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>> "Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical?" There are already widely-available solar-powered redundant distributed systems that do this while producing va

• rthomas6 12y ago
  Apparently trees are carbon neutral or even net emitters of carbon once they're mature, so this is only true for young forests. Edit: I am wrong in the case of old growth forests. After a bit of googling, they are still net carbon capturers. For an individual tree, I'm more right. And in both cases, young trees/forests absorb more carbon in a given span of time than old trees/forests.
  • blhack 12y ago
    I think you're missing the point. The forest is literally stored carbon. All of those trees, plants, animals, etc. are all made out of carbon that has been sucked out of the air and converted into biomatter. (Unless I'm really, really misunderstanding something)
    • mrfusion 12y ago
      Every tree born eventually dies and decays back into CO2 and worse (some methane). I think that's what he's getting at.
      • rosser 12y ago
        On that kind of time scale, that's only relevant if there are net fewer trees. If there are more, you still come out ahead.
      • snowballsteve 12y ago
        So if we say, stop with the corn infatuation and plant forests we would at lease give ourselves some breathing room to figure things out for a half century?
        • rthomas6 12y ago
          Well, how much carbon does corn absorb vs. trees?
    • kaybe 12y ago
      This is actually fascinating to watch. Pieces of some plants can be put into a glass of water and will develop roots and leaves, an amazing amount of mass out of seemingly nowhere. A nice example is cyperus[1], where putting a stem upside-down with the leaves in water will give you a new plant, with just water and air (for a while). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus (only works with some kinds)
    • rthomas6 12y ago
      Yes, so following this logic, imagine how much more carbon is stored when a new forest is planted vs. a forest simply maintaining itself. In the first case all the trees, plants, animals, etc. are newly stored carbon, since before there were no trees and now there are.
  • ankitml 12y ago
    Not sure what you mean, Forests are net emitters when they burn, or they are cut, or their top soil which stores carbon is removed. Forests by just being forests do not emit carbon just like that.
    • rthomas6 12y ago
      Well, actually they do, but after a bit more googling they're not net carbon emitters, and old forests apparently still can capture net carbon. So my point isn't as strong as I thought it was. Trees take in CO2 due to photosynthesis, but they also respirate, taking in O2 and emitting CO2. The net amount of CO2 taken in decreases as the tree ages... so young forests do take in more CO2, but old trees still usually take in slightly more CO2 on the net, due to repairing themselves.