Doing some back of the envelope calculations we have put about 1.6 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Latest estimates put the number of trees on earth at around 3 trillion. Looking at how much CO2 a tree takes up puts the average around 600lbs over the first twenty years. So combing all this if we want to plant enough trees to take up all the excess CO2 we would need about 5.3 trillion more trees, or almost double the total number of trees on the planet.
This is simply not achievable in a fast enough time span to make a difference. Nevermind that I was being super optimistic with all my calculations and the real number needed is likely much higher still.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
"Imagine if trees gave off Wifi signals, we would be planting so many trees and we'd probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe."
-- Tarun Sarathe
I'm saddened by the deforestation I've seen in my hometown. A lot of kids would go to hang out and play in the forests, but it looks like only the designated protected areas some distance off will be left in the future. Having wildlife in one's back yard will be reduced to a novelty.
If you really want carbon capture protect your wetlands. They're truly the best.
Trees are great but part of a larger picture of ecosystems that do a great job of taking co2 out of air and building with it. Soil is a huge deal for how effective ecosystems are at scrubbing co2. All plants die off and decay but much of their carbon can get sequestered into the soil. Healthy soil has deeper microbes and insects breaking down and sequestering better, and improving future plants growth.
Basically stop lawnmowing and industrial farming.
There are all these micro machines that suck up a lot more C02 it is called hemp
We burned millions of years of plant growth within a few hundred years. Trees alone won’t make a dent within the time frame that’s necessary to stave off that 2 degrees increase. Even if we covered every square meter on the planet with trees. We need to start using every solution we can think of to slow down climate change within a few generations. This includes natural solutions like trees, plants and algae and man made solution like sequestering, direct air capture and even geo engineering.
So it turns out that trees are actually carbon neutral, and aren’t carbon sinks like previously assumed.
The tree does store co2 in a sense, but as much co2 is also produced by the tree during its life cycle, it’s leafs are eaten by bugs, the leaves that fall to the ground decompose and also provide feed to microorganisms.
Now once the tree is dead, it also decomposes releasing co2 as well as providing food for bugs and organisms that all turn it to co2 as well.
Nature is wonderful, but they were completely wrong about trees scrubbing co2 from the atmosphere.
click to waste your time
I'm realizing exactly how much worse it is than what's being said here.
First, a lot of the crude oil were burning is not comprised of dinosaurs, there's a portion of it that may be animal matter, but largely, according to what I've learned, oil is primarily the remnants of prehistoric forests. So there's a lot of CO2 that was captured, literally millions of years ago, being reintroduced to the planet. Additionally, any other combustion based power (natural gas, wood, etc) is releasing carbon captured since the last big extinction event.
If you combine all of the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses captured during that extensive history, we could flood the world with CO2, to a level that would cause all life that requires oxygen to survive, to die, including, but not limited to, us.
The planet wasn't formed with an abundance of oxygen. That was a result of plant life that produced oxygen as a byproduct.
Additionally, trees are kind of a shit source of oxygen. They need to be in a growth cycle to capture CO2. That usually happens when they're not busy doing other things, like collecting sunlight for energy. So you get most of the CO2 capture during the night. That's good, but limiting. You lose so many hours of CO2 capture during the daytime that it's never going to really do much good. It's good to have trees, but ultimately, trees alone will not solve the crisis. They might be a good step in the right direction, but they're not the one-and-done answer people seem to think they are.
The most beneficial plant life for capturing CO2 is generally algae, and other single-celled plants. Algae may not have the highest CO2 > O2 conversion by mass (I don't know, I'm not a scientist), but it has a really good track record and bluntly, it's extremely easy to work with.
The part that's killing us (quite literally) is the pollution and habitat destruction that's going to reduce the amount of algae in the oceans, and make it harder for it to survive. Biomatter from aquatic life (through death, but moreso through excretion) is basically fertilizer for algae (mainly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). I'm sure sea fowl contribute to the nutrients here as well.
As we destroy aquatic habitats with our pollution and marine activities, we are making it harder for the algae, one of the biggest contributors to our oxygen supply, to continue to exist in the numbers required for us to have air we can breathe.
At the same time, we're burning so much fuel and releasing so many previously captured greenhouse gasses, that we're well on track to self-extinction.
Global warming, literally the increase in the mean temperature of the planet, isn't the root cause. It's a symptom. It's an indicator. That indicator, right now, says "you're fucked. Good luck." It indicates that the planet, and the environment which has provided for us, all the necessities of life, for so many millennia, is slowly failing.
We, as a species, have suffered, and survived through periods of great heat/warming, and great cold/cooling. The temperature isn't what will kill us. The destruction of the environment, which is also causing the temperature to rise, will be our death.
Simply put, the Flora and Fauna around us, the stuff we call "nature" is being destroyed on a global scale. If we do nothing about our contributions to that destruction, we will not survive to see another millennia on this planet.
You can see the Amazon rainforest sucking back the CO2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ-lMDtiI-k
