Nature Enthusiasts

While I appreciate the sentiment, this is straight from grandma's facebook feed.

Trees are great and all but there's much better carbon sinks, algae is a big one.

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.

How do we get these "trees" into a decentralized block chain with integrated AI? Only then will we get people to carelessly throw money at them.

"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.

but does it make the line go up tho

Trees only store CO² for a limited time. Then you need to somehow store it in the holes we got the oil out from. I prefer algae.

If you really want carbon capture protect your wetlands. They're truly the best.

There's a tiny creature that consumes much more CO2, cyanobacteria. Trees provide windbreaks, shade, and habitats, but cyanobacteria are the OG carbon sequesters.

Cut it down and build with it too. I wonder if this community dislikes that thought.

There are all these micro machines that suck up a lot more C02 it is called hemp

A tree absorbs about 25 kg of CO2 per year. A human breathes out about 250 kg of CO2 per year.

Trees are great, but not all that efficient. To deal with the amount of CO2 humanity is currently producing, we'd need a whole lot more of them.

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.

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.