
An armchair engineer's plan to solve global warming - ph0rque
http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/9969930301/an-armchair-engineers-plan-to-solve-global-warming
======
jholman
Okay, I know I should go do some research instead of writing an HN comment,
but let's face it, I'm not yet a perfect person, so I haven't done that
research, so here goes the HN comment instead. To be clear, my goal here is to
provoke someone into convincingly explaining how wrong I am.

What is the dilly with carbon sequestration? How can this make sense? Isn't
this ideally mostly snake oil?

Once upon a time (say 800 years ago?) we had huge quantities of carbon trapped
deep below the surface of the earth (coal, oil, maybe I'm missing something
else), AND ALSO huge quantities of carbon fixed in solids on the surface of
the earth (large forests). Now we've taken as much coal and oil as we could
find, and put it all in the atmosphere. Plus we've also chopped down lots of
trees, and much of what was chopped down was burned.

Let's just acknowledge that with 7 billion people needing food grown (not to
mention living space), we as a race will not be replanting more forests than
existed 800 (or even 100) years ago. At best, we'll replant some of them. So
what happens to the carbon that's in the atmosphere from all the coal and all
the oil? It won't be going into trees, will it?

~~~
ph0rque
_Let's just acknowledge that with 7 billion people needing food grown (not to
mention living space), we as a race will not be replanting more forests than
existed 800 (or even 100) years ago._

Growing forests and growing food is not mutually exclusive. See the
organisation I link to at the bottom of the article. They plant trees as part
of agro-forestry projects, which provides both trees and food for those who
carry out the projects.

As far as living space for even 10 billion people... the trend is for people
to move to cities, which almost by definition have a very high population
density per unit area. Which is to say, the living space will take up a very
small percentage of land.

Can we sequester all the carbon in the atmosphere that we release by
replanting forests? I don't know. But I'm sure there have been studies done,
with hard numbers on what kind of resources it would take.

------
photophotoplasm
It seems like a deceptively easy way to solve global warming. Anyone see any
holes in it?

~~~
prodigal_erik
If the old tree sequestered carbon at the same rate as the new tree, replacing
it doesn't accomplish anything. You'd have to focus on chopping down the least
efficient trees.

Actually I don't know whether trees are optimal. Something like kudzu might
have higher carbon/arable land throughput, alarming as that prospect might be.

~~~
ph0rque
The easiest thing to do would be to plant trees in areas that have been
denuded, instead of expending energy and time (e.g. money) to cut down
existing trees.

Assuming there is no more (cheap) space to plant trees, replacing mature trees
still accomplishes something: you have a multi-ton tree with ~half the content
being carbon. As long as you don't convert the carbon back to CO2, you can use
it for economic gain and keep the stored carbon out of the atmosphere: use it
to make houses, furniture, bury it so it eventually becomes topsoil (where the
carbon stays in the soil), etc.

I'm sure there are people experimenting with various plants that have the
highest rates of CO2 removal. Besides kudzu, there's bamboo, and probably
other plants. In fact, it would be a neat software algorithm that calculates a
_group_ of plants that would remove the maximum amount of CO2 for the given
area.

