4 ms·

What does this mean? People living in live trees?

• nine_k 12y ago
  Dead trees (cellulose) keep the carbon pretty fine. Build more wooded houses, etc. It's important to not let them rot, though, because this releases CO₂ back to the atmosphere.
  • graycat 12y ago
    I thought that when wood and other plants rotted, the main result was a lot of soil which I thought was heavily carbon, from the plants, from CO2, from the atmosphere. Maybe I'm wrong about this? Or, growing up, Dad put a lot of ammonium nitrate NH4NO3 fertilizer on the lawn. Then the lawn grew fast enough that I got the job to mow the grass twice a week instead of once each other week. After growing up in that house with that lawn, all the grass clippings raised the level of the top soil by about 1.5" -- this was easy to see next to the concrete driveway and walk ways which I observed close at hand as I ran the electric edger, with its 35,000 RPM motor, between the concrete and the lawn. So, CO2 from the atmosphere turned into grass turned into grass clippings turned into top soil which no doubt had a lot of carbon, originally from the CO2 in the atmosphere. While this is many years later and I moved away long ago, I have to believe that that top soil is still there and very much is not going anywhere, certainly not as CO2 back into the atmosphere. Net, a lawn commonly does sequester carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere. Here I'm just giving this point as a biological fact and without any judgment about this situation being good, bad, or otherwise for anything in particular.
    • nine_k 12y ago
      "Rotting" usually means being slowly consumed by fungi and bacteria, which ultimately break a good part of the cellulose down to very simple compounds like CO₂ and water.