A tree has so many benefits, not just capturing CO2 and de-pollution. They're natural air conditoners, maintain temperature, maintain water, they help the soil, help smaller plants nearby, help a whole ecosystem, let alone fruits that are literally super food (minerals, vitamins, fibers, ..), above all when it's local (producers exporting fruits obviously pick them too early in their maturation)
> A tree has so many benefits, not just capturing CO2 and de-pollution.
Indeed. I've heard on the news that one of the reasons for the current drought here in Brazil is the loss of the forests which carried humidity from the Amazon towards the south, where many important basins are located. Since most of the electric power here in Brazil comes from hydroelectric dams, and most of them are in rivers coming from these basins, this drought leads to an increase in the use of thermal generation, which means an increase on the CO2 output.
They absolutely are air conditioners. There's an orchard of either almonds or something else that I drive by daily in CA. The area around the orchard is about 10 degrees less than the rest of the area.
Planting trees should be combined with sustainable harvesting, and using the wood material for building, replacing as much carbon emitting concrete as possible. The buildings should also be built and maintained so that they last as long as possible, effectively acting as long-term carbon sinks.
This way we could have both forests and urban areas acting as carbon sinks. Somebody should tell Americans and EU leaders that wooden buildings do indeed exist already.
What is "sustainable harvesting"? Planting more than chopping down?
It goes beyond that. A forest is not only a collection of trees. To have a forest you also need an undergrowth (I think it's called that way). That's why we have less forest but more trees in some places in Europe.
We need urgently to stop cutting virgin forests. There are not many left and it'll take centuries, maybes millennia to have them back.
This process can be sped up via intelligent afforestation (Miyawaki, permaculture etc).
Heavy mulching combined with densely planted native plants of different heights (everything from understory to canopy layer) effectively traps enough moisture and introduces a wide enough variety of microbes to sufficiently kick start a positive spiral mimicking virgin forests.
This requires manual input of water and mulching for the first two years or so. After that point you have a self sufficient, dense forest that rivals natural ones.
Combined with water harvesting (swales, check dams, man made ponds) this has been proven very effective in dry parts India, China, Northern Africa and Australia.
We can prolong life of small concrete structures if no rebar is used. Without rebar, concrete cannot tolerate high loads, but its lifespan is dramatically increased, from a few decades to potentially millennia. It is, after all, a kind of artificial stone.
Concrete without rebar can be used for construction of small buildings and those would last a long, long time. Much longer than anything made of timber. A 20-generation home of sorts. Remember that once the timber rots away or is burnt, the trapped carbon gets released again.
Let's grow more trees and go back to buildings made of wood isn't commonly suggested though.
In the UK wood is historically used for floors, doors and windows. The rest was stone until canals and trains enabled brick to be used. With roads came concrete.
Yeah, I haven’t looked at the article, but I remember the Chinese did exactly that when trying to fight desertification that’s approaching Beijing. I think most of the trees are dead now.
There is a case where forest growth is providing a positive feedback to climate change. The boreal forest is slowly replacing tundra on its boundary, which reduces the albedo in the Arctic.
It would make much more sense to build houses out of those logs instead of storing them on big piles. That way you can reduce concrete use in buildings, which itself is a major source of carbon emissions.
Log houses have been a thing for a LONG time in many parts of the world, and other types of wooden building exists as well. It seems like environmentalists have totally forgotten this obvious and superior form of carbon sink.
Here in Finland we're building even large blocks of flats from wooden materials these days. Yet the EU keeps telling us not to utilize our forests as much as we do now...
Same here in Sweden, both the increased use of wood in larger constructions as well as the EU's insistence that Swedish forestry and Swedish hydropower are "not sustainable". That's an odd stance to take to say the least, it is almost as if they're using the word "sustainable" in a way it was not meant to be used.
I think we'd need to see the total carbon cost for the proessing of the lumber before we can say whether construction with wood has a net zero or net negative carbon impact.
Harvesting, milling, kiln drying, and transport all seem to me like quite energy intensive operations.
Using wood for construction is good, but it involves a lot of work, and there is a limit to how many houses we need. I imagine producing far more logs.
Not that I've done any math, so I could be wildly wrong.
It doesn't seem to be too much of work or uneconomical, here in Finland construction firms are already making large apartment buildings at least partially out of wood, smaller ones have been built from wood for thousands of years already. Apparently it can be also faster than concrete building, because you don't have to wait for the concrete to dry.
If this were to become a global trend, I think it could really absorb a lot of carbon while also reducing concrete emissions. Admittedly logistics could increase the costs for many parts of the world that lack forests with suitable wood.
If you'll build things from the wood rather than burning it, it'll still be carbon-neutral for many years. And you can grow new tree where it was cut, to consume more carbon.
Now the question is how to utilise used wood without releasing carbon. May be just drown it to deep water?
We would have to essentially recreate the Azolla event (a geological process that took place for 800,000 years) to undo the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere:
If they decompose they are carbon neutral. I've seen some schemes calling for the burying/sinking of organic matter so that would be a carbon negative process (assuming the act of burying/sinking doesn't release too much carbon)
If you plant a new forest it would take some carbon out of the atmosphere because old dying trees would be replaced by new tree. Sure eventually the carbon inputs and outputs would be equal, but the built up forest would hold some carbon.
Sure, if you bury wood in deep mines and seal them, you are removing carbon from the biosphere. But for that, it doesn't really matter if it was wood that you grew or an already existing forest. The mere act of planting is neutral, it's the burying that is important.
By that, you notice that it would be fairly idiotic to keep unearthing old carbon and burying new carbon at the same time. Thus, it is absolutely essential to stop unearthing million-year-old carbon and putting it in circulation.
The statement here is "all plants are carbon neutral" and therefore ".. carbon mitigation actions involving plants are idiotic" ?! .. Can someone with actual knowledge please break this thought-cycle while I am not thinking about consecutive 43+ (110F) degree days here?
Planting plants is great and it will make you and me happy. I also love plants and forests. But if we still keep mining oil and burning it, we'll have warmer and warmer days every year due to the greenhouse effect.
Superficially agree, but I would like to point out that while a tree is neutral, a forest is more of a sink, because as trees die new ones germinate. Thus the forest can retain carbon indefinitely.
It really depends on the definition of "neutral". Is it neutral with respect to the atmosphere or to the biosphere?
I'm very skeptical that as we keep mining new carbon from the deeps every year, we con manage to put all this carbon into the biosphere, and none into the atmosphere.
I’m not saying we can effectively offset fossil carbon by growing the biosphere - we’re currently shrinking the biosphere after all - but it’s an additional benefit to restoring damaged ecosystems.
If we could reforest Sahara, a lot of CO2 would be trapped in that new forest. Probably enough of it not to worry about climate change for a long time.
Of course, reforesting Sahara is a tall order. Even Israelis, who are arguably very good in reforesting semiarid regions, only have limited experience in this regard.
Most previous environmental issues were somehow, if sloppily, fixed over time. Humans are not as thick as you insinuate. Some of them, yes, but the awareness of climate issues is already fairly widespread in most developed countries and is slowly seeping into other parts of the world as well.
I firmly believe that we will be able to sequester carbon economically one day. I am not able to say when, of course. But there are a lot of ways to sequester carbon already, even though expensive ones, and I don't see why they should stay expensive forever. Humans are pretty good in applied chemistry and always come with ways to do things cheaper.
And carbon sequestration isn't something that would require consent of the entire world. Even five or six countries working together could pull it off.
I fear catastrophe but at the same time the human species has been reduced to near extinction before.
We have to innovate and embrace technology otherwise other humans will do it and make our bloodlines extinct. It just sucks that doing so carries so much tail end risk and future generations have to settle that debt.
It’s so hard to predict the future though. What if what we really need is more humans to increase the probability of solving the problems that are causing the climate to change.
From a pure logic point of view you'd better kill somebody who thinks the more people the better. But people are generally not good with logic especially when their beliefs are questioned.
Western people already reducing their numbers. But there are other civilizations on this planet who's not going to reduce birth numbers and they'll quickly replace those who don't have kids. That's kind of social evolution. And any effective means to force other countries to reduce their birth rate are unacceptable in current morale.
Exactly. I would be okay with having only one child if everyone else did the same globally. But there's no point whatsoever if my unborn children will be just replaced by migrants from some society/culture where people have a lot of children, making room for more births in their country of origin.
