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It's not either one solution or another, or what is the best solution, there is not one single solution for solving climate change, it's not that simple. This

• noiv 7y ago
  However, planting all these trees may add enough value to the environment, so that mentioned ANDs are easier to tackle with less resistance.
  • avip 7y ago
    I think what OP argues (and I agree with), is there’s no solution, or even partial mitigation, to climate crisis, wherein we keep the party going and due to some magic science in Alaska things are suddenly ok. This is a lie. If this lie is needed “to get a message across” so be it.
• paulsutter 7y ago
  Nowhere in the article does it suggest abandoning other efforts. Yes of course we should plant all those trees plus every other effort. It’s insane to want to suppress good ideas, i’m not sure you’d accomplishing what you intend with your criticism EDIT: if you don’t like the title, criticize the title. Titles are written by clickbait artists, not the authors
  • Ensorceled 7y ago
    Well, except the actual article's title says planting these trees in this way will stop the climate crisis. They are criticizing this wording. This won't stop the climate crisis but sounds like a great first step.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  I think you're asking the rich to stop being so excessive. Anyone who is both intelligent and poor is not spending 500 dollars for meat in any given month. Myself, I think maybe I eat 2 cheeseburgers a year.
  • magashna 7y ago
    Individually, even most of the rich don't directly pollute so much as entire industries. On the HN front page there's an article stating that shipping companies have collectively spent $12 billion to cheat and instead of polluting the air, they pollute directly into the sea while technically adhering to standards.
    • refurb 7y ago
      Who do you think directly benefits from that industrial pollution? Consumers.
      • lonelappde 7y ago
        But the solution for consumers is for the industry to be tighter regulated and pay more for goods, not for consumers to become ascetics. Consumers can't simply make industry change how they serve other consumers. You can't stop murder simply by waiting for anti-murder people to stop murdering.
        • refurb 7y ago
          My point is more around who benefits. It’s not industry alone. And I would argue consumers have a very big impact on how industry acts. There are a number of environmentally friend products offered that are regulatory requirements at all.
      • 8note 7y ago
        I would have said share holders
        • 7y ago
• EdwardDiego 7y ago
  > We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before Okay, but removing 2/3rds of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere strikes me as a damn good start.
  • perfunctory 7y ago
    Just want to note that while 2/3 sounds like a lot it only refers to the CO2 released so far, not the future emissions, which keep increasing exponentially. There is no alternative to eliminating emissions. Having said that, sure, let's plant more trees. edit: just to add some numbers for the context. > Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution. Given the current emissions rate of ~10Gt (assuming no increase), the amount captured by these new trees will be re-added in just 20 years, and will keep growing afterwords.
    • imtringued 7y ago
      The bigger problem is that it's an absurd amount of trees.
      • salfield 7y ago
        Why absurd? We've removed 3 trillion trees since the beginning of agriculture and replanting 1 trillion is absurd? Or do you think its infeasible? Estimated cost is a few hundred billion dollars. A lot cheaper than most methods of carbon sequestration. It also has the benefit that it could restore ecosystems if done well. People who focus just on carbon emissions miss that the are more systemic problems with destroying ecosystems i.e. in the long term biosphere collapse. The larger problem is that it takes 50 years (or longer) for most of the carbon sequestration to happen. https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/ https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/
        • prolepunk 7y ago
          Let's also not forget how many seasonal jobs in rural areas this will create.
• vinceguidry 7y ago
  Climate change has a very simple cause, CO2 emissions. Should stand to rain that the resolution can be similarly easy. I for one, want to get past this so we can move on to fixing our society.
  • yifanl 7y ago
    Simple doesn't mean easy, unfortunately. There's more than a few sources of CO2 emissions, and some of the significant ones arent even (directly) manmade.
    • EdwardDiego 7y ago
      You're talking clathrates?
      • collyw 7y ago
        Volcanoes emit CO2
  • cardamomo 7y ago
    Reining in emissions and fixing our society are not separate issues. The scale of the change needed to substantially reduce or eliminate CO2 and methane emissions is huge.
  • LimKruscal 7y ago
    Maybe it is more complex to deal with the causes of CO2 emissions. Some places in the world like Africa, East Asian have numerous power plants emitting tons of CO2 to the air and there are no simple substitutes to them because of lack of budget. Also if simply enforce those countries to ban factories would cause a rising of unemployment.
• 11235813213455 7y ago
  Exactly, we need to consume less, a lot less. Personally I've already started since a decade a minimalist lifestyle. I also plant trees when I go riding and hiking, even if it seems insignificant
  • collyw 7y ago
    Or stop producing as many people might be a better option. I mean we could all live like caged hens and keep adding to our numbers for a while longer, but eventually there are going to be some hard limits to how many people the ecosystem can actually hold.
    • 11235813213455 7y ago
      Birth rates are dropping. Consuming less seems like the best short-term solution before hopefully reaching a new world population balance (I hope there could be a sort of global birth control)
  • kaybe 7y ago
    How and where do you do that, do you plant seeds or saplings? On whose lands?
    • 11235813213455 7y ago
      I live in the south-east of France. I started to simply collect seeds along hike paths and public spaces, where they wouldn't have the opportunity to grow, and either throw them or plant them farther where vegetation is more poor, dry, and decreasing year after year That can be oak, hackberry, pine, fig trees seeds or cuttings. I clear up the ground around, uprooting a few weeds, and leaving them at the top with dead branches under, I think it helps keeping moisture, and hope it'll grow. I'll monitor the results Also I eat a lot of fruits (bought at supermarket, produced in France or Italy), I keep their pits and seeds (peaches, apricots, clementines, mandarines, oranges, lemon, peppers, and other green garbage, and bury them in those places (instead of throwing them away in the garbage bin). They might not be able to grow, but at least it should be interesting for the soil life and it saves up garbage bins weight, etc..
• harimau777 7y ago
  That's a good point. I think you are definitely correct. However, I think it's also true that some of the other solutions are likely to happen "on their own" eventually. E.g. technological advancements in alternative energy and electric cars are likely to eventually allow them to replace alternatives (if the environment survives long enough). A lot of the other parts of the solutions don't have good ways to accomplish them. For example, I don't see a good way to reduce travel or population growth.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• Chazprime 7y ago
  We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before, growing to 10 billions and beyond. I don't think that's implied here. Clearly there's a lot to be done, this is just a good place to start.
  • Ensorceled 7y ago
    > I don't think that's implied here. Clearly there's a lot to be done, this is just a good place to start. The title is literally saying exactly that, it's not implied, it's explicitly said: Scientists Identify How Many Trees to Plant and Where to Stop Climate Crisis Planting those trees is NOT going to stop the climate crisis, a large number of other things need to be done too.
    • Chazprime 7y ago
      Read the article; it's stated quite clearly that this is just a way to combat climate change.
      • Ensorceled 7y ago
        I read the article. The title is part of the article. That part of the article says "stop climate crisis". That part of the article is dangerously wrong in the way the OP said.
• rayiner 7y ago
  It’s probably not a “do all the things” solution, because (1) we won’t do those things; (2) trying to do those things will lead to undesirably high levels of government regulation of private behavior. The authoritarian infrastructure will be built, but it will fail because it will be diverted to ends other than addressing climate change. You can already see this happening with the Green New Deal and Global Climate Strikes. The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program. (Which is deeply ironic, because the Soviet Union was immensely energy inefficient and polluting, as a result of populist measures such as subsidized energy. Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output.) The Green New Deal, together with the climate strikes have become vehicles for socialist ideology. For example, despite experts broadly agreeing that we need things like carbon taxes, the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change. Carbon capture and cheap nuclear power can solve climate change, and we can do it without world government. (To many people, that second part is a downside, I think, which is why technological solutions to climate change get less emphasis than political solutions.)
  • cardamomo 7y ago
    But government already has a hand in influencing private behavior by regulating industries. Think of what would change if American farmers were no longer incentivized to produce corn, soy, and dairy. Or if gas prices reflected the full monetary and ecological cost of oil.
  • adrianN 7y ago
    Do you have a source for Global Climate Strike rejecting a carbon price? The movement here in Germany seems to be generally in favor, since the experts are generally in favor and FFF for example explicitly asks politicians to finally listen to the experts. Wrt cheap nuclear solving climate change: Nuclear is currently one of the most expensive forms of energy. How do you propose we make it cheap enough so that we can essentially waste the energy for unburning coal we could have left in the ground by a more aggressive buildout of renewables paired with improving energy efficiency?
    • eukgoekoko 7y ago
• lazysheepherd 7y ago
  This. Climate Crisis is a result of behavior that regards environment as infinite while it is definitely not. And Climate Crisis is just one of the symptoms. World's ecosystem is a multifaceted, wastly complex, richly interconnected and very reactive structure. We as species WILL NOT get away with having power of a bulldozer and mind of a dragonfly[1]. A question: Considering human biology and mind, can human species ever collaborate and act together for a logical cause? I have almost lost all my confidence that we have that ability/function. I really would like to hear your perspective on this. [1]: https://youtu.be/Y0vRupFPw90 https://youtu.be/Y0vRupFPw90
• p0nce 7y ago
  The fallacy is thinking finding a solution prevents from doing the other solutions. You are just confused.
• corodra 7y ago
  While I do agree with you for the most part, theres a few things I think are worth taking away. First, there's no harm in the fact that we need to plant more trees. Would we ever achieve the amount needed as stated here? Hell no. But it at least shows we do need to be serious and replant trees. Edit: For the most part there's no harm in planting trees as long as they're appropriate for the ecosystem, both type and density. One thing the article doesn't talk about, an Amazon forest can be denser per acre while a pacific northwest forest has to be thinner. Due to both pests and wildfire management. I also figure soil fertility too, but I don't have the data for that one. I think the most valuable take away, the amount of trees needed is a good way to visualize the extent of the problem. Mentioning that we pump however many billion pounds of, essentially "smoke", is meaningless to most people. To be fair, it's hard to wrap your head around the weight of a gas for 80% of the population, let alone how much is bad. But 80% of people can understand, we fucked so bad, we need to plant an extra 1 trillion plus trees to start fixing those problems. That's somewhat easier to understand. It's just more tangible for people to think about. Super accurate, no. But it's more about getting people's head around the problem to understand the extent of work needed. "Wow, 1 trillion trees. That's a lot. Is there anything we can do that's easier, but can lower that by 1 billion trees?" "Why yes, we can do..." "What else can we do so we don't have to plant another 1 billion?"
  • kaybe 7y ago
    Also: These trees take decades to grow, at least, and will have to be protected from fires (which are only getting worse) and logging basically forever.
    • corodra 7y ago
      The best info I can find, trees soak up ~45 pounds (tops) of CO2 in a full year after it's about 10 years old in optimal conditions. Different trees, different amounts along with growing conditions. That's just optimal hopes and dreams after 10 years since germination.
    • vonmoltke 7y ago
      > will have to be protected from [...] logging basically forever Not really, as long as the lumber is used for durable purposes and the trees are replanted after cutting.
• RmDen 7y ago
  See Project Drawdown https://www.drawdown.org/ https://www.drawdown.org/ click on View The Solutions to see the different things all of us can do in addition to planting trees
• Lendal 7y ago
  Demanding multiple extreme lifestyle changes from billions of people—most of whom don't like you and won't listen—seems like would make for the least effective and most damaging of all the available solutions. I prefer solutions that involve changing the least number of stubborn and uneducated minds, and offer the most upside. Like industries that are run by professionals and are already accustomed to high regulatory requirements. Energy and construction industries seem like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, just for starters.
• bjornsing 7y ago
  If I play devils advocate here for a moment: Why is it that everybody is so interested in “lifestyle” changes, and so uninterested in things like OP or Project Vesta [1]? I sometimes get the feeling that some people just see this whole climate thing as a good opportunity to force their (pre-existing) values/virtues on others... 1. https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/
  • dashundchen 7y ago
    I wouldn't say people are uninterested, I would say we need to do more than hope for "silver bullet" technology solutions to address the problem after the fact. Especially when it involves geoengineering on a scale orders of magnitude larger than have ever been attempted, and doesn't address the reason we'd even geoengineer. Humans do not have a great track record of predicting the secondary effects of their actions on the earth. Meanwhile our society is incredibly wasteful of energy, and has a ton of low hanging fruit via reduction and efficiencies. The less emissions we produce now, the less we have to clean up with solutions like the linked above. I'll also repeat this again because it's a common accusation leveled on HN. Most people interested in addressing environmental issues are not doing it to "virtue signal" or impose arbitrary values but because they want a healthier environment and to make the world sustainable for future generations.
    • bjornsing 7y ago
      Personally I don’t care one bit about the “virtue signaling”: people can signal their virtues all they want for all I care. But it seems to me it’s more than that: there’s also a lot of that age old instinct of trying to control others behavior... There’s a lot of talk about “we cannot keep...” and “the fallacy of never ending economic growth”. To me that just sounds simplistic and ideologically motivated. When the world turns away from science and innovation, towards dogma and social control, it rarely ends well...
      • dashundchen 7y ago
        > When the world turns away from science and innovation, towards dogma and social control, it rarely ends well... Great! Then you'll be happy to know the science modelling climate change due to human emissions has been well underway since the 1970s, and that science is also saying we need to reduce emissions AND sequester carbon already in the atmosphere to avoid catastrophic social and economic consequences (aka "lifestyle changes"). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115669 You should also be interested in the large amounts of innovation needed to address this - renewable energy sources storage, and delivery, innovative new ideas on how we can travel, grow our food and transform our economy into a more efficient and sustainable one. Since you're interested in carbon sequestration such as Project Vesta, I'm sure you'd agree it makes no sense numerically to only start capturing carbon without also reducing emissions which have been growing non-stop. How do you propose this happens?
• eloff 7y ago
  I agree it's a complex problem that needs to be tackled on many fronts. But the great thing about trees is we like forests, they're economical to plant, and they buy us time. If we remove 2/3 of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, it buys us 20 years at current emissions. In 20 years the demand for internal combustion vehicles will be nearly dead. Coal plants are already in serious decline, but in 20 years they'll probably need subsidies just to keep running. With the pace of advancements in renewable energy and electric vehicles, 20 years is enough to go from we don't know how we'll solve this problem to the problem is solving itself through free-market forces.
• navigatesol 7y ago
  >We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before Do you really think any country or society is "living like" before? Climate consciousness has come a long way. We are getting better in every aspect, though population growth will be an ongoing issue. It will be impossible to progress if every time we try something or suggest something people shout "not good enough!"
• api 7y ago
  > AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste OR eliminate coal as a source of energy. Coal is the #1 source of manmade CO2 by far. Just switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 per kWh generated by 50%. Obviously putting any solar or wind alongside that natural gas cuts much more deeply. By contrast the airline industry only accounts for a few percent of global CO2 emission. Why even bring up air travel at this point? I feel like there's this perhaps subconscious desire to bring moralism into it by shaming people for consumption. The "problem" is that coal can be replaced with almost no impact to our lifestyle, and so getting rid of coal doesn't involve enough sacrifice. The narrative of redemption through sacrifice is deeply woven into not just Western culture but most human cultures really.
  • DarmokJalad1701 7y ago
    > Just switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 per kWh generated by 50%. At the cost of increased methane emissions due to leakages from natural gas infrastructure that makes it far worse than coal since methane is a much more potent GHG. Sources: https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/natural-gas-industry-has-methane-problem https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/natural-gas-industry-has-methan... https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/environmental-impacts-of-natural-gas https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu...
    • api 7y ago
      Point taken, but my main point is about people harping on activities that account for only a few percent while not even mentioning activities that account for large double digit percentages of emissions. To lead with air travel while not even mentioning coal is bizarre.
• LinuxBender 7y ago
  Genghis Khan took a similar approach to cooling the planet, albeit a bit harsh. [1] [1] - https://news.mongabay.com/2011/01/how-genghis-khan-cooled-the-planet/ https://news.mongabay.com/2011/01/how-genghis-khan-cooled-th...
• paulgerhardt 7y ago
  Trees are Big O in the carbon sink direction. Switching to renewable bags or paper straws is just making your huge carbon footprint slightly less huge by sub-percentiles. Plant 100,000 trees in a summer though and you’ve more or less offset your life’s consumption - cheeseburgers or no.
  • gnulinux 7y ago
    But how do you find large enough area to plant 100,000 trees?
    • paulgerhardt 7y ago
      Iceland, Canada, and China all have programs to plant trees on public land. The Canadian approach however is tree farming. Workers plant 75k trees each per summer and make about $60k in three months. The trees are later cut down and made into lumber. This is actually more ideal than letting the trees age-out provided the lumber isn’t later burnt.
• beat 7y ago
  The #1 thing that controls population growth is increasing the standard of living. See the conflict? That said, population is already leveling off. The main cause of population growth now is not high birth rates, but rather increased lifespans and lower infant mortality rates. By the end of the century, population will have leveled off and may even start shrinking some.
• teekert 7y ago
  Well, according to Shell I can just pay 1 ct extra per liter of gasoline and bam, my ICE is CO2 neutral.
• pif 7y ago
  > We need to plant a bunch of trees AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste, AND keep the world population under control, etc. Just a question: why should we? Personally, I prefer global warming with the life quality of modern middle class rather than the wheather of 300 years ago with the life quality of ancient aristocracy. If you want to go back to stone age, please feel free to go: I'm not retaining you. On the other side, if we can discuss about how to improve quality of life for everybody, I'm in! And if we manage to solve global warming without impacting life quality, even better!
  • dplavery92 7y ago
    Because global warming means not just a slightly less comfortable summer season, but also rising ocean levels that displace low-lying coastal communities (to include not just island nations like Micronesia and The Maldives, but also large sections of major harbor cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Sydney); more violent and more frequent tropical storms and monsoons; drastic changes to crop viability in semi-arid agricultural regions such as those in California, North Africa, Yemen, and Afghanistan; increased wildfires in California and Australia; worsened air quality in and around major cities (especially megacities); acidification of our oceans; and heightened turmoil in and around arid regions with existing water and refugee crises. I think there's a latent suggestion in your language that reducing consumption discards all of the technological social progress of the past three centuries, while climate change presents a negotiable inconvenience. The balance is quite the opposite. You can keep cellphones, the internet, food security, modern medicine, and clean, running water. If anything, many of these advances are secured, rather than threatened, by curbing human-driven climate change. >If you want to go back to stone age, please feel free to go: I'm not retaining you. Beyond misjudging the gravity of the problem at hand, I think this comment is also a little short-sighted in appreciating the nature of the problem and our collective responsibility for it. The choices we make as consumers, designers, and voters have impacts that affect the whole world, including populations with clear stake but no voice in those decisions. It's particularly callous to tell someone whose island will be washed away by rising sea levels that they're free to eschew any technology they want to curb ecological impact while our own emissions (by absolute value or per capita) far exceed their own contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels.
• asjw 7y ago
  That's unfair. We should at least address the elephant in the room. For centuries the west (including me) has consumed the planet resources while colonizing the rest of the world. Now that poor countries started having access to the same kind of benefits we have, we tell them that they should stop doing it. It's not gonna happen, so we.better start thinking about what we will do when the oceans levels will rise. Hopefully for me living in the Mediterranean sea will make the catastrophe bearable.
• chrdlu 7y ago
  I think it comes down to the high cost of lifestyle changes. For example, if I am a consultant and needs to fly a lot to make a living, it would be very hard for me to change that. I agree we need people to be more conscious of waste and to reduce excessive consumption, but at the same time, we need easy solutions for people to contribute. I like the dual strategy of Project Wren (https://projectwren.com/ https://projectwren.com/) that encourages lifestyle changes and buying carbon offsets at the same time.