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One problem with the article is they again claim trees take away carbon from atmosphere. This is only true if you look at short term. In long term trees do not

• Retric 5y ago
  Permanent carbon sequestration operates on geologic timescales so it’s very very slow, but trees are one of the more common ways to permanently sequester carbon. Deep roots in a low oxygen environment can last a long time. That still takes the top layer of soil being covered, but grass for example simply represents less biomass per acre. Another common process is run off from rivers getting buried under a continuous stream of silt, and a significant portion of that biomass comes from trees.
• sva_ 5y ago
  But if you have a large living forest, the cycle of each tree will mean that the forest as a whole will store a lot of co2? There's no point in looking at individual trees.
  • lmilcin 5y ago
    No, it is just part of the cycle. It stores CO2 but only temporarily. I remember some statistics that humanity is emitting more new carbon into atmosphere every decade that entire mass of biosphere. So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere. Even if we somehow got it to double its entire mass (nobody even dreams of that), this would amount to pausing our emissions for a decade.
    • danparsonson 5y ago
      > So if you think about it, our biosphere is pretty irrelevant when it comes to removing carbon from atmosphere. Didn't understand your point here initially but I think what you mean is - we've significantly outpaced the biosphere's ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It's not irrelevant, it's overloaded.
      • lmilcin 5y ago
        Okay, so it would be actually more precise if I said "It is irrelevant when it comes to removing CO2 caused by humanity". It is not overloaded. Trees are not concerned by the extra CO2 in atmosphere. Biosphere is a cycle, which means that it has net zero effect on the amount of CO2 in atmosphere. Any CO2 removed from atmosphere is at the same time counteracted somewhere else. Maybe it is burning or rotting or maybe it has been eaten by a breathing and farting camel. More biomass just means there is more CO2 taken out as well as supplied in. The only way it can have non-zero effect on the atmosphere is if we are interacting with what is called sequestered carbon. Humanity is taking out carbon out of long term storage that has been sequestered for millions of years, but there exists no natural process that would counteract it efficiently. There only exists a number of buffers -- an atmosphere as well as oceans.
    • noselasd 5y ago
      It's a storage, but yes it's part of the cycle also. A forrest stores carbon as long as the forrest exists, dead trees emit carbon as they die/rot/burn away, living trees store carbon as long as they are alive (and they help maintain the soil where carbon gets stored also) Once a forrest reach maturity , it will be a store like any other carbon store (but perhaps a fragile one , it can easily be cut or burned down). Basically, if you remove a forrest (e.g. burn it down), most of the carbon is released into the atmosphere - thus it's a storage keeping the carbon it stored away from the atmosphere. Forrests store about 400 billion tons of carbon in total , and we emit about 9-10 billtion tons of carbon per year. (most numbers you find will be of co2, but those 2 oxygen molecules account for quite a bit of the volumn/weight also, so make sure to not mix numbers that account for just carbon with numbers that represents co2 )
    • 3pt14159 5y ago
      "Temporarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If we built our cities with wood like we used to they can last hundreds of years. Thousands if we really did it right. There's a Japanese temple that's fourteen centuries old.
• jdsully 5y ago
  Worse fire is part of the normal life cycle of these trees: http://www.150.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=27588 http://www.150.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=27588
• nashashmi 5y ago
  The maturation of trees and the drip of leaves and other refuse equals to the effective sequestration of carbon. Based on this, the more healthy thing to do is plant more and cut down more. And repeat.
• Forge36 5y ago
  A 50-100 year increase in carbon capture helps. It buys significant time to find more permanent solutions.
  • ahevia 5y ago
    No. We have permanent solutions already. We just need the policy to encourage their adoption and implementation. (And further research to advance the existing solutions) CCS (carbon capture & sequestration) is still needed. Even if we stopped emitting GHG today we’ll be above the 1.5 degrees target, but CCS is not a technology that “buys us time” It’s something we use in conjunction with renewable energy resources. CCS isn’t even operating at a large enough scale yet to begin to mitigate or lessen the effects. I don’t mean to harshly criticize. This idea that carbon capture is a time buying technology is often used as a greenwashing narrative to discourage the adoption or solutions we already have.
    • mkl 5y ago
      > We have permanent solutions already. Really? What are you thinking of? Wikipedia makes it all sound pretty speculative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
      • ahevia 5y ago
        I meant permanent solutions in energy. Not carbon capture. Apologies I can see how my comment wasn’t clear
    • sdenton4 5y ago
      Nobody who's serious thinks there's a single silver bullet; we need multiple paths to sequestration, and the other technological solutions aren't scaling up yet. We also need to scale up renewable energy as fast as possible, and get people to stop driving ICE cars. People have to pick where to put their own effort and investments, but no one is saying that these efforts are mutually exclusive. Planting trees is one (very good) bullet among many, which we can do at large scale today. Forests also have excellent effects on local climate and the water cycle, and provides habitat for wildlife and biodiversity. More forests gives us a healthier world.
• truculent 5y ago
  Yes, but if we have more trees overall, then more CO2 will be in the sequestration stage of the cycle at any given time.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  > For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever Basically, they need to be turned into tomorrow’s coal or oil.
  • knuthsat 5y ago
    I think it turned out that coal and oil are mostly heavily processed microorganisms. Trees never end up so deep.
    • wizzwizz4 5y ago
      You're thinking of oil. Coal is trees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation
      • adrusi 5y ago
        Most existing coal was once trees, but large scale conversion of trees into coal was only possible in the carboniferous, when trees were new on the biological scene and there wasn't anything that could decompose them, so dead trees just piled up and slowly turned into coal under the anaerobic conditions of being buried under other trees. You can still get coal made from trees, when a forest fire turns some wood into charcoal and that gets buried in the soil, or under unusual circumstances where a tree gets buried somewhere inhospitable to the microbes that can decompose lignin.
        • aoeusnth1 5y ago
          Interestingly, the Wikipedia article for coal formation links to this paper which refuted the idea that coal formation was primarily attributable to the delayed agility of microorganisms to break down lignin during the Carboniferous period: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611
        • twofornone 5y ago
          I think it depends on the depositional environment, its still possible for trees to be buried before decomposition. Especially in forested areas with significant water flow. Once a log hits the muddy, anerobic bottom of a river/lake it essentially enters stasis, people fish centuries old logs out of rivers for profit. All of these things happen at massive scales, so even though the vast majority of wood does decompose before it can be preserved, even a few percent is probably enough coal to power some future post nuclear apocalypse society's industrial revolution in a few dozen million years time.
• gbrown 5y ago
  That’s just not true on any reasonable timescale. Healthy forests absolutely build up organic matter in soil on various timescales, and while the carbon has various residency periods it’s a net sink. Things like forest fires can create charcoals as well, which last a very long time in soil.
• appleflaxen 5y ago
  And if you interrupt the cycle at any point and vent 10% of the participating carbon to the atmosphere, you are going to have a massive spike at that particular point in time. If that spike further prevents the cycle from continuing (because the Sequoia can no longer grow in sufficient time scales) then you suddenly have a net release that will not be recaptured. Which is, of course, exactly the point of the article: keeping the carbon trapped in the cycle is the sink. I don't know your intent, but this seems like a deliberate framing of a technical truth in a particular light in order to downplay consequences. If this isn't your intent; great! But if it is, it's not a responsible way to foster discourse. We should all exercise maximal humility in dealing with climate change because we are dealing with incredibly complex systems with truly catastrophic implications of making the wrong choice. We need to engage with each other as constructively as possible to any chance of minimizing the harm.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    I see, so what you're saying is that the carbon cycle isn't a "sink" so much as it's a "source"? Burning trees can release CO2 which they might then do nothing to recapture?
    • appleflaxen 5y ago
      Yes; the carbon cycle is both when it's changed: Breaking the cycle is a source, and strengthening the cycle (increasing its depth) is a sink.
• downrightmike 5y ago
  Yeah, the only reason we have so much oil is that it took a few 100 million years for fungus to figure out how to eat trees. So that carbon just collected and got buried until now.
  • twofornone 5y ago
    Not quite. The vast majority of petroleum comes from the remnants of microorganisms like algae. They settle in anoxic aqueous environments, are buried over millions of years, compressed and transformed into organic rich rock called kerogen. If that kerogen is buried to sufficient depth and temperature it then cooks and is converted to oil and gas. Trees and plant matter typically turn into peat and eventually coal.
• xyzzy21 5y ago
  Calcium carbonate from fossilized shells are about the only long-term sink for CO2 that matters. Layers of limestone and marble. That's it.
• xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Yes, each tree individually only temporarily stores carbon until it is eventually burned or rotted. But if trees are being replanted at a rate that CO2 in is equal to CO2 out, it's essentially a permanent storage when you look at the full system. Additionally, if you increase the total number of trees in the system, your storage increases, which is reducing the amount of CO2 in the air. Even if this isn't the end-all-be-all permanent solution, it certainly helps in the short term.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  > In long term trees do nothing to CO2 because they only participate in a CYCLE. In the long term, in other cycles, everyone alive will die, humanity will cease to exist, the sun will supernova, and the universe will contract to a single point (is the last one accurate?). Meanwhile, sequestering carbon for 2,000 years seems like a useful cycle, and only a "short term" if your community functions on geological timescales. This isn't the grass in your lawn. > For carbon to be permanently removed the tree would have to be somehow buried forever. This is actually a thing. We just need to stop digging up those old trees.
• pvaldes 5y ago
  I wonder why this is so difficult to understand. Of course that trees take away carbon from the air. Is called photosynthesis. Is exactly what trees do. They participate in a cycle but the cycle grows with time, because you have more organic carbon trapped in alive beings and less in the air, so can trap more and more. And at long term this trees will move part of this carbon to the soil. Unless we will keep burning the soil like idiots, of course. Anything that will work at short term is extremely valuable at this moment.