I don't know that getting more trees than you lost is a useful or effective measure against climate change. It's a good thing, certainly, but I imagine the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere requires more than a steady state of trees. I wonder how much of the world we'd need to cover with trees in order to offset our carbon production, certainly more than we've had during modern civilization.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-many-new-trees-would-we-... says a new forest the size of New Mexico might offset the US's emissions. Or not. It depends. But first thing to do would be not to cut down the existing ones.

They say it would take a forest the size of New Mexico "to account for one year of American emissions" - given that trees both process CO2 during respiration and act as sinks when they grow, I can't tell if they'd be able to offset those emissions the next year as well or if we'd need a new forest.

Trees produce CO2 during respiration and intake it during photosynthesis. The carbon captured during photosynthesis will be offset to some degree by the tree's own need to consume glucose.

Basically we need to grow trees as fast as possible, cut them down and bury them deep, exactly the opposite of what we’re doing when mining fossil fuels. No wonder there’s exactly zero people doing that.

Why are they focusing on making bio-oil to throw away instead of biochar that has many known non-fuel uses? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar#Applications

Nice!

There's been a proposal to bury them not-so-deep, but saturated with salt to prevent decomposition. It's not necessary to sequester the carbon forever, just on a time scale for natural absorption of the CO2 into oceans and then into carbonates (which is something like 100,000 years, IIRC).

So that someone in the future can discover these reserves and use it as fuel?!?!!?!

No, by then it's at least conceivable that cold fusion will by then be a reality. If an individual cracks this problem maybe they'll offer a paper ending with a comment akin to Watson & Cricks 1953 paper on DNA. "It has not escaped our attention that ..." Or words to that effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGgovWTBoWY (Hossenfelder) https://lenr-canr.org/ (Library)

It's wonderful how pseudoscience is a renewable resource. Ghosts, then ESP, then pyramid power, and now cold fusion.

https://www.livingcarbon.com - they actually genetically engineered trees to grow faster.

Biochar is exactly doing that and is an active area of research in many places. There is several ongoing projects also showing that biochar can improve soil quality and crop yields.

We need to be building a mountain range out of diamonds.

Can you imagine the extraterrestrial archaeologist trying to explain that?

No - stupid slow speed of light stops so many interesting science fiction imaginations.

Reality is very much a bummer.

Some of those interesting scifi scenarios would not be so good for us.

It's true that the speed of light prevents it from actually happening, but you should still be able to imagine it.

The nice thing about making diamonds as opposed to coal or bio-oil is that it's quite hard to burn the diamond, so less chance of someone getting tempted into using these enormous reserves that are just sitting there, depreciating, to fuel the helicopter of their bitcoin-mining luxury cruise ship or create an ultra-fast pizza delivery service using rocket launchers

Depends on where the carbon goes. Into a home? Locked up for a long time. Under a cooking stove? Released.

But does it help worrying about where we're putting logs while we're burning fossil fuels? We need to plant enough trees to offset all the trees we're burning, but also all the gasoline, oil, and natural gas we're burning as well as all the concrete we're producing. The math seems like it'll never balance.

I did the back of the napkin math below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697255

Barring mistakes, it balances if we had avoided reducing the planet's vegetation by 20% since 1900. So much for that.

That's obviously not "the" solution, but it seems like reducing fuel burn while increasing forestation would benefit us beyond what is commonly expected.

Interesting math, so it is mathematically possible. Important to note, 1 billion hectares is just over the size of all of the United States.

That first map makes it seem like we had gains pretty much all over the world, but it's not showing net gain, most of the countries of the world had a net tree cover loss. I wish it had a map showing net losses per country too – and it'd be interesting to see it going back in time, many countries had periods of very extensive logging during the 1800's and 1900's.

If you scroll there is indeed a map with net gain in the page I shared. Direct link to the net gain map file here: https://research.wri.org/sites/default/files/gfr/2022-10/36%...

gain yes, but not one showing the losses per country

Happy to be your personal google, gives me an excuse to look at it again.

This dashboard is good for that https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/?categor...

This visualization is also good: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

Thanks for these pointers, I really didn't mean for you to go out looking, was just complaining a bit about the presentation of that first site ;-)

Interestingly, the first forest watch loss (pink blob) I zoomed in on there turned out to be a project initiated by a local environmental organization to restore an island to its original farmland (as it had been up until a century ago and for centuries before) with wild sheep keeping the trees down, small bushes and wide range of local flowers instead of deep tree cover. And the nearest "forest gain" (blue blob) was a park tree. As Yolland the disenchanted mapmaker said, "Something is being eroded."

No worries at all :)

> most of the countries of the world had a net tree cover loss.

This also doesn't really matter.

Russia, Canada, Brazil, the US, and China are about ~60% of the world's trees.

Their forest areas could grow by only 2-3% and dozens of small countries could lose substantial percentages of their forests, and we'd still end up with a ton more trees and forest area.

What happens when the forests in those places burn down?

Depends on how they burn and what forest we are talking about. A small intensity fire will leave many of the healthy trees alive while burning dead ones, and will turn some of the carbon into charcoal which is sequestered. A larger intensity fire will also kill healthy trees, and turns the carbon into CO2.

Many of the forests in North America need to burn every year in that low intensity fire. Their seeds won't even sprout until after a fire (when all the dead undergrowth has been burned away thus leaving the new sprout with sunlight). However this doesn't apply to all forests in North America, and I know even less about other countries.

Moral of the story: consult a forester who knows the local forest before talking about anything. In many places we have been badly mismanaging forests and there is no nice way out. We probably do need to burn down and start over with large parts of North America because of all the harm decades of "Smokey the bear" have done to our forests.

That depends on how many of them burn. A few? Doesn't matter much. All? Goodbye, and thanks for all the carbon.

What percentage of burning down over what time scale?

Forest loss data is available for the study period (2000 - 2020). I've worked with this specific data source quite a bit. While it's known for being the gold standard in global forest loss estimation there are many countries that criticize it for over estimating loss. Going back further than 1985 is difficult/impossible as the estimate is derived from satellite data.

I wonder if declassified cold war spy plane photos might be usable to extend the records farther back in history? The resolution and coverage should be pretty good.

They didn’t take high resolution photos everywhere back then. In the early satellites it used physical film they recovered. And later digital storage and bandwidth was expensive and they dumped any data they didn’t need.

I'm not thinking of early satellites, but rather spy planes like the U-2 and SR-71 (and their equivalents in other countries). They would take use big long reels of physical film, covering quite broad areas on continuous capture from high altitude. It's possible that much was discarded but my guess is that most of it was archived somewhere for the intelligence community. (I'm sure that some areas of the world got more attention than others, of course).

Be interesting to go back even further, pre agriculture. The world would be awash with trees.

Not really. In some places yes, but trees need specific conditions to exist: there would be lots of grass land and deserts too.

And it’s not just trees. Ever heard of “justdiggit”?

They found that digging holes in the desert functionally accumulates enough water to promote diverse plant life. It’s apparent an ancient practice. They organize groups to do it. Ecological stewardship is, I hope, a key shift in mindset from the current totalizing view of global warming.

https://justdiggit.org/

I didn't know about this but after several documentaries on the medium to long term impact of these projects many areas being more detrimental than beneficial I tend to be a bit skeptical. I get particularly skeptical when the whole website is geared towards taking in corporate donations rather than teaching how to do it and direct action and a sort of wiki of how to do it yourself as well as evangelizing that.

I didn't spend too long on the website but this page https://justdiggit.org/dig-in/farmer/start-regreening/ seems to be the closest to that, yet it's still no instructions and just marketing. I don't want to sound too negative or make a judgment call with too little information but wanted to share my worries as it has become all too common for grifters to take advantage of the situation in a sort of partnership with huge corporation leadership teams. They get free money and the leadership team gets to greenwash whatever they do in their core business.

I never researched this specific one in detail other than a few minutes now, but the company I worked for previously used to do this style of donations and we found a lot of projects like this.

So take a minute to look at their impact reports and then we can discuss the evidence.

https://justdiggit.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Justdiggit...

Sorry I shared the main link— they are an NGO that raises money, that’s how it works.

I just find it hard to understand that if you really found out digging holes has this much impact, and you truly care, that you wouldn't share schematics and detailed guides on how to do it in your own land, does that make sense? They would of course still try to do larger projects, but it just feels strange enough to cause doubt for me. Sorry if it's a misjudgement.

Water bunds, and other approaches to re-greening are part of a United Nations-funded project. You can see other examples (including instructions) at these sites:

https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/

Instructions:

https://amshaafrica.org/index.php/building-water-bunds-a-ste...

Thanks for sharing, maybe I'm demanding things they aren't set out to do and being too cynical.

Yes, that's my take of your position.

There is plenty of literature about the effectiveness of swales and bunds. Justdiggit didn't invent them. Their expertise is in mobilising communities to actually implement them, and raising funds to support them.

Agreed. It's the corporate equivalent of sinning left and right 6 days a week, then going into the confession booth on Sunday and getting asked to recite a couple of Hail Mary's.

We should get prisoners to just randomly dig holes in the sand, a shovels length in diameter