
Scientists discover the world contains dramatically more trees than was thought - evo_9
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/02/scientists-discover-that-the-world-contains-dramatically-more-trees-than-previously-thought/
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danmaz74
I really wonder why, when talking about climate change, the reference to
deforestation has been downplayed so much compared to a few years ago. Isn't
that just as important as CO2 emissions?

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abandonliberty
Did some programming on the Kyoto accord. At the time, old forests were
thought to be carbon neutral (e.g. in a steady state), while a growing forest
clearly absorbs carbon, and we assumed cut trees were released carbon into the
atmosphere.

I am curious about the last assumption: Wood products can hang around for
quite a while, so while long-term decomposition may release their carbon into
the atmosphere, in the short term we have some very old wood around. Hell,
maybe we could grow trees and sink them into oxygen-deprived water where they
never decay.

Ultimately investment in this area has been reduced as the truth could be very
inconvenient for the economies that rely on tree farming or land created by
deforestation. See the disgraceful yellow blob:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol)

~~~
hackuser
> I am curious about the last assumption: Wood products can hang around for
> quite a while, so while long-term decomposition may release their carbon
> into the atmosphere, in the short term we have some very old wood around.

I have a hard time thinking of significant amounts of wood that doesn't
decompose, unless treated by humans. There are exceptions, including petrified
wood or maybe wood in oxygen-deprived water (I don't know much about that) but
I doubt it adds up to much. I know I've read studies about the carbon released
by decaying organic matter in rivers and river deltas; it's a well-studied
process as far as I know.

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chadzawistowski
What about architecture? There are plenty of buildings which have lasted over
100 years.

~~~
hackuser
> What about architecture? There are plenty of buildings which have lasted
> over 100 years.

Agreed. That's what I was thinking of to when I wrote, "unless treated by
humans".

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chadzawistowski
Ah, I was thinking of pressure-treated wood [0][1] as opposed to "raw" wood.

[0]
[http://www.homedepot.com/c/discover_benefit_pressure_treated...](http://www.homedepot.com/c/discover_benefit_pressure_treated_wood_HT_BG_LC)

[1]
[http://www.strongtie.com/productuse/ptwoodfaqs.html](http://www.strongtie.com/productuse/ptwoodfaqs.html)

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amelius
If only we could plug these new numbers into the climate models and press
"recompute".

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twblalock
It makes no difference. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere has not
changed. If anything, this might mean that trees are less effective at
reducing carbon than we thought, because there are more trees than we thought
there were.

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andallas
I think you're right, I read a few months back that grass is actually much
more efficient in terms of reducing carbon. I'll have to look that up.

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elorant
How on earth can you miscalculate something like that by almost an order of
magnitude when we have satellite imaging around for decades?

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mninm
From the article:

"satellite observations and ground-based ecological work. The former gives an
overall view of where forests do and don’t exist on the Earth’s surface. But
the latter goes underneath the canopy to determine how many trees exist in a
given area in a given type of forest."

It seems that satellites give a good measure of the acreage covered by forests
but are not suitable for differentiating individual trees. To do that requires
on the ground sampling and as more sampling is done it is being discovered
that the actual number of trees differs substantially from previously
established estimates.

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elorant
So basically we have no way of counting trees from pictures? I mean it
shouldn't be that hard, right? You have green pixels and brown ones. We have
software that can discern car license plates in urban environments where you
have a gazillion of different colors in the picture.

I guess the need never arise for an automated tree counting algorithm.

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benihana
> _So basically we have no way of counting trees from pictures? I mean it
> shouldn 't be that hard, right?_

Are you a programmer? Have you never had to deal with someone who thinks
they're smarter than they are and thinks they know everything get pushy about
the simplicity of doing things that are not as simple as they assume? I have,
and I can't say I'm a fan of those conversations or the people who initiate
them. Your comment feels a lot like that.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
His comment reminded my of xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/)

~~~
Redoubts
Not [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/) ?

~~~
dr_zoidberg
I guess the "I mean it shouldn't be that hard, right?" struck me the most, but
yeah, both comics would apply :)

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pvaldes
Scientists discover the world can support dramatically more humans that was
thought after zillions of spermatozoans were found in each male human.

A 10 cm trunk diameter pine is not a tree, is a... (let's invent a new word
for this) a 'treeddler', a baby. This is a classical case of apparent amount
of population after dissapearing of the older trees. You can pack instead a
lot of little trees in less space, but is not even remotely the same and only
one or two will survive.

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headstorm
> a 'treeddler'

Only if it treeddles! If not, might sapling be a satisfactory existing word?
Some dictionaries constrain sapling to 4 inches, which is ~10 cm.

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pvaldes
Sapling is too generic to me. Two leaves in a 2 cm stick is a sapling but a
juvenile 5 m high tree is also a sapling. Some trees grow really slow, some
plants are not trees but have a 'similar' function in nature (bamboo for
example) and a lot of trees begin as multitrunked shrubs. Is not trivial to
count trees in a forest when several trunks share the same root system so we
can expect a lot of troubles and variations. We should focus in measuring live
biomass probably instead. To group different saplings of different species and
try to cook a result from this is always a problem.

Maybe to make people understanding the consequences of deforestation we need
to create a new system and talk instead of ecological categories like seed,
seedling, 'treedler', tree and perhaps 'treelder', but I'm just having fun
with the words.

Ash, for example, is equal to "a common tree" but people forget often that the
morphospecies "a 500 years ash" is extinct in most forests (as all species
that depend on it). This is like if we try to define and understand human
societies just looking at "people from 20 years or less".

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oneJob
Maybe there is an issue with the idea of "discover"... This sort of hubris is
insidious.

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sageikosa
Perhaps "awakened to their sheer lack of perspective?" That a global total
estimate could be off by 8x, should probably bring a few other global
estimations into question, but probably won't. Epistemology is a lost art.

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rokhayakebe
_The study also finds that there are 46 percent fewer trees on Earth than
there were before humans_ came into the picture.

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TeMPOraL
Maybe it's me being grumpy this morning, or I'm too used to thinking in log-
scales, but 7.6x doesn't strike me as "dramatically" more. It's not even an
order of magnitude more! Sounds within the bounds of estimation error, which
is what the scientist do, because surely they're not going out there and
counting trees one at a time.

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coldtea
What's "dramatically more" is all about context, it's not just about the
relative change regarless of what's changed.

Wouldn't you consider a 7.6x change in your salary "dramatically more"?

> _It 's not even an order of magnitude more!_

That's irrelevant. Even in software profiling, making something run "merely"
2x as fast can result in HUGE profits and savings (e.g. the movie studio that
gets its rendering done in 3 months instead of 6).

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JorgeGT
Commercial aviation industry aimed at an annual improvement in fleet
efficiency of 1.5% from 2010 to 2020. The estimated cost was $1.3 trillion.

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paulajohnson
From what I've heard, it sounds like this is really "new method of counting
trees produces much bigger results". The new estimate may be better, but it
may not.

Paul.

~~~
louhike
Why do you sign your comment with your first name?

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williesleg
Now that's an inconvenient truth!

