero net. Anything absorbing anything has either to store it - grow, or release it in some form. Carbon is element, what are the options? Store it permanently, transform chemically and release, or transform it atomically and change the element but tree is not a nuclear plant.
- TomMarius 7y agoAs long as it's wood, it's emission negative
- mistrial9 7y ago.. it is not "plummeting demand" .. it is a bump in the massive consumption growth curve of the modern age.. aside from that, all paths need to be considered.
- mywittyname 7y agoGovernments should pay to have the mature trees harvested, then tossed into some body of water, and eventually covered with dirt. At that point, the carbon sequestration will last for a 1000+ years. Should demand ever increase, then the felled trees could be reharvested, cured, then used as normal.