Unfortunately the reality (as always) is much more prosaic. There is no one single clever solution to the climate problem. Fixing climate will require lots and lots of different solutions across the board, including reforestation.
The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation.
Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation?
This may be practical for areas such as the example in the article of the Kubuki Desert reforestation project, where desertification due to the encroachment of dunes can be thwarted. But the major deserts such as the Sahara, Gobi, or Arabian Empty Quarter have very low precipitation, below what is needed for grass, desert shrubs, cacti, etc.
In the article the claim is that the environment changes due to the presence of the forest and results in more precipitation.
i.e. the presence of precipitation and trees are linked. If you remove one you remove the other, and if you add one (trees in this case) you get the other.
>But for the past 2,000 years or so, the climate of the Sahara has been fairly stable. The northeastern winds dry out the air over the desert and drive hot winds toward the equator. These winds can reach exceptional speeds and cause severe dust storms that can drop local visibility to zero. Dust from the Sahara travels on trade winds all the way to the opposite side of the globe.
>Precipitation in the Sahara ranges from zero to about 3 inches of rain per year, with some locations not seeing rain for several years at a time. Occasionally, snow falls at higher elevations. Daytime summer temperatures are often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and can drop to near-freezing temperatures at nighttime.
Precipitation is controlled by the humidity in the prevailing wind systems. Prevailing winds from the northeast drop whatever moisture they have on the southern margins of the Mediterranean or on Egypt and Sudan.
Most areas became desert after deforestation, many times due to earlier civilizations of humanity, many speculate that these were often largely influential in the falls of empires.
A good example would be Iraq, when it was still Babylon there were a lot of trees, forests, and marshes there. The deforestation around the mountains eventually caused droughts, which turned it to desert and contributed to the fall of an empire.
There is evidence of this with nearly every fallen civilization that wasn't directly caused by war, but even then often the wars happened due to scarcity caused by similar events in neighboring nations.
You probably heard before that large forests alter the weather around them. This is no exaggeration. Deserts are locked in a state of infertility because ay rain that falls quickly washes away, taking with it any top soil. So first you big holes to trap water underground, then you let the biomass build up some top soil, then you plant trees. When you have enough trees, they start pulling water from underground into the air, increasing moisture and starting a positive feedback loop. Then you start expanding into the surrounding desert areas. It's a lot of work, but possible, and being done.
And there is an assumption that there is enough freshwater to do this.
"A third of the world’s biggest groundwater systems are already in distress"
"Water scarcity already affects every continent. Water use has been growing globally at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and an increasing number of regions are reaching the limit at which water services can be sustainably delivered, especially in arid regions"
Correct, water scarcity is in fact the PRIMARY bottleneck.
The main "innovation" in this solution isn't "we must plant massive forests," it's that clean (solar-powered) desalination is now possible at very large scales, so we are able to provide the volumes of freshwater necessary for large-scale reforestation and conversion of deserts.
Forestry people have known for decades that trees were the best solution to CO2 in the atmosphere, but there wasn't enough forestable land. And while we can reclaim deserts, we couldn't do it at scale unless we irrigate. And we couldn't do it unless we could affordably create a new source of freshwater that wasn't already needed for humans and agriculture.
Should also mention that water requirements are generally much higher than needed to sustain an existing equivalent forest, as most desert soils have a high salt content near the surface, due to evapotranspiration drawing salts up and concentrating them, and lack of precipitation to ever flush/dilute them.
Not sure if any of these proposals plan to attempt to actively reduce soil (or aquifer) salt content, but for basins without sufficient excess water for an outflow, salt build up is a big problem. Managing the salinity requires more fresh water than what is needed to sustain the plane life.
Maybe theoretically possible if we have exceedingly cheap nuclear power. Fill the coasts with reactors that are optimized not for power generation but for transferring the waste heat to desalination facilities.
I'm burnt out or depressed with my current career (or something else), but at this moment I would happily pivot to spending the rest of my life trying to help nature. How could I create a business or venture that allowed people to make a livable wage while also working to create a balanced ecosystem between human and nature?
I realise that has icky connotations, and is anathema to some people, but we will need at least 50% more food over the coming decades, and we are already over-using the land (and especially the sea) by a lot.
Organics, permacultures, symbiotic planting, etc, are all good things, but not nearly enough to meet our future needs.
So we need to concentrate large parts of agriculture into a much smaller footprint.
Hydroponics, aquaponics, indoor fish farms (we really need to stop fishing wild fish at sea, except in the most artisanal line-caught manner), synthetic milk, juices, flours, even grains if possiible, protein from insects, engineered yeasts, etc, etc.
Ideally, we could actually make food much more nutritious, and delicious, by manufacturing most of it.
Good people can help keep it on that ideal course, not a more dystopian one of sickly 'protein pills'.
Agriculture, countryside management, waste management or the like are probably areas where you could personally make a real difference. IMHO we have far, far too many clueless virtue signalling activists and politicians that are capable of nothing more than spouting the empty platitudes their handlers feed them, and far too few skilled engineers and technologists figuring out how to boil down these nebulous aims into practical, smart measures that can succeed without the need for draconian legalistic enforcement. It's extremely rare to see any of the latter groups actually dig deeply into a problem and persevere with developing solutions that make a change; for example they'll bleat on about the patriarchy and how we need more women in IT, but will they actually ever really learn anything about IT themselves to inform their thinking and help bring about the change they claim to want? Not a chance.
Honestly, tree farming is carbon negative. By continuously growing trees and turning them into lumber you capture carbon and turn it into houses and furniture. Using the profits to buy more land to reforest, then cycling though planting and cutting down trees on a cycle.
Are there methods of tree farming that are focusing solely on carbon capture? For example, is it known that a species of plant that grows quickly captures carbon very efficiently?
There is a lot of marketing and some "scammy" practices put in selling Paulownia trees. Eucaliptus is faster and many coniphers also.
You can find photos of trees regrowing light fast after being chopped, and from an old root but this is not how you measure accurately growth in a tree. The tree enters in emergency mode and is using all the reserves in the root to restore the lost canopy ASAP. It will slow down considerably in the following years.
I'd avoid introducing Eucalypts to places they aren't already prevalent. Fires don't kill them, but do kill a lot of their competition, they drop very flammable leaf and branch litter, have oily explosive sap, so naturally they spread with fires. With more fires the more eucalypts spread, with more eucalypts there are more uncontrollable fires.
A country where Eucalypts are completely dominant is Australia. In the US California is full of them. Both Australia and California have uncontrollable fire problems.
There are plantations of eucalyptus trees in Brazil, either they don't know what introducing them will do to their country or they just don't care.
Before using eucalypts, consider what introducing a very invasive tree that transforms the countryside into something much more flammable than it originally was will do.
Agree with that, but must be noted that Eucalyptus has 700 species and not all make fireforests (I like that definition and we don't have any for that so I'll coined it).
> either they don't know what introducing or ...
Is a monoculture. They don't care. Is hard to claim ignorance still in the age of Google.
> "An acre of empress trees can absorb 103 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments.[12]"
Technically yes but it would be generally worse at self-sustaining scalability - you need to construct more greenhouses, keep the higher exposed surface area of water from evaporating, and find a sequestering use for that algae.
Non-biodegrading bioplastic made with renewable eneegy could technically work for that role but more plastic waste isn't approved of for obvious reasons.
In addition to capturing carbon, forests (of native tree species) provide many ecosystem services, including fresh water retention in the land, food and habitat for other species, shading of the ground, etc that a greenhouse full of algae would be challenged to provide. Most of the carbon stored in a forest is subterranean and increases significantly over time.
I don't know, are you familiar with carbon capture rates for algae? It's a good point and one to explore: trees/plants vs. algae for carbon capture. If you could make a modular system of tiles (say 10' x 10') comprised of carbon capturing method of choice (algae pools, trees), would it make sense to install these on buildings in cities (or anywhere, but suggest cities because that is certainly where such things do not exist at scale anymore) (then consider fabrication and maintenance costs)? I have no idea what the solution is to the carbon capture problem, but increases opportunities for carbon capture seems like a high level solution.
This is how Sierra Pacific Industries does it in California. All the clear cuts are reforested while the clear cuts are used to make timber for houses, etc. Most forests in America are managed. However the way it is done is pretty manual maybe drones and robots would make it more efficient.
Is it even possible to help nature in a way that generates profit for a business? Most things that help, say, a rare fungus or a migratory bird, don’t make money for humans. That’s why we’re in this mess to start with.
I also don’t believe we know how to help nature. It’s too complex. I think most “ventures” just do more harm, possibly including reforestation (are we SURE big, dark forests are good?) I put more trust into “rewinding” projects that involve just leaving things alone, no matter how much it distresses humans to see dead/dying animals and weeds.
You could join me and help get the best idea for mainstream engagement with conservation up and running: https://fend.earth
(hook people and give them what the want; a collective direct conservation movement at scale)
We could save a million+ acres of rainforest, grow to be a non profit of actual value and personally say goodbye to that "useless man" feeling and the waves of melancholy that go with it. Get in touch: infoatfenddotearth
Solar Foods estimates their process is 20,000 times more land-efficient than farming. Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat.
So if it doesn't take too long before this stuff takes over the market, we could grow our three billion acres of trees on existing arable land and skip most of the desalination.
It might seem impossible for agriculture do disappear all that quickly, but whale oil was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., then kerosene came along and wiped it out in a couple decades. And according to studies, people overwhelmingly eat what's cheap and tastes good; if lab-grown foods can manage to taste good and leverage their low resource use into low prices, things could change very quickly.
Gets my vote. I love woodland and can't bear the empty, desolate green spaces that cover most of the UK, and which many British people consider to be 'nature'.
And here's an idea: process the wood into a form that can be used for land reclamation without decomposing, cover said land with topsoil, grow trees on said land. Voila: a buffer against worsening coastal erosion due to sea level rise, that also locks in carbon in terms of the trees used to build the footing, and moreover provides extra land for growing trees and locking in even more carbon.
Large scale deforestation of Ireland began in the bronze age but present day rural attitudes towards trees, the dynamics of EU farming welfare and a population of 3.7 miilion hill maggots (aka sheep) ensure that woodlands have almost no chance of re-establishing themselves in our time.
Its quite sad because much of the land is so wet and compacted now, yet when Ireland had higher tree coverage, as much as 80% of the extensive precipitation that the Atlantic throws at us never even penetrated the soil. Much of the elements that make life harsh today were at one time regulated by forest ecologies to people's benifit.
A possible solution would be a long term compensation of farmers in exchange for their grazing rights on the 1,050,000 acres of commonage. With the sheep off the uplands,20 years could be sufficient for natural woodland revival. Given that sheep farming is essentially a subsidised activity the financials could be feasible... But you try saying that in a pub in the west of Ireland and making it out the door with both your arms still attached to your torso.
For those who don’t know, there was a reforestation done in US west coast in recent history [1]. Also from the details I have read at least a good portion of it was done by a grassroots effort.
If you drive through the highway that goes through the forest today, it is unimaginable it was a restoration project. There is even a cool observation desk somewhere in the middle
> The forest was replanted from 1949 to 1973 in the largest reforestation project of its kind.
It may have helped fix climate if we had stopped deforestation in 1992 after the first UN climate summit, used only sustainable wood from that moment on and cleared no mature forest for pasture or palm oil. Oh, and started migrating to zero carbon economies when it would have taken a percent or two reduction a year, rather than the throw ourselves off a reduction cliff required now. Thanks politicians!
Right now we're still clear cutting, legally and illegally, mature scruffy ancient forest that provides carbon store, and massive bio diversity. At the same time tree planting campaigns and forestry mainly create limited diversity, or no-diversity monocrop desert (forestry). Typically neat proof of human interference. How many tens of years growing or thousands of hectares planted to equate the mature wood and stored carbon lost around the world every day? How much biodiversity and how many species compared to mature, "nature hewn" forest? Global reforestation projects will destroy more ecosystems... What will be the unintended consequences of foresting deserts and the necessary human activity, irrigation, even desalination? How many more species will go as a consequence?
Now had we created no-development zones around forests, to allow them to expand naturally, in a world not deforesting at ever increasing rate...
So should we not try any ideas like this? Just give up and burn it all down, point fingers and say, "I told you it was too late. Look how right I am." I see no solutions offered in any of your written paragraphs and I welcome any and all alternatives.
When a house is on fire, worry about the new extension after the fire is out. Otherwise it's Jevons' paradox writ large. We're still destroying and emitting at ever faster rate. Effort should be going into circular sustainable economies, decarbonising, achieving carbon neutrality, assisting the developing world to carbon neutrality too.
That works under the assumption that we can't do both. We can absolutely work on carbon neutrality and getting the developing world off of coal and oil burning technologies while working on restoring a natural carbon capture system in the form of forests and ecosystems.
I just think the neutrality, reduction in resource use and sustainability has to come first. Otherwise Jevons. Of course there can be intelligent overlap. I would hope that as nations move near to neutrality they must have put effort into a rethink of agriculture and forestry (and every other human activity).
Now they can re-plant locally appropriate species and create new forest that will eventually appear to be entirely natural ancient woodland or rain forest. Forest that's destined to be mainly left alone as carbon sequestration. Along with wood production that's sympathetic to the planet and sustainable.
Greening deserts feels, to me, like a "near neutrality" re-wilding project. Something we can think of adding in a push to carbon negative, to undo some of the damage done. Something to do after we have sustainable, renewable electricity everywhere network to desalinate and irrigate. Something that can be carefully seeded to take account of species and that appears and acts natural, and stays put as national park or reservation. Without destroying yet another wilderness.
Not as a green project slapped down as Deus ex machina solution in a world that's not yet moving to neutrality. That risks making it worse. In fact it will almost certainly make it worse as coal and oil is still permitted to keep on looking for new markets and uses.
This is an all-of-the-above-all-hands-on-deck moment in human history, so I applaud you for focusing on the things you feel are most impactful.
Some of us are also looking beyond the challenges (e.g., coal power) that have known solutions for the most impactful thing we can do to buy more time. Large transportation, electricity, and agricultural infrastructure will take time and lots of political will to change.
Planting trees on unproductive land with desalinated ocean water that no one's fighting over is low-hanging fruit.
We should absolutely reforest on a large scale, but we also need to drastically cut emissions, and pursue other carbon sequestration strategies (olivine weathering for example).
I'm not sure trying to convert desert into forest is even a good idea. Some of these deserts have been around a long, long time and harbor their own unique organisms. And as the article mentions it could cause unpredictable disruptions in weather patterns.
It seems pretty clear that right now there isn't any one silver bullet strategy that is going to avert climate disaster. We absolutely have to reduce emissions and increase carbon sequestration to get to net-zero, then we need to go further into net-sequestration of carbon.
Am I naïve, but if people are busy replanting or doing nature related things (granted locally) they will probably less busy ordering items from the other side of the planet.
Rather reinforces my point. Headline: "global forest loss over past 35 years has been more than offset by new forest growth"
Replacing the carbon storage of a single 100 metre mature rain forest meranti, and the diverse ecosystem below it by new growth requires how many square miles? It's a net loss for a century, perhaps more. Overall it's a colossal loss.
I note that article accounts for area covered only. No mention of the human activity, of the clear burning, size of trees, amount of other growth under the canopy etc.
Cutting growth could be carbon positive in some limited circumstances I guess. If it's used to build houses or other structures where the wood doesn't rot in terms of just the materials it /could/ be storage positive if the equivalent land is replanted.
> What will be the unintended consequences of foresting deserts
I think you are overly concerned but here you raise a good point: foresting a desert could lower the albedo of the Earth. If not offset by the CO2 uptake of the trees, this could have a net greenhouse effect on the climate.
If you’re really worried about albedo, perhaps start questions the impact of gigatons of soot flowing over the North Pole, blackening huge ice fields over the last few decades.
States can make regulations, introduce carbon taxes, ban unsafe or unsustainable activity. When was the first international industry emissions reduction summit? How are they doing in comparison to the politicians? Exxon, Shell and BP knew all about the harm they did in the mid 20th century. So they buried it, briefed against it, greenwash us with irrelevant and insignificant adverts.
I indict the states, particularly the developed states, for not bringing forth regulation requiring environmental consideration, emissions reduction, sustainability with penalties encompassing delisting, huge fines and exec imprisonment. Companies are quite happy to drive everyone off a cliff for a little more gold. We've known that since the first days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
I think this is a naive view. First, there isn't a shortage of land for planting trees. And land is a requirement for storing the sequestered trees anyway.
The most cost effective path to fixing more carbon is to plant right, and without cutting.
I like the idea of biodiversity as much as the next person but the climate paradigm is we have to do something or we're all going to die. "Green" causes are not guaranteed to align with each other and when they come head to head I think we should favor the one that is about continuing to exist over the one that is fundamentally an aesthetic or philosophical concern, the fruits of which we will be unable to enjoy if we die out.
"We" are not "all" going to die, but there are definitely going to be some very messy outcomes for large populations. (Bangladesh? India are already setting up to not take refugees from there) It's pretty much business as usual for the west to trigger death at a distance and then disclaim responsibility for the results.
I think an easier to understand way to look at it is that every square meter of forest is enough to offset 1 or 2 watts of carbon based energy consumption if we assume that the trees don't die and decay, no forest fires, etc. We know that's not enough to sustain a modern civilization because past civilizations were dependent on energy from wood and coulndn't sustain a much lower standard of living even with a much lower population density. By contrast solar can sustain on the order of 100 watts per square meter and can do it even in areas without enough rainfall for forests.
The world has a lot of land, though. Before humans came along, there were roughly 6 trillion trees in the world. Now there are about 3 trillion, mainly due to forests being cut down for agriculture, wood, etc. Getting back the other 3 trillion trees would sequester an additional 75 gigatons of CO2 per year using your figure of 25kg/tree/year. Human activity emits 45gt/year according to his article.
That only "fixes" climate change as long as the trees continue growing and do not die. When dead, trees release their CO_2 that they've sequestered back into the atmosphere due to decomposition. Therefore, assuming those forests stay around, you've only delayed the problem by sinking a fixed amount of CO_2 away into the living biomass of the trees. The only way to make that a permanent sink would be to biochar the trees as soon as they die, which would be a logistical nightmare.
Negative rant over, it's still not a bad idea for the fact that it'd slow down the worst effects of climate change for a while, buying time for other solutions like renewable energy and whatnot, but it's not a pancea.
That's basically, well, not true. When trees break down they contribute to soil organic matter. Approx 58% of SOM is carbon (SOC) making soil one of the largest carbon sinks on the planet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_organic_matter
Lack of soil accumulation does not mean the soil evaporates into thin air; it is taken up by the watershed and redistributed downstream. The same carbon cycle is in effect; accumulation in any particular terrain has really nothing to do with it.
Literally survivor bias. The old growth forests that survived loggers were the ones they couldn’t get to for a profit. Those will be in or near geographic barriers like swamps or rocky terrain.
I've rarely hiked in harvested and replanted forests; these are boring. I did most of my hiking in central/northern BC and Alberta, Canada. These are some of the largest tracts of old-growth timber in the world.
The many old-growth forests I've hiked (sample: >1,000km, mostly dominated by conifers), with last burn times ranging from decades to centuries, have rarely boasted deep soil levels. This hypothesis is supported by existing research: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225314103_Soil_Carb...
Old-growth coniferous forests are great -- but they're not a big "carbon store".
If you want land-use based carbon storage, I'd recommend investigating where the continent-wide, massive, deep, healthy carbon-rich store of topsoil and humous came from -- grazed grasslands and scrub brush.
Oh, North Canada? That's some tricky terrain. Bedrock is very near the surface, and you're right, it's hard to build up. Short growing season, for one.
The article you link mentions softwood forests being problematic for carbon accumulation. Not hardwood forests. Old growth temperate hardwood forests are quite rare now, and some of the apex tree species in those forests have very serious pathogens keeping them from re-establishing, more's the pity.
Does soil continue to break down over time or does it permanently sequester into peat/coal/oil? As far as I knew, basically all of the tree's cellulose eventually gets released over time into CO_2 via biological activity.
There is an upper limit to the amount of CO2 that soil absorbs - it's clearly not infinite. There is an equilibrium in the Earth's natural Carbon cycle.
Once a soil matures (a process that might take many decades), the amount of CO2 retained vs emitted reaches equilibrium.
Some thoughts on finite CO2-absorbing capacity:
- If these forests are sustainably logged, we can take some of the carbon out and sequester it in buildings (or even just bury it), allowing the forest to regrow and absorb more carbon.
- I have a theory that presently discussed global climate change solution only needs to buy us a maximum of 100 years, and by then our tech for dealing with silly problems like excess carbon will have almost surely advanced beyond recognition. Given rates of progress in chemistry, physics, and materials science over the last two centuries, this isn't crazy.
Some trees takes years to fully decompose, even in contact with the soy, even on tropical climate. I say because I practice a kind of agriculture where we plant trees to feed to soil, we prune/cut the trees to cover the soil 4 times a year, the soil keeps increasing in organic matter (becoming darker and darker each year) and I notice some especies are very good at not decomposing, usually this are trees used for civil construction, which is another way of storing the CO2 I think. For me cutting trees down is not the problem, the real problem is not planting more... also where that energy of the tree ends up, burning wood I think is a waste.
I personally believe that forests provide a net positive in terms of CO2 scrubbing regardless of decay/decomposition. The only evidence I'd offer is a time lapsed NASA video[0] showing CO2 emissions heatmap over time. The areas like the Amazon clear up the CO2 on a daily and seasonal basis. The areas where forests are impossible like the Arctic, it does not. The sun drives the cyclical "heartbeat" effect you see from day to day on the video, where plants using photosynthesis in the day (and macroscopically, the summer) effects the intensity of scrubbing moreso.
Also, maybe it is my mind's desire to simplify of all of it, but it was eye opening for me, and seemed obvious upon seeing that video, that forests were the key player in air management globally, and industrialized nations were the main drivers behind CO2 production in the air globally.
I thought about this and had an idea that I don't know if it can work, but I couldn't find any major problem with it.
Specifically, what if we start burying dead trees or those who reached peak mass in places where conditions will transform them into coal in 100(00..) of years?
That way carbon is captured and stored until we burn them again.
I am not sure that coal can be made this way again. There are fungi and bacteria now which break down the lignin in cellulose, which there was not during the carboniferous period. That was 60 million years of dead trees not breaking down fully and being compacted underground to make that coal, and it won't happen next time because the lignin will be eaten.
If deforestation is still occurring (net result that we are cutting down more trees than we are planting) then cutting down more trees doesn't solve the problem.
We do in fact need people to just start planting trees.
> if you biochar fallen trees and litter, and then bury it, it stays sequestered for a long time.
> It also improves the soil long term - particularly in sandy soils it helps water retention.
> Obviously this is much more work that just planting and forgetting though.
If we used cross-laminated timber [1] to construct our buildings instead of concrete, there would be an economical incentive to keep a lot of timber forests around. For additional carbon-negativity (and soil quality!) the timber industry could be required to biochar and bury its litter. This way, without too much government coercion, maybe our building frenzy [2] could end up being carbon negative?
Much like modern diesel engines that make (polluted) air clean(er) [3].
Well, the main purpose would be to avoid tree death. And even natural death of trees can be allowed considering that an oak lives around 150 years.
Regarding what you say about releasing the co2 they have stored, keep in mind that the tree is not a co2 sponge. It takes co2 and transforms a big chunk of it in other carbon-based components useful to the tree.
I am not deluding myself that we will mitigate climate change by covering Earth in sequoia, but still that gives some timescale on how long trees can live.
If we could mitigate climate change for another 1,500 years we would probably have found some other mitigations by then.
I do not see how the maximum age of the trees matters. There is no difference between 10 generations of trees that live for 150 years and one generation that lives for 1500 years. What matters is the amount of additional CO2 which can be bound in biomass per square kilometer (comapred to the biome we are replacing) and how many square kilometers which are available for this project.
I fully support any plan that ends in the forest moon of Endor. What are even the odds we'd have fossil fuels left to burn in 1,500 years? I feel like we can safely say we'd have reached peak oil by then.
I don't know the source other than Elon Musk stated it in one of his presentations, but according to him we have five times as much fossil fuel reserves as we would need to utterly destroy ourselves with climate change. If that's right, waiting until we run out is not a solution. I realize the context was mentioning some speculation that we could push the timeline out some by planting trees. That speculation aside, we can't just wait for the oil to run out and be fine.
I didn't intend argue we should wait until we run empty on Fossil Fuels. I just can't see any way in which we'll still be consuming them in 1,500 years - either we'll have moved off them, we'll have run out, or the world will have become not compatible with life (non-exclusive "or" in this case).
"FTR, many tree species can live for hundreds of thousands of years."
The oldest known tree in the world is 5000 years old.
No individual trees are known to live hundreds of thousands of years.
There are clonal trees, like aspens, that could live as a colony for hundreds of thousands of years, but that's not quite the same thing (and our oldest verified example is only 80k years old).
Ok, you're right that it depends on what you count as a tree. An aspen "colony" is a living organism, and its "trees" visible aboveground are merely its stems. Such organisms may live as long as 1,000,000 years.
But when the trees die, new trees will grow in the same area, sequestering more or less that CO2 that was emitted from the dying tree, no? Would this not turn the forests into a permanent CO2 sink, at least on a rough scale?
I unfortunately can't find a reference, but I heard that it takes about 20 years for a newly planted tree to peak with regards to absorption of carbon, and after about 100 years it reaches equilibrium where the forest emits about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as it absorbs (through decaying matter, fallen trees, and whatnot). It of course depends on the type of tree.
I think it's best to look at this as mass preservation problem. Trees absorb CO2 from air and store in their bodies. Once they die, the CO2 gets released.
Since there's a limited tree mass per area unit that the ground can support, once you reach that mass the input and output need to zero out, since there's nowhere to store any additional CO2.
I'm not an expert in this area, but from what I can tell:
Young rapidly growing forests sequester carbon more quickly than mature forests, but mature forests still sequester some carbon, possibly into the soil. (One source https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080910133934.h... )
Separately, the regrown forest could be maintained in a state of peak carbon sequestration by doing selective logging from time to time, and as a bonus it would be profitable to do so.
Let's also not forget that forests burn. And they burn on a regular basis. You also run into tree-specific issues like beetles, which can kill off wide swaths of trees "naturally".
So, natural death and decomp is not the only things to worry about with using forests.
By end of time, I assume you mean entropic heat death of the universe. In which case no, planting trees will have become impossible trillions of human years previous to this, due to there not being and planets.
Sweden have had for several decades a law that require reforestation when landowners harvest timber. Every year a lot of trees get planted, and depending on how you count you can either see it as a massive amount of carbon credits from the last 50 years or so, or as being carbon neutral as it is very likely that the wast majority of the timber end up being burned.
If we look at climate research we also see a similar concern. Reforestation only work as a carbon sink if it also accompanies agreements to not harvest the tress and keep the forest as reservations. In simple terms, global reforestation in order to combat climate change has the same challenge as a global initiatives to create more forest reservations.
A global reforestation policy without extending the reservations is carbon neutral. It is much better than deforestation, but it won't fix the problem of fossil fuels putting out massive amount of carbon into the air.
I urge people to read The Secret Life of Trees (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life...). This guy says "This is why we only need to irrigate our forests for about 20 years — once they reach maturity, they will influence their local biome and bring self-sustaining rains.", but, according to the book, most trees are still basically adolescent at 100 years. I love the idea and am an active supporter of rewiliding myself, but you need to understand the timeframes of what you're working with.
I agree, but I still think of this as a useful part of a complete solution. It's something that buys us time to shift away from fossil fuels.
With current tech, we could drastically reduce emissions by moving to a mix of nuclear (the modern, safe kind) for baseload plus wind and solar for peak, but it's going to take few decades to build it all out, and during the intervening period we have a lot of excess CO2 we need to sequester.
At least the article title is quite a bit misleading in my eyes.
There is no single silver bullet solution to "fixing" climate change. However, reforestation can play a large role in combating climate change. The first and most important step should be to cut down burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The lowest hanging fruit there is stop using coal. It is the worst offender and the most easy to get rid of. Just burning gas instead cuts CO2 emissions by more than 30%. Not counting in that number is, that a lot of gas is burnt on oil producing sites instead of used and that gas plants can have much higher efficiencies, like using the heat also for heating houses. Gas plants can reach up to 90% efficiency this way, basically halving the CO2 emissions vs. coal. Also, flexible gas plants play nicer with renewables as solar and wind. And of course stop using oil e.g. for cars.
Having done that would cut down the CO2 emissions drastically, and then the reforestation becomes a more realistic target and would indeed a very practical means to get to net zero emissions. And even if it were only a small part, setting up desalination to green large parts of the desert would be a big net win. But before we use solar cells to produce water for growing trees, we should use the electricity produced to not burn fossil fuels in the first place.
Although forests have many more other benefits like animal habitat, soil creation, local climate change, cloud generation, ..., a simpler, quicker and cheaper solution would be to invent artificial photosynthesizers (using solar light) or electrosynthesizers (using electricity) - huge installations that would absorb air like big vacuum cleaners, capture the CO2 and decompose the molecule into Carbon products. For example by employing such processes as Reduction of CO2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of_c...
The only thing that's needed is to incentivize such research. Let's say creating a global fund of 20-30 Billion dollars and encouraging researchers to apply for grants from this fund.
Next step after basic research is done and something feasible invented would be to commercialize the solutions. However again here we would need incentives. It is really hard to implement the idea without commercial interest.
What would be a good incentive for this? Well, the captured carbon could be sold... Any other ideas?
Option 1 - Plant trees that have been growing for millennia, with skills that are wide spread across all of humanity
Option 2 - Invent technology that is currently unknown, scale it to a world wide scale, facing unknown challenges and problems with technology that is today completely unknown.
I agree and would say the same thing, but slightly less dismissively. :)
The key here is that we're out of time. This coming decade is probably the last one we will have where the problem can be solved at a cost less than 10% of world GDP. If we wait another 10 years, I suspect all solutions will require a significant fraction of global GDP and authoritarian-style interventions.
As a technologist, I'd love a magical new technology. But I'm also an engineer, and I want to execute the most efficient and low-risk solution in the smallest possible timeframe. After taking all factors into account, that's massive reforestation.
If new technologies are developed in the meantime, that's GOOD. Every bit of help that's put into play helps us. It's not a competition, it's a collective race against time, and we can all contribute.
I've often thought that vast swathes of otherwise barren land on this planet could be used for cultivating hemp and Cannabis, for a vast amount of uses (not just getting high).
It obviously grows very quickly compared to trees. And like 'a weed'. The 're-greenification' of land would be rapid.
And then all those trees dry out because waterbed can't carry this many, and they catch fire. See California, nearly every year. It's a 100% natural process for them to dry out and catch fire from time to time. It's just not very conducive to permanent carbon capture. The proposed solution (irrigation) is the most pie-in-the-sky part of the plan. It's "solar energy, ???, profit" basically.
I like the scalability aspects of this. I don't think we have a technical solution that is as scalable as a biological one. I do think that simply "planting trees" is not going to do the trick though.
> A global reforestation project is how we fix climate change
It isn't. Besides being inadequate even on its own terms, creating large and flammable forests in a time of increasing droughts is just going to lead to megafires, which will instantly eliminate all gains from years of forestation.
We should still plant trees. There's no real downside to doing so except the cost. But you absolutely cannot count on flammable forests locking up carbon forever. Forests burn, they get cut down for firewood, bad things happen to them.
Tree-planting is, like, 1% of what needs to be done, not 90%. It's a 1% solution.
Since deforestation is one of the major contributors to climate change in the first place, this is kinda like saying 'the solution to climate change is to stop causing climate change'
Trees are the best tool modern technology offers to sequester carbon. As it stands, the largest "crop" we have in america is grass. Lawns, though better than nothing, are a poor substitute in terms of taking in carbon. This and all of our empty parking lots, roads, and other car-enabling infrastructure contribute to urban sprawl that takes land from forests. It's an uphill battle, but changing various zoning laws is a good step
> Thus, to reforest 3 billion acres at current prices will cost the world an investment of $3 trillion/year for 20 years. That sounds like a lot, but the world GDP of 2017 was $80 trillion. Therefore, this plan would require an investment of a little less than 4% of world GDP every year for 20 years.
$3T each year (4% of world GDP) for 20 years still sounds like a lot.
I think the actual costs will be a lot lower as this will take many years of experimentation before scaling, and by then the cost of the solar panels (which I think is the vast majority of the cost) will likely have continued to ride its exponential downward cost curve. One source: https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/
The author seems to assume that deserts are lifeless places, which is incorrect. Converting billions of acres of desert to a monocrop forest would kill the billions of plants and animals which have become adapted to that environment, which could also negate the emissions reductions. Monocrops are also ecologically unstable and easily destroyed by disease.
FWIW, I don't think he's creating a monocrop forest -- he's planting a range of species that form an interdependent web.
This is also being done in locations that were forests a few hundred years ago before humans cut them down. The mature forest is a self-sustaining ecosystem, but it needs extra water for a few decades until it reaches that point. https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/12/hawaii-news/yisha...
I hope that all reforestation programs in the future will use local native species and will not use fast-growing non-natives such as Eucalyptus. The "woodland" around, for example Berkeley California, is so depressing to contemplate due to the dominance of Eucalyptus and the corresponding lack of fauna.
A very interesting proposal. Given the current ultra low interest rates all the costs could be directly monetized by the central banks (via "climate bonds"), rather than making governments pay or introducing helicopter money when the next recession hits. We just need some key to distribute the resulting jobs and manufacturing orders between the countries.
In developed countries changing land use policies in the developing world seems to be an easy way out.
Nobody asks people in the developing world what they think about it. I suspect many of them would feel the same way about being forced to change their land use the same way the yellowjackets feel about an increase in the price of fuel.
Uh huh. Good to know this guy has it all figured out.
Edit: trying to find the most absurd claim in this. I think it has to be the desalinization idea. That we can “just” scale up desalinization at existing marginal costs to 3 TRILLION cubic meters of water. The entire world currently desalinizes less than a billion each year. So that’s at least a 300x increase in water production! And how do we provide the energy to do this? The article hand waves it off as “solar power”. Yeah sure that would be great. Forget the cost of infrastructure or the transportation or the space for the solar power or whatever
Trees are great. By all means, plant trees. But don’t go thinking this poorly reasoned back of the envelope math is going to help.
It was a shallow one-liner that repeated a platitude in a dismissive way. That makes it an unsubstantive post and we're trying to avoid those here. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and taking their spirit more to heart when posting? Your comment broke at least three of them:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals [...] A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We don't even need to STOP entirely. We can just reduce by ~50% of current levels.
Greenhouse gases could still be used for numerous applications, as long as we stop using it for power generation, ground transportation, and manufacturing.
A fair amount of greenhouse gas emissions are from growing and transporting food. "Just stop" means that a fair amount of our food production stops. The problem with +4C is a lot of people dying; killing them earlier by starvation is not a solution.
Does that series cover eliminating Rupert Murdoch? I know that this is taboo to discuss, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head.
I disagree with the position that even the discussion of the necessity for war, or any active engagements, in the pursuit of solutions to the existential threats posed by climate change are forever off limits. I understand their presence, but as the danger continues to increase, and the solutions so inadequate, directly addressing the root causes — specifically, the apparent necessity to go to physical war against those who seek to destroy humanity — should not be so taboo.
But it’s your site. I hope you and your colleagues reconsider this stance, however, at least in regards to this specific issue, especially given its unprecedented importance.
> it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head.
I beg your pardon?
Who exactly is holding a gun to humanity's head?
Are you thinking of entire populations or do you have specific individuals in mind?
While I sympathize with your sentiment a more accurate and less provocative way of saying almost the same thing would be to say that the biggest barriers to dealing with climate change are social and political, and so changing social norms (so corporate behavior as evidenced by Murdoch) becomes unacceptable, and electing politicians who will pass meaningful climate-change laws, is really important.
One is the ordinary corporate manager which is not especially ideological. This person might be part of the problem because CO2 emissions help the firm make money, but they'd have no deep problem with making money without CO2 emissions.
Another is Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and other funders of the "new right" who actively campaign to make governments less responsive to issues such as climate change -- predominantly by spamming the agenda so that politicians never get far past "lowering taxes for the rich".
A third is the ordinary people, which makes the problem particularly difficult. In most countries the #1 way to have a riot is to raise the price of fuel. For instance, after Macron destroyed his credibility by cutting the wealth tax, he was unable to ask the "yellowjackets" to make any sacrifices. Now he can't manage pension "reform" for the same reason.
All of these are "not only but also" solutions. One thing we need to do is end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, but that only addresses one type of pollution, and it only gets us so far if the alternative doesn't pollute in some way. (For example, solar and the waste that it generates.) We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue.
Which unless we come up with some pretty smart measures is inevitably going to involve poorer lifestyles for most in the developed world, in effect (and perhaps this explains the keeness on the left for environmental issues) moving us to a more socialist model, wherein hard work offers far less in terms of monetary reward than at present.
I’ve been thinking about this position today and I don’t see how it makes any sense. Look: would a 10 million dollar salary really induce you to work 10 times harder than a 1 million dollar salary? What about 100 million- would you be working 4000 hours a week instead of 40? You’re going to spend all that money on one person and expect to get your moneys worth? No. Upper executives get that kind of money because they can, not because it makes sense.
Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?
I think you are in denial about human nature if you think that money is not a motivating factor for many (most?) capable professionals, and bringing the question of fairness into it and the fact that rewards at the higher levels are exponentially out of whack does not affect this initial point. To flip it around would be to say that things are so unfair and people are only taking the money because they can, not because that what really motivates them, so let's make all salaries the same because that won't affect peoples' choices. I have some knowledge of the dental profession through my partner. Her opinion is that money is the main motivating factor for entry into the profession in the UK, with altruistic concerns far behind. If one accepts this as having even some element of truth (and there's no small amount of evidence of rich, showy dentists on Instagram etc.) do you really still believe that altering the incentive will not affect behaviour? Qualifying as a dentist is hard. Becoming an expert on root canals is harder. People do not do it out of the goodness of their heart, or for social recognition of their career success alone. Material rewards are an essential component of the motivation.
There are many things that motivate people, money being one of them. I never said it wasn't a motivation. But a 2 dollars an hour raise could motivate a lot of people and an extra million for some CEO makes a marginal if any difference. There's no logical line you can trace from "money motivates people to do hard things" straight to "therefore all the money should be in the hands of a tiny number of people". That doesn't logically follow. There has to be balance. You have to look at what brings the maximum benefit to the most people. My point is that currently the people in power don't care whether things are out of balance, so long as they are the ones who benefit. If we have to make sacrifices to safe the world, cutting pay for the top 1% will not affect their motivation to work by very much. They're still going to be making more than the rest of us.
Look: if you’re the ceo of a corporation you can basically set your own paycheck. To suggest that these guys are diligently going over data, studying the best pay structure to attract talent, and so forth is totally naive. For one thing, none of these guys are very good at math. At the end of the day, trying to set your pay structure to grow the company is really hard. Cutting everyone’s pay to give yourself a raise is really easy. These are people whose parents paid for them to get into Harvard, they played golf with the right people to get into upper management they’ve always thought of themselves as above and separate from the common people who they hold in utter contempt- you’re not going to see very ethical behavior from someone like that. No tears will be shed for them if we have to bring a little balance back to society in order to save it.
Well quite. But that doesn't change the fact that enforcing poorer lifestyles will inevitably affect the incentive to work hard. This website is in no small part about startups and getting rich, isn't it?
Personally, I'm forced to compete because I live in a stupidly overpriced part of the world in terms of housing (SE UK) but apart from a nice house I need very little to support my ego apart from my dog and family, so I think I'd cope with the poorer lifestyle far better than many people I see around me, seeming to have built their self-worth around posessions and silly crazes.
An honest question: if a technological solution were found that both solved climate change and allowed us to continue burning fossil fuels, would you accept it?
Parent as I read it isn't suggesting that having your cake and eating it too is possible, instead they're attempting to establish a dual-scale demarcation of viewpoints with one scale being "Prohibition or allowance of fossil fuels" and the other scale being "Fixes or does not fix climate change".
This is useful because polling has discovered many US Republicans will actually vote for climate solutions _if_ they employ new technologies that would result in new industries.
I suspect that unfortunately there is a mismatch between hypothetical polling and reality given the current outright hostility to solar and wind in spite of them contribuiting jobs and income in their regions. Farmers are renting land for turbines using fallow fields for solar panels and are facing bizzare objections when there are fewer externalities than the existing options.
The people voting against environmental reforms are doing it because they don't want to reduce their quality of life.
And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels, there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life. And so without convincing people they should reduce their quality of life for the benefit of future generations, nothing is going to happen.
>The ones who think it would reduce their quality of life are just being ignorant. They don't understand the possibilities.
I'm not willing to give people that benefit of the doubt. Deep down, people are loss averse, and will tell themselves whatever about the second coming or make up conspiracies to do it. The real cause is people don't want to give up single family homes with garages and SUVs on quarter+ acre lots. People don't want to give up annual vacations to tropical destinations.
> The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
It's not evenly distributed because the costs aren't felt evenly. Fossil fuels are portable, they start on demand in a variety of weather or time of day, and they have all the infrastructure already setup to use them. They're good at what they do. But until the environmental costs aren't incorporated into the financial costs of fossil fuels, I don't see what would motivate people to move away from them.
I think we'll still have the luxuries we have today. Fossil fuel burning will not completely end, but we'll get to our vacation destinations another way. Electric airplanes are coming, for example. Not soon, but eventually.
Single family homes with quarter+ acre lots are great places for solar installations, btw.
It’s very, very, very unlikely that we’ll find a magic bullet solution at this stage. Removing co2 from the atmosphere requires some external energy source, for one thing.
That would depend on the risks and the side effects, but assuming there was some magic bullet that would restore the atmosphere to a stable state and allow the burning of unlimited fossil fuels- yes, in a heartbeat.
