
Adding 1B hectares of forest could help check global warming - tsar_nikolai
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/adding-1-billion-hectares-forest-could-help-check-global-warming
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859)

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hirundo
I just heard Paul Stamets say that soil is around 30% fungal mass, dead and
alive, and that makes fungus the greatest repository of carbon in the
biosphere. So to sequester a maximum amount of carbon maybe we should be
optimizing for fungus rather than trees. Is a forest the best way to do that?
Trees do have a lot of surface area for fungal growth. If so maybe we should
be selecting kinds of trees to plant based on their fungal friendliness.

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manifestsilence
That makes me think prairie may compete well with forests in effectiveness.
Many prairie plants have 10' roots or more, and the root systems are dense.
Over time they do quite a bit for the soil and sequester a lot of biomass.

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sampo
Some scientists are criticizing that the authors have maybe 2× overestimated.

[https://twitter.com/SimonLLewis/status/1147114505949855744](https://twitter.com/SimonLLewis/status/1147114505949855744)

[https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664](https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664)

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tsar_nikolai
Interesting! What's interesting to me as well, is that despite their
criticism, both scientists do seem to support the opinion that it is an
extremely important measure to add to our portfolio of climate measures.

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ishtanbul
one important aspect in this is that forests have lower albedo than grassland.
This means they absorb more solar radiation.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z)

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ars
You can take this a step further and just cut down trees, bury them in the
ground and let new trees grow.

Do your part, and don't recycle paper, instead make sure to bury it. (I'm only
sort of kidding.)

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manifestsilence
That's an important point - where those trees go when they die is part of the
puzzle. Systems thinking is important. When a tree decays, I wonder how much
carbon goes into the soil vs. into the air. What about when a forest fire goes
through? More frequent controlled burns help prevent catastrophic forest
fires, but do they cause a smaller or larger overall co2 release? On the one
hand, a firestorm causes entire trees to explode that would otherwise survive
with little damage. On the other hand, frequent burns might burn material that
would otherwise decay into soil...

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etrautmann
The form of carbon is also important - if methane is produced during
decomposition it is much worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2

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neals
So does anybody here know how to make a 2%+ revenue from running a forest?

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lazyjones
Apparently you can get "Gold Standard Land Use and Forests" certification for
your forest and sell carbon credits for $18 USD/tonne or so to polluters.

[https://www.goldstandard.org/luf](https://www.goldstandard.org/luf)

Here they calculate carbon benefit for 7500 hectares in Cameroon, which
appears to be ~3 million tonnes annually:

[https://www.cifor.org/fctoolbox/download/Topic-4-Section-D.p...](https://www.cifor.org/fctoolbox/download/Topic-4-Section-D.pdf)

($7200/hectare annually seems like a lot of money to me...)

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edf13
Seems good until Carbon Credits are pulled or altered at some point in the
near future due to abuse

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ajharrison
Ending the factory farming animal agriculture industry is the only long term
solution.

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etrautmann
This may be one component, but certainly not sufficient

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boxcardavin
I've done this math before and it's not encouraging. Global carbon fuel
burning is more than two cubic miles annually. A billion trees will capture
about a trillion kgs of carbon over 10-20 years, but yearly we're burning
about 4 trillion kgs of just crude oil.

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ssijak
1B hectares od trees is much different than 1B trees

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goatlover
Up to 2500 hundred trees can be planted in a hectare. Which is over a trillion
trees. I think that coincides with an article on planting a few trillion trees
to offset climate change.

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geogra4
Each human being on this planet just needs to plant about 140 trees - to give
a sense of the scale of this number

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etrautmann
On face value that sounds absurd, though in reality seed distribution may be
automated and scaled in a feasible manner. Certainly the number of corn plans
planted in the US alone must be an astonishing number if calculated per
capita.

