Every time I've seen someone suggest that plants could have taken up the load it seems trivial to demonstrate this is not the case. For plants to take up the l

Every time I've seen someone suggest that plants could have taken up the load it seems trivial to demonstrate this is not the case. For plants to take up the load, they would need to absorb and retain 30,000,000,000 tons of additional plant matter annually. A pine tree can absorb ~1 ton/year. If you put 100 per acre, and assume the trees are 100% sequestered, you'd need 30,000,000 acres (50,000 sq. miles) of additional pine forest, where none of the material was allowed to decay back into CO2 just to break even. Plants don't generally sequester much of the carbon they capture in their lifetimes naturally. Mostly it's the root matter of the plant that stays sequestered. So, if you wanted the world to take this up without human intervention, you'd have to figure out how to get 30,000,000,000 tons of root matter generated each year.