
There’s Plenty of Space for One Trillion More Trees - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/theres-plenty-of-space-for-one-trillion-more-trees
======
ars
So the count of how many trees there are _now_ was off by an order of
magnitude.

And we are supposed to give credence to an estimate of how many there were
10,000 years ago? What makes you think that's any more accurate?

This kind of sloppy science is ruining people's confidence in science. I know
it's supposed to be an iterative process, always getting better, but there
should be some self awareness built in that early iterations should not be
relied on in any way!

~~~
panic
I'm not able to read the actual research paper, but the article refers to the
"United Nations estimates of global forests." I'd assume they used the model
they developed for forests and applied it to this estimate to get a number of
trees.

------
jensen123
So the article says that there are currently about 3 trillion trees, down from
about 6 trillion when humans started with agriculture, and then cites an
ecologist about how insane this is. But, if you go back even further, wouldn't
there be less trees again? I watched the documentary "The Green Planet" a
while ago. If I remember correctly, it said that before humans greatly reduced
the number of grazing animals in Europe by hunting, the forests in Europe were
not dense like today. They were more like parks, with many grassy fields,
since obviously many trees did not get the chance to grow tall before being
eaten by those grazing animals.

------
gpsx
I am not an expert on this but I assume the total amount of carbon on the
earth is essentially constant. I am guessing for the most part it exists on
earth as (1) plants and other life forms (2) fossil fuels and (3) other non-
living stored carbon, in things like plastics and lumber. In the air it is
mainly carbon dioxide. The more we store on earth the less there will be in
the air.

Maybe we need a plant and trade system rather than cap and trade. Whenever
fossil fuels are sold, a corresponding amount of carbon must be stored, either
through new plants of in other sequestered carbon.

~~~
cschneid
You're describing one form of carbon offsets. A cap & trade system is pretty
much what you're suggesting, depending on the specific implementation of a
cap&trade system.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset#Land_use.2C_land...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset#Land_use.2C_land-
use_change_and_forestry)

~~~
gpsx
I did not realize cap and trade systems were backed by actual carbon storage.
That makes more sense then. Thanks for the link.

~~~
rgbrenner
they don't have to be.. but most cap and trade proposals include carbon
offsets... so a polluter can complete an offset project OR purchase credits to
pollute more.

------
ageofwant
Look here:
[https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.0362291,118.4896355,5465...](https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.0362291,118.4896355,546561m/data=!3m1!1e3)

Can you figure out where there used to be trees ? That's now wheat farms
mostly. Due to the tree removal salination has ruined 2 million hectares of
what is now essential wasteland.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity_in_Australia)

~~~
soperj
Don't know why you couldn't replant trees then. There are many types trees
that do well in saltier soil. For example, White Ash, Red Cedar, Black Walnut,
Japanese Black Pine, Pin Oak and Red Oak. Doubt it'd take much to get
something estabilshed, and it'd probably take over on it's own gradually.

~~~
thmcmahon
Not sure that you'd want to plant a bunch of European trees to replace native
Australian forests.

~~~
monsieurbanana
Why?

~~~
ageofwant
It would be futile. Native Samphire, melaleucas and casuarinas can live in
saline soil conditions that would kill most anything non-native. There may be
exceptions of course.

Its when the Samphire starts to die that you know your in shit street.

------
mojoe
Interestingly, planting 1 trillion trees all at once would decrease the albedo
of the earth
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo)),
increasing warming in the short term. I wonder how long the trees would have
to exist before the scrubbing effect on carbon dioxide would outweigh the
albedo change?

~~~
devishard
Geez, albedo is a topic I didn't know existed until just now, but which is
clearly a complex enough topic for hundreds of people to spend their entire
lives studying it. Super cool.

~~~
CalRobert
The fantastic SimEarth had a great daisyworld simulator that illustrated the
concept well. You had two species of daisies, light and dark, and their
balance had a huge effect on the world.

Of all the Sim games, that's the one I'd most like to see get an update
(though "Planet melting? pay $29.99 for in-game carbon credits!" would be an
off-putting business model).

------
xivzgrev
If you planted a tree every second, it would take you 31 thousand ish years to
plant them all.

That said, if you had 100k people planting them itd take under a year. Can a
machine plant 1 tree per second? Id be interested to learn that

~~~
ludamad
That's an interesting thought. It immediately made me think of some fast
moving contraption that buried seeds into the ground. Obvious difficulties
would be navigating, and being small while being able to force something into
the ground.

~~~
aacook
There are people who get paid to manually plant trees. They're called Tree
planters. Seeds seem more scalable but the industry appears to use saplings.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9wPTwlGGJs)

Maybe a drone could complete the two actions instead. 1\. Jam rod thing into
ground, pull it out, dump dirt 2\. Stuff in tree

A guy on Reddit claimed to have planted 1.25mm trees this way:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_12...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/24jgsy/ive_planted_125_million_trees_across_canada_in)

Young trees need water until they're established, so I wonder how many little
trees actually survive.

~~~
logfromblammo
You can wrap their bases with a porous bag of hydrated gel--like a yolk sac
for saplings.

Logically, it would be best to use industrial processes to factory-assemble a
package that results in the lowest cost per established new tree when it is
left in the wild with no further maintenance.

Existing tree seeds are cheap and stupid, and limited by the state or the art
in tree-seed technology, which is essentially to coax an animal into eating a
fruit and crapping out the seed elsewhere in a nice, fertile pile of dung.

Humans can do better, by sprouting the seeds in a controlled, indoor facility,
culling any unsuitable saplings, and granting the sapling additional resources
that the parent trees could not provide before planting it in a location
distant from the parents that is already known to be suitable for the adult
tree.

~Alternately, leave Robo on tree-planting detail, and skip ahead 1000 years in
the Epoch to pick him up.~

------
WalterBright
I read that the great plains were naturally forests, not grasslands. The
theory is they are grasslands because long ago the forests were burned to
provide habitat for the buffalo.

This theory is supported by the Kansas farmers having planted trees, and the
trees do quite well.

I would imagine that a great deal of forest could be created by replanting the
great plains.

~~~
solipsism
You may be remembering incorrectly, the great plains were grasslands many
millions of years before humans arrived on the scene. Remember we only left
Africa ~100,000 years ago.

~~~
jordanb
Yeah the grasslands are 25 million years old. Humans have only been in America
for 15,000 years:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains#Paleontology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains#Paleontology)

------
vinceguidry
I'm reminded of _Anna Karenina_

> "I wouldn't attempt to teach you what you write about in your office," said
> he, "and if need arose, I should come to you to ask about it. But you're so
> positive you know all the lore of the forest. It's difficult. Have you
> counted the trees?"

> "How count the trees?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, laughing, still trying to
> draw his friend out of his ill-temper. "Count the sands of the sea, number
> the stars. Some higher power might do it."

> "Oh, well, the higher power of Ryabinin can. Not a single merchant ever buys
> a forest without counting the trees, unless they get it given them for
> nothing, as you're doing now.

------
siscia
An article here a couple of weeks ago claimed that sea weed is more effective
than tree fighting carbon dioxide, and it seems cheaper to plant and manage...
Shouldn't we focus on it instead of trees ?

~~~
Caprinicus
I wonder which would be more effective at countering ocean acidification,
since sea plants need the carbon dioxide in the water in order to create
oxygen.

------
dec0dedab0de
I really think the answer is to switch to wood fuled biomass generators for
electricity. It would be an incentive to plant more trees, and the charcoal
waste could be burried as fertilizer, placing excess carbon back in the
ground.

~~~
willismichael
The amount of solid carbon left as waste is inversely proportional to how
efficiently the wood is burned. In high-heat combustion, virtually all of the
carbon is consumed and released as CO2, rather than remaining in the ashes.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
What if it were purposely inefficient, and stopped once the wood is reduced to
charcoal?

~~~
infinite8s
So we basically go back to using fireplaces for heat.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
No. The idea would be to never actually burn the wood, just heat it up enough
to release gases, and burn the gases in a generator. These could be (are?) run
at power plants.

willismichael pointed out that efficient biomass gasifiers will then burn the
resulting charcoal, which releases quite a bit of CO2. I suggested using the
charcoal as fertilizer, instead of burning it.

~~~
infinite8s
Wouldn't heating it up to release the gas use more energy than results from
burning the gas?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
As far as I understand it once you get it going you can use the gas to keep
the temperature up, and still have excess. Of course, this is only until the
fuel runs out.

------
acchow
Could satellite/drone imagery with computer vision could get an accurate
count?

~~~
nxzero
Given half the trees are already gone, not sure how useful a more detailed
count would offer.

~~~
eggy
Actually there are more trees in the US now than in the 1800s [1]. However,
the downside is that there is relatively little age difference in them, since
they were planted in the last 50 years or more. This means less diversity of
habitat, and it takes a while for the critters to build up biosystems in them.
Still, I'll take the positive away from it. The quick effect of actually
warming the Earth was surprising to me, because if we plant so many new trees
we lower the albedo, and it takes a while for the trees to scrub the CO2 to
make it a net win.

    
    
      [1] http://www.greenoptimistic.com/united-states-trees/#.VwxsqybSqHs

------
ImTalking
Maybe we should just plant hemp, the most useful plant on this planet.

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I don't understand the argument. We needed to know how many trees there are to
know whether we physically have space available for more?

~~~
paulsutter
We need to know the density of trees in various environments to understand how
many more we can plant. And when you have that, you also know how many trees
already exist.

It's also useful to know how many trees have been lost to development, which
is closely related to how many currently exist. And all of that is based on
knowledge of tree density in various environments.

------
p886
10^12 trees for anyone wondering

------
maerF0x0
Makes little sense because trees die and decay, releasing their stored carbon.
We released the carbon from liquid fuels and thats how we should reset, back
to liquid carbon that wont go anywhere.

~~~
prebrov
Isn't that how ecosystem should work? Tree dies, new one grows on the spot. X
amount of carbon should be locked in a Forrest ecosystem as long as it lives;
trees, other vegetation and organisms. Some of it will eventually fossilize
for good.

