6 ms·

Not every year. Given the article's assertion of the 103 tons per acre per year, your Alaska of Empress trees would do it until they all die and presumably thos

by bwanab 7y ago

Not every year. Given the article's assertion of the 103 tons per acre per year, your Alaska of Empress trees would do it until they all die and presumably those forests will be maintained into perpetuity.

_rpd 7y ago
When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. Unless you bury the tree in an anaerobic environment or treat it in some other way, the tree is just a time-delayed release mechanism. New forest can store a buffer in perpetuity, e.g., a new trillion trees can store 133 Gt. But current emissions are > 40 Gt/year, so this is < 4 years worth of emissions.
- duckymcduckface 7y ago
  Makes me wonder if in the future the solution will be to create synthetic crude and pump it back into the ground.
  - tim333 7y ago
    Or just: >Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments as in the article. You could make chunky log cabin type buildings to use more. I'd quite like a log mansion.
  - plutonorm 7y ago
    Maybe this is where the oil came from In the first place. A desperate attempt to dump co2 by a doomed civilisation in the deep past. Obviously not, but could make a good short story :)
  - youngtaff 7y ago
    Make charcoal and then bury it
  - marcusverus 7y ago
    It definitely seems like the ideal solution is bacterial sequestration of carbon into some inert, non-toxic, storable chemical.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. It's not the tree which does that. It's the organisms consuming the tree during the decomposition process which do that. And that doesn't happen all at once. Indeed, if you grow another tree then you're likely to still be net-positive. If you use the tree for other purposes -- construction, for example. Or burning for energy production -- then it becomes a useful part of the lifecycle.
  - ska 7y ago
    > Or burning for energy production Doesn't that just release the C02 again? Construction purposes might help, or any other way of sequestering.
    - ac29 7y ago
      Yes, but its net-zero carbon, so still an improvement over using fossil fuels.
      - robocat 7y ago
        Net-zero CO2. Probably other factors are small, but hard to predict (particulates, volatile chemicals, other effects of growth). Might be positive or negative.
      - ska 7y ago
        Fair, so that implies it doesn't really help, but at least isn't actively making things worse.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  There is a guy here who cuts them down and regrows them from the stumps, selling the timber and feeding stock with the leaves and small branches. Presumably this increases the carbon capture. https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-the-power-of-paulownia-the-fastest-growing-tree-in-the-world/ https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-...
  - quixoticelixer- 7y ago
    Ironically the stored CO2 destroyed the 'civilisation' that fixed it in the first place
nosianu 7y ago
The carbon stored in a tree is proportional to its weight, about half its dry weight is carbon [https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/images/long-content-page/Carbon%2BStored%2Bin%2BTrees%2Bby%2BSize-Table.pdf https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/images/long-conte...]. Also in all those discussions of processes(!) I find people even here seem to be looking at points in time only, and usually at the start of the process. That also includes the issue of looking at just one tree instead of a forest. When you look at the whole system individual tree life cycle doesn't matter any more. Some trees grow old and die or are harvested (what happens?), others grow in their place, overall the forest remains at a pretty stable and fixed weight. Unless you find trees that keep growing for miles and miles higher for thousands of years. Look at total biomass, not at tree life cycles! The equations at that point of a mature forest are balanced. The whole forest stores a fixed amount and that's it. As long as we keep bringing carbon from very ancient forests back out of the earth, it does not matter how many forests there are. You will only get a temporary dip. This whole thing is ridiculous: Even if we decided to bury grown trees deep underground to remove their carbon from the surface forever - why not save the huge effort (and the energy that process needs which again has to be fed somehow - with even more fossil fuels for quite some time to come) and simply leave the ancient forests where they are (deep underground)? You can plant trees as much as you like, as long as we continue to bring up carbon from underground it is useless - apart from a temporary (small) dip. The above-ground forests will never be big enough to compensate for the below-ground forests being brought back up. A quick search shows links and links of opinion and "studies" all about "we can store carbon underground!" Well, wait, what?? I don't get it. - it's already (down) there!! Earth did just that a long time ago! Just stop bringing it up, then you don't need to find ways to get it back down, which according to the laws of physics is a net-negative process. For the same amount somehow stored underground we need far more for the energy to do so, as long as we rely on carbon for energy (which won't change any time soon at scale across the world). And if we don't need the carbon for energy we won't bring it up any more (about three quarters of oil is used for energy or heating, an even higher share of natural gas and coal). I really don't understand the discussion at all. It seems like a great distraction, all those studies and headlines and discussions about storing CO2 underground? For the reason mentioned. After you get it out and burn it (i.e. turned it into CO2), you will need even more of it to get the energy to get it back down where it already was to begin with. Even if we would have 100% solar/wind, the whole scenario does not sound very useful to me at the imagined scale. Even using it as temporary energy store/source for energy demand when wind/solar are not available should be done with what already is above ground, or if it involves a blow-ground cycle it should be one far smaller than the current extraction and the imagined reburying. Having more forests is wonderful for many reasons (even though at this point vast areas are removed - https://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html https://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html). However, the attention it gets as some sort of "solution" for global CO2 levels amazes me (in combination with the fact I just linked even more - stopping what we are doing would be soooo much more impactful, both destruction of current and previous forests above as well as underground).

by bwanab 7y ago

_rpd 7y ago

When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. Unless you bury the tree in an anaerobic environment or treat it in some other way, the tree is just a time-delayed release mechanism. New forest can store a buffer in perpetuity, e.g., a new trillion trees can store 133 Gt. But current emissions are > 40 Gt/year, so this is < 4 years worth of emissions.

duckymcduckface 7y ago
Makes me wonder if in the future the solution will be to create synthetic crude and pump it back into the ground.
- tim333 7y ago
  Or just: >Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments as in the article. You could make chunky log cabin type buildings to use more. I'd quite like a log mansion.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  Maybe this is where the oil came from In the first place. A desperate attempt to dump co2 by a doomed civilisation in the deep past. Obviously not, but could make a good short story :)
- youngtaff 7y ago
  Make charcoal and then bury it
- marcusverus 7y ago
  It definitely seems like the ideal solution is bacterial sequestration of carbon into some inert, non-toxic, storable chemical.
inetknght 7y ago
> When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. It's not the tree which does that. It's the organisms consuming the tree during the decomposition process which do that. And that doesn't happen all at once. Indeed, if you grow another tree then you're likely to still be net-positive. If you use the tree for other purposes -- construction, for example. Or burning for energy production -- then it becomes a useful part of the lifecycle.
- ska 7y ago
  > Or burning for energy production Doesn't that just release the C02 again? Construction purposes might help, or any other way of sequestering.
  - ac29 7y ago
    Yes, but its net-zero carbon, so still an improvement over using fossil fuels.
    - robocat 7y ago
      Net-zero CO2. Probably other factors are small, but hard to predict (particulates, volatile chemicals, other effects of growth). Might be positive or negative.
    - ska 7y ago
      Fair, so that implies it doesn't really help, but at least isn't actively making things worse.
lostlogin 7y ago
There is a guy here who cuts them down and regrows them from the stumps, selling the timber and feeding stock with the leaves and small branches. Presumably this increases the carbon capture. https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-the-power-of-paulownia-the-fastest-growing-tree-in-the-world/ https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-...
- quixoticelixer- 7y ago
  Ironically the stored CO2 destroyed the 'civilisation' that fixed it in the first place

nosianu 7y ago

The carbon stored in a tree is proportional to its weight, about half its dry weight is carbon [https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/images/long-content-page/Carbon%2BStored%2Bin%2BTrees%2Bby%2BSize-Table.pdf https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/images/long-conte...]. Also in all those discussions of processes(!) I find people even here seem to be looking at points in time only, and usually at the start of the process. That also includes the issue of looking at just one tree instead of a forest. When you look at the whole system individual tree life cycle doesn't matter any more. Some trees grow old and die or are harvested (what happens?), others grow in their place, overall the forest remains at a pretty stable and fixed weight. Unless you find trees that keep growing for miles and miles higher for thousands of years. Look at total biomass, not at tree life cycles! The equations at that point of a mature forest are balanced. The whole forest stores a fixed amount and that's it. As long as we keep bringing carbon from very ancient forests back out of the earth, it does not matter how many forests there are. You will only get a temporary dip. This whole thing is ridiculous: Even if we decided to bury grown trees deep underground to remove their carbon from the surface forever - why not save the huge effort (and the energy that process needs which again has to be fed somehow - with even more fossil fuels for quite some time to come) and simply leave the ancient forests where they are (deep underground)? You can plant trees as much as you like, as long as we continue to bring up carbon from underground it is useless - apart from a temporary (small) dip. The above-ground forests will never be big enough to compensate for the below-ground forests being brought back up. A quick search shows links and links of opinion and "studies" all about "we can store carbon underground!" Well, wait, what?? I don't get it. - it's already (down) there!! Earth did just that a long time ago! Just stop bringing it up, then you don't need to find ways to get it back down, which according to the laws of physics is a net-negative process. For the same amount somehow stored underground we need far more for the energy to do so, as long as we rely on carbon for energy (which won't change any time soon at scale across the world). And if we don't need the carbon for energy we won't bring it up any more (about three quarters of oil is used for energy or heating, an even higher share of natural gas and coal). I really don't understand the discussion at all. It seems like a great distraction, all those studies and headlines and discussions about storing CO2 underground? For the reason mentioned. After you get it out and burn it (i.e. turned it into CO2), you will need even more of it to get the energy to get it back down where it already was to begin with. Even if we would have 100% solar/wind, the whole scenario does not sound very useful to me at the imagined scale. Even using it as temporary energy store/source for energy demand when wind/solar are not available should be done with what already is above ground, or if it involves a blow-ground cycle it should be one far smaller than the current extraction and the imagined reburying. Having more forests is wonderful for many reasons (even though at this point vast areas are removed - https://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html https://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html). However, the attention it gets as some sort of "solution" for global CO2 levels amazes me (in combination with the fact I just linked even more - stopping what we are doing would be soooo much more impactful, both destruction of current and previous forests above as well as underground).