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> Reforestation is not a viable solution to climate change. It's a strange tangent to take here. The article makes no mention of reforestation. Just to give
by h0l0cube 7y ago
> Reforestation is not a viable solution to climate change.
It's a strange tangent to take here. The article makes no mention of reforestation.
Just to give some background about the situation in Australia: many of the trees are not just fire tolerant, but their seeds are triggered to germinate when a fire passes through - they depend on fire. This means that 1000s of saplings will arise where there were once 100s of established trees. This increases the fire risk over the next 5 years, but it does capture back a lot of that carbon.
A big problem is that much of the old growth forests, that have less tree density, and thick canopies that rob much of the sunlight to smaller plants, have been clear felled. In their place, is either regenerated forest, with a higher fuel content, or with paddocks, where grass fires can rip straight through.
But still, large canopy fires can still affect these old growth forests. As with all bush fires, the only thing that can be done is to back burn to contain them, and to ensure that sections of forests are divided by fire breaks.
I suppose, to reduce fire risk and potentially releasing all this carbon, we could just turn all the trees into furniture. But I love forests, so I hope deforestation never becomes a popular idea.
So what are you suggesting Australia does here?
- missosoup 7y agoThere's a number of really obvious things for Australia to do. Like not voting in a prime minister who literally brought a lump of coal into parliament and told everyone that it represents the future[1]. We're ideally located for renewable power, we have an abundance of uranium for nuclear. And yet we're one of the worst polluters per capita in the world. But my comment wasn't about Australia specifically. It was about the general notion which has spread, that planting a bunch of trees will make a meaningful dent on climate change. It won't. It takes 10 minutes and the back of one envelope to do the math to understand that it won't. If you do the math, you'll find that every person on earth must plant 20 trees each year to offset their average Co2 emissions for that year alone, nothing to speak of the 5b people * 100 years debt we must repay to wind back atmospheric Co2. And once fully grown those trees need to be cut down and buried deep underground to contain their carbon content from returning to the cycle. We must focus our effort towards effective solutions because focusing it on ineffective ones is worse than doing nothing. Afforestation is not an effective solution. I'm not against afforestation, but at this point we need to run the numbers to figure out whether it makes things better or worse given that rising temperatures mean an increasing number of wildfires that can't be stopped. Wildfires that dump 6 months of an entire nation's Co2 output into the air in the span of a few days. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-a-chunk-of-coal-into-parliament-video https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-m...
- radicalbyte 7y agoAustralia is totally insane given that if the world went full on into combating Climate Change mode then Australia would be one of the richest countries on the planet. You could own power heavy industry and if we force the airline industry to use renewable fuel then you'd be one of the biggest exporters globally. Times will change, you'll get rid of him and his friends. Once we've gotten so far I really hope that these people are held criminally responsible for their corruption.
- solarengineer 7y agoIt is necessary to have multiple solutions. There needn’t be just one. We need to restore forest cover for reasons I’ve responded to you on in another thread. We need to have low carbon energy - I’m one of those coming around to Nuclear energy. We need to stop pollution via plastics. We need to stop greenhouse gas emissions and figure out solutions to address those gases that we’ve already released. Your reminder about the wild fires dumping half the years CO2 into the air the the span of a few days is a sobering thought. But, your general message (despite your clarifications) seems to suggest that we might just as well get rid of all trees and artificially supply ourselves with oxygen.
- galangalalgol 7y agoHow are Australia's lithium resources? What is your stance on climate engineering and the role it has to play?