Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

Re:Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change by Sharlin on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @09:12AM (#17662150)

Why burn them to charcoal? Living trees continue to be efficient carbon sinks for potentially hundreds of years. If you have to cut them down you should use the material for construction, to reduce dependency on energy-intensive steel and concrete industry.

But it’s a moot point anyway, because trees simply grow too slowly to be an effective carbon buffer at the timescales that are relevant right now.

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Re:Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change by adrianN on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @09:18AM (#17662197)

You burn them because that prevents decay from releasing CO2, stabilizing the carbon for at least a millennium. Young trees also add biomass much faster than old growth.

Using them for building material is okay as well, but the amount of wood needed to get rid of the excess CO2 is far above any reasonable demand for building material. (We're talking about a trillion tons of carbon here)

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Re:Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change by Sharlin on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @09:43AM (#17662397)

”Young” here still means ”decades old” (and large, mature trees keep growing thicker fairly consistently which leads to carbon fixation to be a superlinear function of tree age). Plus recent research indicates that old-growth forests actually continue adding biomass quite efficiently. So any planted trees should at least be allowed to grow a lot longer than your standard tree plantations.

Whatever you do with the biomass a hundred years from now doesn’t really matter; either climate change is in control by then or the humanity is screwed.

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