"rises by nearly one third" sounds a bit strange to me, more correct would be "Plant CO2 uptake is currently underestimated by one third according to new research"?
> The research, detailed in the journal Nature, is expected to improve Earth system simulations that scientists use to predict the future climate, and spotlights the importance of natural carbon sequestration for greenhouse gas mitigation.
Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
> Even though the world gained 130.9 Mha of tree cover between 2000 and 2020, it still lost much more, with an overall net loss of 100.6 Mha. While the global numbers report a negative trajectory, there are distinct regional patterns or “hotspots” of net gain. At least 36 countries gained more tree cover than they lost over the 20-year time period. As a continent, Europe gained 6 million hectares of tree cover by 2020. Asia also had a large proportion of countries with net gain, particularly in Central and South Asia. The drivers of much of this gain (for example, what proportion is due to intentional restoration interventions versus land abandonment) are still difficult to determine using the available data, but are a key area for future research. Additionally, even though tree cover gain is occurring in many places, it doesn’t “cancel out” the impacts of loss. Primary forests in particular serve as critical carbon stores and support an intricate network of wildlife, none of which can easily be replaced once lost.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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."
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
At least in the UK woodland cover is increasing. It was 3% back in 1900~ and today it stands at about [13%][0]. The aim in the UK is to be at 15% woodland and tree coverage by 2050 – quite achievable.
I currently teach woodland management and arboriculture (I also run a weird hybrid business doing software and arboriculture) in the UK and the idea that we cut down more than we plant is a common misconception that I spend a lot of time (and I mean a lot of time) correcting with the public and general layperson. Felling trees for forestry purposes requires a felling license[1], which always comes with a re-stocking clause.
As for urban green infrastructure (basically private and municipal trees and hedges), that comes with it's own issues, and there's a lot of wins to be had there but there are also lots of challenges. I know the Arboricultural Association in the UK are doing some great work here to advocate for finding ways to retain private and municipal trees whilst managing risk to the public (the main reason trees are normally removed second only to "aesthetic").
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is also a thing in the UK which broadly translates to ensuring that any private building works or developments must now have a demonstrable positive effect on local biodiversity and where that's not possible, then developers can "offset" by commissioning biodiversity projects elsewhere. For example, I've just taken delivery of 1200 trees (oak, hazel) today, which will be planted into semi-ancient woodland that I manage.
So basically the idea that we're cutting down forest ahead of what can restock isn't accurate, in fact in the UK at least, it is quite the opposite.
[1]: unless it is a) less than five cubic metres in a twelve week period (basically "thinning" woodland so that other trees have room to grow / habitat improvement for priority habitats). b) a private tree without a preservation order/ fruit tree, c) diseased or dying or d) a suitably high risk to public safety.
It depends. For forestry stock there's no real way to avoid monoculture if you need a lot and you need it soon (40-60 years). There's much more to this answer though because Phytopthora is hammering larch, Ips is hammering spruce and red band needle blight is hammering pines. That's another topic on itself. Broadly though, there's nothing wrong with a monoculture per-se ([Pando][1], Boreal woodland) it just depends on how it is managed and how well the ecology does in response to it.
That being said, personally, I favour the continuous cover approach of mixing up natives broadleaves with non-native conifers as long as the site isn't ancient or semi-ancient natural woodland (ASNW) or plantation on ancient woodland site (PAWS). For those sites, they're too important for use as a commercial forestry site and arguably the ecology needs to be restored, maintained and managed. Those sites are precious and should be managed properly in-line with their identified [NVC identifier][2]. The one exception to this is coppicing. Having a coppice on ancient sites where coppicing was practised is one of the few woodland management techniques that adds to ecology over all four woodland layers over all time frames.
I never thought I'd answer that question on HN. I appreciate you asking. What's your take on forestry monocultures?
My preconception (not a botanist) was that monocultures were automatically worse for local ecologies. I wonder if lumbering practices in America are similar. Obviously, it's a mix of good and bad, but it would be cool to find some research that suggests how we're doing.
I also just like an eclectic, vibrant forest, and personally, monocultures ruin that vibe for me. I'm pretty spoiled though, having lived much of my life in heavily-wooded areas.
Old forests sequester more carbon than new ones. When you cut down a tree, you leave half of it under ground, and when the roots break down all that carbon is released to the atmosphere.
It is far from straightforward whether it is better to leave the forests standing or cut down and replant. The forestry industry is of course claiming that a cultivated forest is better for the climate. The environmentalists are claiming that old forests that are left alone are better for the climate and in addition better for ecological diversity.
I tend to believe the side whose income doesn’t depend on their claim.
Sounds dubious. Most trees are not nearly 50% roots by biomass. The roots that remain will get broken down, but not into gases exclusively. A new tree that’s growing is actively capturing new carbon. Cutting down a tree won’t help much, but if a new tree grows where the old one was, it’s hard to find reasoning to suggest a net loss.
What happens to the parts that are cut down and used is what matters. If you build long-lasting houses from them, then it's probably good for the climate, as long as new tree is planted in its place. If you use the wood to make toilet paper, then it's not so good for climate since that carbon will return to the atmosphere faster.
It’s a net negative over time if the square footage that was housing a tree is replaced with grassland or a neighborhood. You trade a one-time, one-tree-sized fixing event against all fixing by all future generations of trees on that spot.
The climate math of lumber works if you’re talking about “productive forests” where trees are allowed to grow to replace trees cut down. It doesn’t work for situations when a forest is cleared and not replaced, which is mostly what is happening where rainforest is being cleared.
In the USA, at least, most the lumber for home construction is farmed. We don't rely on "old growth" for much anymore.
Meaning the forests are kept forests and new trees are planted to replace the ones that are cut down. The land the trees are farmed from is kept forested because it provides a income source for the owners. Also the trees tend to grow much faster then they do in natural forests because things like spacing out trees is optimized.
This is a big complaint for wood working folks, ironically. Because natural grown trees grow slower the wood grain is much tighter and ends up being generally higher quality. Where as modern farmed wood has huge rings.
Although it isn't too bad because you don't use soft woods much for things like furniture making. Where as construction lumber is almost all soft wood.
So at least in the USA the ratio of grown-to-cut wood is about 1.92. So we plant trees nearly 2 to 1 versus what we cut down.
I guess a tree farm (if the trees are used for construction and not burning) would be significantly net negative for atmospheric carbon, especially if the operation was entirely powered by solar and electric?
Most (all?) of the carbon sequestered by a tree that dies and rots on the forest floor goes back into the atmosphere. So the "fixing by all future generations" is just the same carbon sink as the current 1 alive standing tree for that spot of real estate.
Regardless, the net carbon sink of a healthy forest is higher than the net carbon sink of a few houses that were built in its place.
Simply think of the number of tons of wood in an acre of forest, compared with the number of tons of wood in a housing development.
It doesn't matter that some trees die and release their carbon, other trees grow. Instead of thinking of individual trees, simply think of the entire biomass of the forest.
A tiny amount is turned to coal (often via forest fires) which then isn't returned to the cycle. We are talking about -0.1C over thousands of years though, if we otherwise went carbon neutral - which seems unlikely for the long tail of small users but if we get the major uses of fossil fuels to something carbon neutral that would get us very close to stopping global warming at least.
Much less than half of the tree mass is used that way. (But of course also the part in buildings is there only temporarily, for the lifespan of the building)
Are there any good charities that buy up green land for the sake of not doing anything to it? From what I've read of carbon capture economics, it seems a frillion times more effective to simply not chop down more forest compared to investing in carbon capture (though I'm not saying we shouldn't do both)
Yes, the Nature Conservancy is a large nonprofit that buys lands to hold in its natural state, albeit not at the scale needed to offset industrial activities. They tend to focus more on qualities like undisturbed ecosystems, or biodiversity, than climate change.
And in the U.S. at least, many states have a concept of a conservation easement where you get a tax advantage by promising not to disturb or develop land you own. This is used by some wealthy individuals to lock up a bunch of land undisturbed. But again, so far it is not remotely close to offsetting the overall human behaviors that are forcing warming. (As evidenced by the directly measured rising CO2 levels and temperature anomalies.)
Not exactly what you're asking for, but [Ecologi](https://ecologi.com/) is doing lots of work on the tree-planting front, but also doing other work that helps with climate change, like solar panel setups in Morocco, wind farms in the US, methane emissions in Brazil, and more.
I think they mean the global CO2 uptake from plants is 30% higher overall not that a single plant is able to uptake 30% more than the estimated before.
Even though more CO2 pressure in the atmosphere increases also the potential uptake in a plant.
> Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
"Plants" is not a synonym for "trees". There are grasslands that are significant carbon sinks - even farmland managed in the right way can be a carbon sink . The oceans (which have a notable lack of trees) are a major carbon sink (although this paper is not talking about this, if I understand the abstract correctly).
There are plants in the ocean that man will have trouble to cut down.
Earth isn’t the same kind of living organism as man, but it’s an organism just like AI isn’t the same intelligence as that of man’s, but it is intelligence.
As I understand the article; it’s not that we found out that they’ve _started_ absorbing more CO2; it’s that the previous estimations were flawed and we have new, improved ones.
Isn’t this common knowledge among plant growers anyway? Plants can easily enjoy a co2 ppm of 1000+ in a greenhouse for faster growth. Photosynthesis involves an exchange of co2 to oxygen
Interesting that a couple of months ago there was an article which stated the exact opposite:
> In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447 by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
> “We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.
> “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.
Not exactly. The headline is a bit misleading imho: the article doesn't say that CO2 uptake by plants is up by 31%, rather that new estimates of the CO2 uptake by plants is 31% higher than previous estimates. That doesn't preclude a temporary collapse of carbon absorption (related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell).
> related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell
Just trying to parse this - does that mean "a collapse in carbon absorption" actually means "more carbon was produced for the same amount of absorption"?
This is interesting to know, but easy to overstate IMO.
Back of the envelope number is 10 kg of CO2 absorbed per maturing tree and year (for ~20 years).
This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me, and a factor of 30% is not gonna change this significantly.
Renewables + electrification seems much more realistic, when countries like France are already under 5 tons CO2/year/person by relying on carbon-free electricity (US is at 15!).
But it's still nice to know because at least planting/conserving trees apparently helps even more than expected...
> This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me
That’s 50 trees each year for each person, or, in the USA, about 17 billion trees, for a total new forest of 340 billion trees.
Infeasible, but not completely impossible, I would think, from a ‘could we do it?’ viewpoint. ‘Is there a decent chance we’ll do that?’ probably has the answer “no”, though. For the USA, I guess cutting combining forestation with decreasing energy usage would be the easier option.
Thats an even bigger area than I imagined... Another big problem is that we'd have to grow those forests again after 20 years, because mature trees stop being a CO2 sink.
The numbers/ratios should be even worse for Europe where the population density is higher. But I can totally see the approach working after scaling CO2 emissions down.
I think going over single digit percentages of land area in forestation levels is already politically almost impossible-- agriculture alone is gonna meet any such attempt with ridicule at best and copious amounts of buckshot at worst...
> On a global scale, oceans and other water bodies absorb approximately 25-30% of the CO₂ emitted by human activities each year. This absorption occurs primarily through two mechanisms:
> - Physical Dissolution: CO₂ dissolves in water and reacts to form carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate ions.
> - Biological Processes: Aquatic organisms, especially photosynthetic ones, play a significant role in capturing and sequestering CO₂.
It's a useful datapoint in understanding the Earth's carbon cycle, but that's all - and it in no way changes the fact that the sum total of current human activity is dragging that cycle out of equilibrium by about 2.5-3ppm per year, or 8-10%ish per decade.
>used new models and measurements to assess GPP from the land at 157 petagrams of carbon per year, up from an estimate of 120 petagrams established 40 years ago and currently used in most estimates of Earth’s carbon cycle
>One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles.
this sounds pretty significant. Any particular reason why it hasn't been updated for the last 40y?
If it has been underestimated then that means climate models have been using the bad, underestimated data, so they need to be updated and run to see where we are at, corrrect?
I expect climate models contain a lot of parameters that aren't related to plant uptake of CO2, and some that are. I expect that, until now, the latter have been based on the 1980 study, because otherwise this latest result would not be news.
I also expect that the contribution of plant CO2 uptake is a large factor in these models, so a significant change like this will potentially have a significant effect on predictions.
Are any of these expectations wrong? If so, which ones?
Yes because the models attempt to model feedback loops like the albedo difference created by greenery, the CO2 dampening effect of photosynthesis, the water content of the air and how that's affected by trees and so on.
Bear in mind, ESMs aren't trying to predict future CO2 levels. They're trying to predict future weather based on the effects of higher CO2, and vegetation is a part of that.
Right, this new estimate can be useful for decision support: if we plant X acres, how much CO2 would it absorb? It's not very important outside of that, and it cant have caused significant past errors because to date humans have not undertaken large-scale planting for CO2 absorption reasons.
Several countries have implemented large-scale planting efforts: China, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Australia, Pakistan, and Turkey to name a few. In 2019, Ethiopia claimed to have planted over 350 million trees in a single day as part of a broader initiative to plant 4 billion trees within a year to fight climate change.
It's not very important outside of predicting the future of the climate accurately.
That's not the kind of thing I'd write "It's not very important outside of" before. This "mere" prediction and decision support is the reason we fund the sciences.
Expected future CO2 concentration are a parameter for the climate models, and are generated by themselves by other models with different set of inputs accounting for a series of natural and socio-economic variables.
Yes, although you will not find a climate scientist that will admit to having used a model that was clearly wrong. They just silently update the model and hope you don't ask. And if you ask, nope, they will not hand over their model. But trust me bro, the models are correct.
No, the atmospheric CO2 measurements are unaffected by this. We definitely have a CO2 problem despite plants being more effective at extracting it than previously thought.
Another way of looking at it is that planting trees may be more effective at removing CO2 than previously thought, and deforestation somewhat more harmful.
Well, wouldn't it be correct to say that now, with the new numbers, CO2 uptake of plants will be 31% more than previously thought? So every coming year, there will be 31% more CO2 converted into oxygen than previously thought?
Previously we believed that ocean, wetlands, soil, and geological activity absorb about 75% of the CO2. Plants account for around 25% of the carbon absorption.
The research doesn't indicate that more carbon in total is absorbed than we thought - we've got a pretty solid understanding of the total carbon absorption capacity, because we measure it directly, rather than model it. It indicates that a larger proportion of the carbon absorption comes from plants than we thought (around 33%, instead of 25%), with the other sources taking on proportionally less of the absorption.
This research will allow us to more accurately model how land use impacts CO2 though, and will likely put a higher premium on protecting plant life in any carbon assessments.
I would say no. We still have data on our year to year/decade to decade C02 in the atmosphere. So we can track how quickly it's rising. Those data points would already include any error we have in how much C02 is absorbed or created.
This kind of change is deeply worrying, because on the face of it, it implies means estimates of climate change are potentially rather unsound - such large changes in mechanisms central to change - and so climate change could be much worse than we expect.
If climate change isn't so bad, then phew, but if it's actually worse, then we are in even more deadly trouble than we already are.
Unfortunately this doesn't mean much for the practical problem, because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots.
It's like we've got a bathtub where the water level is rising, because we won't turn off the tap and the drain is only so big. We can lower the apparent water-level by throwing in a bunch of plant-sponges, but we can't just keep adding more indefinitely.
Correct, in the long-term. Like how a temporary loan is somewhat wasted if the breathing-room it generates is only used to delay fixing the budget shortfall.
I think the part of the page you linked that is relevant to this topic is:
>But when forest carbon is released—which could happen when trees die in a changing climate, or when short-term carbon offset contracts expire and allow landowners to clear their forests—temperatures inevitably go up.
The first part ("when trees die in a changing climate") links to a National Geographic article behind a paywall. Before the paywall appeared, I noticed it said something about "drought or fire", which leads me to wonder whether the loss of forest carbon occurs only under those conditions. Is that right? If so, by avoiding those conditions, we coughs avoid that loss.
We could plant, cut down and burn trees for the energy, in a circle, and keep carbon levels in our atmosphere the same, instead of digging up new carbon from the ground and burning it. We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.
This consumes far more land area than we have available.
The first blast furnaces were indeed fuelled this way, from locally sourced charcoal, but coal/coke took over due to requiring far less effort (energy!) to extract.
Going by https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy... , the UK's single large scale biomass power plant is fuelled by over sixteen million hectares (160,000km^2) or approximately one Wisconsin. If we wanted to power the whole UK electricity from biomass, we'd need ten Wisconsins. (Wisconsin, presumably, would have to find some other source of power in this scenario)
(of course, Drax wasn't built to burn imported biomass, it was built to burn locally extracted coal ...)
A slightly more useful land area is the United Kingdom itself, which is 243,000km^2. With this technique, it takes an area 1/19th the size of the UK to produce 4% of its energy.
This isn't a feasible approach to energy production, but it's an order of magnitude less bad than your figures have put forward.
Yes. That's what my view is. If we cut down the trees, and burn them, we'll have the same level of C atoms in the atmosphere. If we keep using gas and oil coming under the ground, the number of C atoms will keep increasing.
Although I am not exactly sure about the ratio of the C atoms stored in the atmosphere, and C stored in trees, houses, but it seems to me the Logical move that we should stop getting gas and petrol from under the ground and start using trees and other plants instead.
That’s correct, but there is also something else, NASA has argued that their satellite imagery has shown an increase in the planet’s plant coverage as CO2 has increased, since to plants, CO2 is what not just oxygen is to us, but also in many ways like nourishment by absorbing the carbon from the air, which they use to grow.
Plants are generally not CO2 limited. General water is the limit - thus deserts are not very green despite having as much CO2. Even in wet climate a few weeks without rain and the plants are going dormant.
In the ocean the limit is often other nutrients like iron. Attempts have been made to add iron to the ocean and those areas suddenly turned green (though it is not clear how sustainable this practice would be, nor if there might be other unknown negatives).
That isn't to say CO2 is never the limit. Large greenhouses often are CO2 limited (often burning fossil fuels indoors to provide the CO2 without opening windows and thus letting something else undesired in). There are no doubt areas where CO2 is the limit and so NASA can see more green that is attributed to more CO2 - but still CO2 is rarely the limiting factor.
This is a bunch of nonsense. Of course reduction in C02 can limit growth. You even make that very point by mentioning the use of CO2 generators in commercial greenhouse operations.
The argument NASA makes is basically the same that CO2 increases have resulted in expected increases of plant growth, as is observable by satellite.
I do not subscribe to the insane CO2 Bad religion that you appear to subscribe to because it is yet another dumb religion to harness the naive and gullible peasants, but you go right ahead. How about you stop being horrible to other people about it though and stop traveling and using technology that all produces CO2.
Ok guys, this climate change stuff is temporarily off the menu until we win the great power AI war with China. Same goes for nuclear power. Send the memo out that we love nuclear power now after 40 years of hating it.[1]
Climate change stuff is off the menu until Americans elect a president that actually believes in climate change.
There is no "power AI war with China", this is just another pretext from the GOP to fuel the extraction industry with public money, and "drill, baby, drill".
What about the nuclear power stuff though? That was a Biden initiative and a huge reversal of the past 40 years of Democratic Party policy. Just seems like things are moving in energy policy.
It's too little, too late, but I'll still take it. However I still have a hard time believing banks and other private actors will go through funding 20+ years projects like nuclear reactors in today's short-termist economy.
> Pan-tropical rainforests accounted for the biggest difference between previous estimates and the new figures, a finding that was corroborated by ground measurements, Gu said. The discovery suggests that rainforests are a more important natural carbon sink than previously estimated using satellite data.
And yet, we stand by on the sidelines while narco, wood and cattle organized crime cartels contaminate, log and burn down the rainforests.
IMHO, at least the endangered rainforest belts should be placed under international supervision with a joint military cooperative on a shoot-to-kill order against these kinds of criminals. Think of an UN Blue Helmets mission, but not as a toothless "peacekeper corps" like the usual useless bullshit. The very ability of Earth to provide for human life hinges to a significant part on the continued existence and health of the rainforest ecosystem, and it is obvious now that many of the countries in which these forests lie are fundamentally incapable of maintaining this shared resource.
It feels like we can never catch a break. If we do something like underestimate the amount of CO2 plants absorb it still does nothing to change our fate.
Is there anything in our climate models that if we got wrong would drastically reduce the estimated severity of long term impacts from climate?
We don't ever actually know if any model is accurate -- that is, whether it actually models the underlying physical process. We just have a lot of models that have made predictions about the future that turned out to be more or less correct, much more often that you'd expect by chance, and so we develop trust in that correspondence with reality over time.
It's possible that our current climate models are wrong, by a little or a lot. It's also possible that General Relativity is wrong -- gravity might stop at this time tomorrow.
If you're interested, this issue is called the Problem of Induction in philosophy. (Confusingly, "induction" has a different meaning here than in mathematical induction.)
There are a lot of people who think humanity will intentionally geo-engineer our way out the negative effects of our accidental geo-engineering. In part because it is something active that a single nation could do for itself. Like, China could just decide one day to do what you’re saying and it’s unlikely anyone would start a war to stop them.
Seems scary because we don’t actually know how to do it, and we only have one planet. We could create horrible side effects like killing ocean life we depend on for food, or admire (e.g. whales). We also have evidence for a “snowball Earth” state at times in the past. What if we overcorrect? Lots of good sci-fi stories about that to chill our bones.
The argument against it happening is that it would be expensive for that one nation, but benefits would not be proprietary. Whereas building out an economy of low-carbon power generation, manufacturing, and transportation creates tons of domestic economic benefits like jobs, trade, profits.
We have already geoengineered the temperature to be 0.2-0.4 C lower by container ships emitting SO2. We have also observed this a lot from volcanic eruptions. We should really at least try.
Every problem has unforeseen benefits. Global warming reduces the risk for nuclear winter when the resulting tribal conflicts lead to the nuclear regional exchange dice landing on that number that cant come up on repeated throws.
I thought I'd read in the past that an uptake in C02 for plants/trees (and therefore faster growing) results in a weaker structure which doesn't stand up to the environment as well as slower growing trees.
And also a poison for them — just as oxygen is both of those things for us. (If oxygen isn't even a metaphorical food for us, then neither is CO2 for plants).
Unfortunately, "food" is more complex than "how much carbohydrates do you get per day?"
We still have ways to go to that. From the current 400 ppm to about 2000ppm before the apocalypse. Until then the yields will generally improve from today’s baseline. There might be other systems that break before that and we get plantocalypse earlier
The messaging of this article is causing people in this very comment section to conclude that climate change is progressing slower (or even not progressing at all) based on a revision of a plant CO2 uptake study that was done in the 1980s.
Like it or not climate science is extremely political and selectively reported science (which this is) that is presented to the public needs to account for the context in which it exists or it is no better than propaganda. The fact that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is primarily funded by the US Department of Energy is plenty of reason to be suspicious of its motivations. They have a vested interest in shaping the public's perception of energy production and its impact on the climate.
Everyone wants clean air. There is reasonable debate as to what that threshold should be and what human actions should be taken to improve it and this information adds to that debate.
If you were looking for a data point to use as a cudgel against the "idiots" then you are failing in at least to known ways.
That is not at all the sentiment GP is expressing.
Say you have a terminal disease. Doctors evaluated the progression of your illness and estimated you have three years to live. Of course, when you begin treatment changes your life expectancy: start now and you may get twenty more years; start in two years and you’ll only get an extra four.
Your insurance company says “doctors are all quacks, you’re not ill, they’re just in it for the money” and don’t pay you anything. They know that’s a lie and that after you die there is a high probability your family will sue them out of existence, but the people currently in charge hope that will be far enough in the future they won’t have to personally worry about it. In the meantime they will enjoy the money they don’t pay you.
As the months go by, you visibly deteriorate. It’s obvious you are sick. Your insurance maybe pays for some token cheap medicine to make you more comfortable and get themselves more leeway. Maybe that buys you an extra four months. They’ll be horrible but you will be alive and so your family can’t sue. They continue to be off the hook but it’s getting harder to escape the reality.
Then a new doctor comes along and says “actually we overestimated the progression of your illness, you should’ve been given five years initially”. What do you think happens then? Obviously the insurance company will use that as an argument to further delay your treatment and double down on the rhetoric that all doctors are quacks. The damage is still happening but the urgent action needed to stave it off is once again delayed into the future.
That is what GP is complaining about. It’s obviously good news that you’re not so close to death as you thought, but that knowledge may end up hurting you in the long run.
Yes, this specific messaging feels motivated by the bottom lines of energy producers. The information doesn't actually change what we've measured regarding progress of climate change, but it's vague enough that plenty of people in the comments here are confused and acting like climate change isn't real after all.
Well then it's a flawed analogy. There is no credible basis to say the planet is "dying" in same exigent sense you convey with this analogy. It's particularly bad faith to compare the lifespan of a Human with the imputed lifespan of Earth.
Analogies are never perfect, they are a tool to explain an idea by way of drawing similarities. They are not meant to overlap perfectly, that would be a tautology.
It’s not realistic to think one’s family could simply sue an insurance company or of existence. It’s pretty obvious to anyone engaging in good faith that the example is making a point for humans, not attempting to be taken literally by obtuse robots.
You said it derogatorily, but it is genuine evidence that rising CO2 concentrations are have less effects than previously thought. In theory there could accumulate enough evidence to show anything.
That is exactly it - that's untrue. CO2 absorption was previously underestimated, but that does not change the rising concentration or the effect of CO2 on the climate.
But it might change what we view as a legitimate mitigation strategy.
For example, could we burn oil at 2024's rates with 1900's forests and not have net-positive CO2 levels? Back of the napkin:
- We're producing ~37 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) through burning of fossil fuels at the moment [0]
- The current forestation level is ~4 billion hectares [1]
- The net loss of forestation is ~1 billion hectares since 1900, with deforestation rates peaking starting ~100 years ago. [1]
- 1 petagram == 1 Gt
- Current forests consume 157 Gt/yr [article]
Therefore, the billion hectares we cut down in the past century would consume an additional 157 * 0.25 == 39.25 GtCO2/yr if it were still standing, 2 Gt more than our historical maximum global net output.
Obviously, the burning of fossil fuels is ultimate source of the increase in CO2, but without the deforestation it would still (back of the napkin) be sustainable. At least, we'd not be quite so far down this road.
It isn't. Greenhouse emissions have remained roughly stagnant for over 30 years, while lung cancer deaths have dropped by 50-60 percent. Of course that's largely due to a decrease in smoking, but without any concomitant increase in mortality from "bad air", I don't see how anyone could think it's a "big deal".
"rises by nearly one third" sounds a bit strange to me, more correct would be "Plant CO2 uptake is currently underestimated by one third according to new research"?
> The research, detailed in the journal Nature, is expected to improve Earth system simulations that scientists use to predict the future climate, and spotlights the importance of natural carbon sequestration for greenhouse gas mitigation.
Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
Not everywhere, between 2000 and 2020, 36 countries managed to get more tree cover than they lost, so we "just" need to expand this practice.
https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/forest...
> Even though the world gained 130.9 Mha of tree cover between 2000 and 2020, it still lost much more, with an overall net loss of 100.6 Mha. While the global numbers report a negative trajectory, there are distinct regional patterns or “hotspots” of net gain. At least 36 countries gained more tree cover than they lost over the 20-year time period. As a continent, Europe gained 6 million hectares of tree cover by 2020. Asia also had a large proportion of countries with net gain, particularly in Central and South Asia. The drivers of much of this gain (for example, what proportion is due to intentional restoration interventions versus land abandonment) are still difficult to determine using the available data, but are a key area for future research. Additionally, even though tree cover gain is occurring in many places, it doesn’t “cancel out” the impacts of loss. Primary forests in particular serve as critical carbon stores and support an intricate network of wildlife, none of which can easily be replaced once lost.
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/
We should get prisoners to just randomly dig holes in the sand, a shovels length in diameter
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.
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 :)
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).
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://charmindustrial.com
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!
https://www.livingcarbon.com - they actually genetically engineered trees to grow faster.
We need to be building a mountain range out of diamonds.
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
Can you imagine the extraterrestrial archaeologist trying to explain that?
No - stupid slow speed of light stops so many interesting science fiction imaginations.
It's true that the speed of light prevents it from actually happening, but you should still be able to imagine it.
Reality is very much a bummer.
Some of those interesting scifi scenarios would not be so good for us.
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.
At least in the UK woodland cover is increasing. It was 3% back in 1900~ and today it stands at about [13%][0]. The aim in the UK is to be at 15% woodland and tree coverage by 2050 – quite achievable.
I currently teach woodland management and arboriculture (I also run a weird hybrid business doing software and arboriculture) in the UK and the idea that we cut down more than we plant is a common misconception that I spend a lot of time (and I mean a lot of time) correcting with the public and general layperson. Felling trees for forestry purposes requires a felling license[1], which always comes with a re-stocking clause.
As for urban green infrastructure (basically private and municipal trees and hedges), that comes with it's own issues, and there's a lot of wins to be had there but there are also lots of challenges. I know the Arboricultural Association in the UK are doing some great work here to advocate for finding ways to retain private and municipal trees whilst managing risk to the public (the main reason trees are normally removed second only to "aesthetic").
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is also a thing in the UK which broadly translates to ensuring that any private building works or developments must now have a demonstrable positive effect on local biodiversity and where that's not possible, then developers can "offset" by commissioning biodiversity projects elsewhere. For example, I've just taken delivery of 1200 trees (oak, hazel) today, which will be planted into semi-ancient woodland that I manage.
So basically the idea that we're cutting down forest ahead of what can restock isn't accurate, in fact in the UK at least, it is quite the opposite.
A good news story for you.
[0]: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statis....
[1]: unless it is a) less than five cubic metres in a twelve week period (basically "thinning" woodland so that other trees have room to grow / habitat improvement for priority habitats). b) a private tree without a preservation order/ fruit tree, c) diseased or dying or d) a suitably high risk to public safety.
I heard that the major problem with replanting efforts is monoculture. What are your thoughts on that?
It depends. For forestry stock there's no real way to avoid monoculture if you need a lot and you need it soon (40-60 years). There's much more to this answer though because Phytopthora is hammering larch, Ips is hammering spruce and red band needle blight is hammering pines. That's another topic on itself. Broadly though, there's nothing wrong with a monoculture per-se ([Pando][1], Boreal woodland) it just depends on how it is managed and how well the ecology does in response to it.
That being said, personally, I favour the continuous cover approach of mixing up natives broadleaves with non-native conifers as long as the site isn't ancient or semi-ancient natural woodland (ASNW) or plantation on ancient woodland site (PAWS). For those sites, they're too important for use as a commercial forestry site and arguably the ecology needs to be restored, maintained and managed. Those sites are precious and should be managed properly in-line with their identified [NVC identifier][2]. The one exception to this is coppicing. Having a coppice on ancient sites where coppicing was practised is one of the few woodland management techniques that adds to ecology over all four woodland layers over all time frames.
I never thought I'd answer that question on HN. I appreciate you asking. What's your take on forestry monocultures?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) [2]: https://jncc.gov.uk/our-work/nvc/
Super interesting!
My preconception (not a botanist) was that monocultures were automatically worse for local ecologies. I wonder if lumbering practices in America are similar. Obviously, it's a mix of good and bad, but it would be cool to find some research that suggests how we're doing.
I also just like an eclectic, vibrant forest, and personally, monocultures ruin that vibe for me. I'm pretty spoiled though, having lived much of my life in heavily-wooded areas.
> Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
Carbon is captured when trees grow. Lumber binds carbon into buildings and constructions.
Old forests sequester more carbon than new ones. When you cut down a tree, you leave half of it under ground, and when the roots break down all that carbon is released to the atmosphere.
It is far from straightforward whether it is better to leave the forests standing or cut down and replant. The forestry industry is of course claiming that a cultivated forest is better for the climate. The environmentalists are claiming that old forests that are left alone are better for the climate and in addition better for ecological diversity.
I tend to believe the side whose income doesn’t depend on their claim.
Sounds dubious. Most trees are not nearly 50% roots by biomass. The roots that remain will get broken down, but not into gases exclusively. A new tree that’s growing is actively capturing new carbon. Cutting down a tree won’t help much, but if a new tree grows where the old one was, it’s hard to find reasoning to suggest a net loss.
What happens to the parts that are cut down and used is what matters. If you build long-lasting houses from them, then it's probably good for the climate, as long as new tree is planted in its place. If you use the wood to make toilet paper, then it's not so good for climate since that carbon will return to the atmosphere faster.
>and when the roots break down all that carbon is released to the atmosphere.
How do you figure, exactly?
Bacteria and other organisms “eat” the wood, and then “breath” out CO2 (and sometimes methane).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_respiration?wprov=sfti1#
It’s a net negative over time if the square footage that was housing a tree is replaced with grassland or a neighborhood. You trade a one-time, one-tree-sized fixing event against all fixing by all future generations of trees on that spot.
The climate math of lumber works if you’re talking about “productive forests” where trees are allowed to grow to replace trees cut down. It doesn’t work for situations when a forest is cleared and not replaced, which is mostly what is happening where rainforest is being cleared.
In the USA, at least, most the lumber for home construction is farmed. We don't rely on "old growth" for much anymore.
Meaning the forests are kept forests and new trees are planted to replace the ones that are cut down. The land the trees are farmed from is kept forested because it provides a income source for the owners. Also the trees tend to grow much faster then they do in natural forests because things like spacing out trees is optimized.
This is a big complaint for wood working folks, ironically. Because natural grown trees grow slower the wood grain is much tighter and ends up being generally higher quality. Where as modern farmed wood has huge rings.
Although it isn't too bad because you don't use soft woods much for things like furniture making. Where as construction lumber is almost all soft wood.
So at least in the USA the ratio of grown-to-cut wood is about 1.92. So we plant trees nearly 2 to 1 versus what we cut down.
I guess a tree farm (if the trees are used for construction and not burning) would be significantly net negative for atmospheric carbon, especially if the operation was entirely powered by solar and electric?
Most (all?) of the carbon sequestered by a tree that dies and rots on the forest floor goes back into the atmosphere. So the "fixing by all future generations" is just the same carbon sink as the current 1 alive standing tree for that spot of real estate.
Regardless, the net carbon sink of a healthy forest is higher than the net carbon sink of a few houses that were built in its place.
Simply think of the number of tons of wood in an acre of forest, compared with the number of tons of wood in a housing development.
It doesn't matter that some trees die and release their carbon, other trees grow. Instead of thinking of individual trees, simply think of the entire biomass of the forest.
A tiny amount is turned to coal (often via forest fires) which then isn't returned to the cycle. We are talking about -0.1C over thousands of years though, if we otherwise went carbon neutral - which seems unlikely for the long tail of small users but if we get the major uses of fossil fuels to something carbon neutral that would get us very close to stopping global warming at least.
I’m talking specifically about when trees are used for lumber.
I think the subsistence farmers cutting down the Amazon are doing more burning than construction.
Much less than half of the tree mass is used that way. (But of course also the part in buildings is there only temporarily, for the lifespan of the building)
> Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown).
This is not true. Sustainable forestry practices have been increasing forest coverage for some time now.
Are there any good charities that buy up green land for the sake of not doing anything to it? From what I've read of carbon capture economics, it seems a frillion times more effective to simply not chop down more forest compared to investing in carbon capture (though I'm not saying we shouldn't do both)
Yes, the Nature Conservancy is a large nonprofit that buys lands to hold in its natural state, albeit not at the scale needed to offset industrial activities. They tend to focus more on qualities like undisturbed ecosystems, or biodiversity, than climate change.
And in the U.S. at least, many states have a concept of a conservation easement where you get a tax advantage by promising not to disturb or develop land you own. This is used by some wealthy individuals to lock up a bunch of land undisturbed. But again, so far it is not remotely close to offsetting the overall human behaviors that are forcing warming. (As evidenced by the directly measured rising CO2 levels and temperature anomalies.)
Not exactly what you're asking for, but [Ecologi](https://ecologi.com/) is doing lots of work on the tree-planting front, but also doing other work that helps with climate change, like solar panel setups in Morocco, wind farms in the US, methane emissions in Brazil, and more.
Search for „rewilding“. It’s a popular approach in the UK but you’ll find projects in other countries, too.
Underestimated by one quarter! A factor of 4/3 or 3/4.
I think they mean the global CO2 uptake from plants is 30% higher overall not that a single plant is able to uptake 30% more than the estimated before.
Even though more CO2 pressure in the atmosphere increases also the potential uptake in a plant.
>Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
Hmm, anyone has data on this? I've seen many people claiming the opposite of that opposite.
> Too bad that we are currently doing the exact opposite (cutting down more forest than is regrown)...
"Plants" is not a synonym for "trees". There are grasslands that are significant carbon sinks - even farmland managed in the right way can be a carbon sink . The oceans (which have a notable lack of trees) are a major carbon sink (although this paper is not talking about this, if I understand the abstract correctly).
There are plants in the ocean that man will have trouble to cut down.
Earth isn’t the same kind of living organism as man, but it’s an organism just like AI isn’t the same intelligence as that of man’s, but it is intelligence.
Ok, we've made the estimates rise in the title above. Thanks!
As I understand the article; it’s not that we found out that they’ve _started_ absorbing more CO2; it’s that the previous estimations were flawed and we have new, improved ones.
Isn’t this common knowledge among plant growers anyway? Plants can easily enjoy a co2 ppm of 1000+ in a greenhouse for faster growth. Photosynthesis involves an exchange of co2 to oxygen
https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/greenhouse-carbon-....
Not clear from the linked article. Did you see something else?
NPP is probably increasing as it's been observed for years now that the earth is net greening in response to rising CO2
Interesting that a couple of months ago there was an article which stated the exact opposite:
> In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.12447 by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
> “We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.
> “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-c...
Not exactly. The headline is a bit misleading imho: the article doesn't say that CO2 uptake by plants is up by 31%, rather that new estimates of the CO2 uptake by plants is 31% higher than previous estimates. That doesn't preclude a temporary collapse of carbon absorption (related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell).
> related mostly to forest fires as far as I can tell
Just trying to parse this - does that mean "a collapse in carbon absorption" actually means "more carbon was produced for the same amount of absorption"?
That's not the opposite. It's different context.
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This is interesting to know, but easy to overstate IMO.
Back of the envelope number is 10 kg of CO2 absorbed per maturing tree and year (for ~20 years).
This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me, and a factor of 30% is not gonna change this significantly.
Renewables + electrification seems much more realistic, when countries like France are already under 5 tons CO2/year/person by relying on carbon-free electricity (US is at 15!).
But it's still nice to know because at least planting/conserving trees apparently helps even more than expected...
> This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me
That’s 50 trees each year for each person, or, in the USA, about 17 billion trees, for a total new forest of 340 billion trees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... says the USA has about 280 billion trees, so we’d ‘only’ have to grow that by 120%. That would grow forest in the USA from about 33% to about 75% of land area.
Infeasible, but not completely impossible, I would think, from a ‘could we do it?’ viewpoint. ‘Is there a decent chance we’ll do that?’ probably has the answer “no”, though. For the USA, I guess cutting combining forestation with decreasing energy usage would be the easier option.
Thats an even bigger area than I imagined... Another big problem is that we'd have to grow those forests again after 20 years, because mature trees stop being a CO2 sink.
The numbers/ratios should be even worse for Europe where the population density is higher. But I can totally see the approach working after scaling CO2 emissions down.
I think going over single digit percentages of land area in forestation levels is already politically almost impossible-- agriculture alone is gonna meet any such attempt with ridicule at best and copious amounts of buckshot at worst...
there are also organisms in water:
> On a global scale, oceans and other water bodies absorb approximately 25-30% of the CO₂ emitted by human activities each year. This absorption occurs primarily through two mechanisms:
> - Physical Dissolution: CO₂ dissolves in water and reacts to form carbonic acid, bicarbonate, and carbonate ions.
> - Biological Processes: Aquatic organisms, especially photosynthetic ones, play a significant role in capturing and sequestering CO₂.
It's a useful datapoint in understanding the Earth's carbon cycle, but that's all - and it in no way changes the fact that the sum total of current human activity is dragging that cycle out of equilibrium by about 2.5-3ppm per year, or 8-10%ish per decade.
>used new models and measurements to assess GPP from the land at 157 petagrams of carbon per year, up from an estimate of 120 petagrams established 40 years ago and currently used in most estimates of Earth’s carbon cycle
>One petagram equals 1 billion metric tons, which is roughly the amount of CO2 emitted each year from 238 million gas-powered passenger vehicles.
this sounds pretty significant. Any particular reason why it hasn't been updated for the last 40y?
Impressive, yes. Important? Absolutely. Significant? Not really.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
If it has been underestimated then that means climate models have been using the bad, underestimated data, so they need to be updated and run to see where we are at, corrrect?
No. Climate scientists did not base all of their current models on a 1980 study about how much CO2 trees can technically absorb.
That's a straw man.
I expect climate models contain a lot of parameters that aren't related to plant uptake of CO2, and some that are. I expect that, until now, the latter have been based on the 1980 study, because otherwise this latest result would not be news.
I also expect that the contribution of plant CO2 uptake is a large factor in these models, so a significant change like this will potentially have a significant effect on predictions.
Are any of these expectations wrong? If so, which ones?
No because we aren't reliant on a model of atmospheric CO2 concentration. We directly measure it.
Yes because the models attempt to model feedback loops like the albedo difference created by greenery, the CO2 dampening effect of photosynthesis, the water content of the air and how that's affected by trees and so on.
Bear in mind, ESMs aren't trying to predict future CO2 levels. They're trying to predict future weather based on the effects of higher CO2, and vegetation is a part of that.
You measure the past, but you don't measure the future, right ?
Right, this new estimate can be useful for decision support: if we plant X acres, how much CO2 would it absorb? It's not very important outside of that, and it cant have caused significant past errors because to date humans have not undertaken large-scale planting for CO2 absorption reasons.
Several countries have implemented large-scale planting efforts: China, Ethiopia, India, Brazil, Australia, Pakistan, and Turkey to name a few. In 2019, Ethiopia claimed to have planted over 350 million trees in a single day as part of a broader initiative to plant 4 billion trees within a year to fight climate change.
>It's not very important outside of that,
It's not very important outside of predicting the future of the climate accurately.
That's not the kind of thing I'd write "It's not very important outside of" before. This "mere" prediction and decision support is the reason we fund the sciences.
Expected future CO2 concentration are a parameter for the climate models, and are generated by themselves by other models with different set of inputs accounting for a series of natural and socio-economic variables.
I assume they mean for things like offsetting programmes, predicting the continuing trend and effect of governments deciding to plant more/less, etc.
Don't we need models to make predictions about the future?
Yes, although you will not find a climate scientist that will admit to having used a model that was clearly wrong. They just silently update the model and hope you don't ask. And if you ask, nope, they will not hand over their model. But trust me bro, the models are correct.
We know that soils seem to absorb less carbon as plant absorb more [0].
It's fascinating to see all those studies improving our limited understanding of the biosphere.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03306-8
> Plants the world over are absorbing about 31% more carbon dioxide than previously thought, according to a new assessment developed by scientists.
So that means our supposed CO2 problem is 31% smaller than we previously thought?
No, the atmospheric CO2 measurements are unaffected by this. We definitely have a CO2 problem despite plants being more effective at extracting it than previously thought.
Another way of looking at it is that planting trees may be more effective at removing CO2 than previously thought, and deforestation somewhat more harmful.
Well, wouldn't it be correct to say that now, with the new numbers, CO2 uptake of plants will be 31% more than previously thought? So every coming year, there will be 31% more CO2 converted into oxygen than previously thought?
That just means that CO2 emissions are actually higher than previously thought. We directly measure atmospheric CO2.
Previously we believed that ocean, wetlands, soil, and geological activity absorb about 75% of the CO2. Plants account for around 25% of the carbon absorption.
The research doesn't indicate that more carbon in total is absorbed than we thought - we've got a pretty solid understanding of the total carbon absorption capacity, because we measure it directly, rather than model it. It indicates that a larger proportion of the carbon absorption comes from plants than we thought (around 33%, instead of 25%), with the other sources taking on proportionally less of the absorption.
This research will allow us to more accurately model how land use impacts CO2 though, and will likely put a higher premium on protecting plant life in any carbon assessments.
Aha, yeah that makes sense. But I can't really see that in the article.
Sadly not, because most carbon is absorbed by the ocean, not plants. And second because all of the nasty warming trends are still out there
Or this statistic means that actually much more oxygen is converted by plants compared to being processed by the ocean?
So it means planting extra plants to fight CO2 is much more effective than previously thought?
I would say no. We still have data on our year to year/decade to decade C02 in the atmosphere. So we can track how quickly it's rising. Those data points would already include any error we have in how much C02 is absorbed or created.
> supposed CO2 problem
No. This study has changed precisely nothing about how we measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Or climate change in general.
This kind of change is deeply worrying, because on the face of it, it implies means estimates of climate change are potentially rather unsound - such large changes in mechanisms central to change - and so climate change could be much worse than we expect.
If climate change isn't so bad, then phew, but if it's actually worse, then we are in even more deadly trouble than we already are.
Unfortunately this doesn't mean much for the practical problem, because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots.
It's like we've got a bathtub where the water level is rising, because we won't turn off the tap and the drain is only so big. We can lower the apparent water-level by throwing in a bunch of plant-sponges, but we can't just keep adding more indefinitely.
>because most of that uptake is is dumped into the atmosphere again when the plant dies and rots.
If that's true, there would seem to be no benefit to the climate in preserving or regenerating forests.
Correct, in the long-term. Like how a temporary loan is somewhat wasted if the breathing-room it generates is only used to delay fixing the budget shortfall.
https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/commentary/blog/why-tempora...
Thanks for responding.
I think the part of the page you linked that is relevant to this topic is:
>But when forest carbon is released—which could happen when trees die in a changing climate, or when short-term carbon offset contracts expire and allow landowners to clear their forests—temperatures inevitably go up.
The first part ("when trees die in a changing climate") links to a National Geographic article behind a paywall. Before the paywall appeared, I noticed it said something about "drought or fire", which leads me to wonder whether the loss of forest carbon occurs only under those conditions. Is that right? If so, by avoiding those conditions, we coughs avoid that loss.
We could plant, cut down and burn trees for the energy, in a circle, and keep carbon levels in our atmosphere the same, instead of digging up new carbon from the ground and burning it. We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.
This consumes far more land area than we have available.
The first blast furnaces were indeed fuelled this way, from locally sourced charcoal, but coal/coke took over due to requiring far less effort (energy!) to extract.
Going by https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy... , the UK's single large scale biomass power plant is fuelled by over sixteen million hectares (160,000km^2) or approximately one Wisconsin. If we wanted to power the whole UK electricity from biomass, we'd need ten Wisconsins. (Wisconsin, presumably, would have to find some other source of power in this scenario)
(of course, Drax wasn't built to burn imported biomass, it was built to burn locally extracted coal ...)
Drax uses about 12,000km^2, not 160,000km^2.
A slightly more useful land area is the United Kingdom itself, which is 243,000km^2. With this technique, it takes an area 1/19th the size of the UK to produce 4% of its energy.
This isn't a feasible approach to energy production, but it's an order of magnitude less bad than your figures have put forward.
> We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.
Location doesn’t matter. Duration of storage matters. If we could find a way to lock it up in a building material that would be effective and useful.
It's not exactly turning CO2 into bricks, but there's a few applications of biochar as an additive to improve concrete, asphalt, particleboard, etc.
Yes. That's what my view is. If we cut down the trees, and burn them, we'll have the same level of C atoms in the atmosphere. If we keep using gas and oil coming under the ground, the number of C atoms will keep increasing.
Although I am not exactly sure about the ratio of the C atoms stored in the atmosphere, and C stored in trees, houses, but it seems to me the Logical move that we should stop getting gas and petrol from under the ground and start using trees and other plants instead.
Trees take too long to grow relative to how much is used in construction, let alone if it were used as a fuel vs coal.
If trees are doing more work then we estimated in simulations, then good/bad, as we cut down forest we are doing more damage.
But also, since trees do more work than we thought, then planting more will have bigger impact than past estimates.
That’s correct, but there is also something else, NASA has argued that their satellite imagery has shown an increase in the planet’s plant coverage as CO2 has increased, since to plants, CO2 is what not just oxygen is to us, but also in many ways like nourishment by absorbing the carbon from the air, which they use to grow.
Plants are generally not CO2 limited. General water is the limit - thus deserts are not very green despite having as much CO2. Even in wet climate a few weeks without rain and the plants are going dormant.
In the ocean the limit is often other nutrients like iron. Attempts have been made to add iron to the ocean and those areas suddenly turned green (though it is not clear how sustainable this practice would be, nor if there might be other unknown negatives).
That isn't to say CO2 is never the limit. Large greenhouses often are CO2 limited (often burning fossil fuels indoors to provide the CO2 without opening windows and thus letting something else undesired in). There are no doubt areas where CO2 is the limit and so NASA can see more green that is attributed to more CO2 - but still CO2 is rarely the limiting factor.
This is a bunch of nonsense. Of course reduction in C02 can limit growth. You even make that very point by mentioning the use of CO2 generators in commercial greenhouse operations. The argument NASA makes is basically the same that CO2 increases have resulted in expected increases of plant growth, as is observable by satellite.
I do not subscribe to the insane CO2 Bad religion that you appear to subscribe to because it is yet another dumb religion to harness the naive and gullible peasants, but you go right ahead. How about you stop being horrible to other people about it though and stop traveling and using technology that all produces CO2.
Ok guys, this climate change stuff is temporarily off the menu until we win the great power AI war with China. Same goes for nuclear power. Send the memo out that we love nuclear power now after 40 years of hating it.[1]
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/96aa8d1a-bbf1-4b35-8680-d1fef36ef...
Climate change stuff is off the menu until Americans elect a president that actually believes in climate change.
There is no "power AI war with China", this is just another pretext from the GOP to fuel the extraction industry with public money, and "drill, baby, drill".
What about the nuclear power stuff though? That was a Biden initiative and a huge reversal of the past 40 years of Democratic Party policy. Just seems like things are moving in energy policy.
It's too little, too late, but I'll still take it. However I still have a hard time believing banks and other private actors will go through funding 20+ years projects like nuclear reactors in today's short-termist economy.
> Pan-tropical rainforests accounted for the biggest difference between previous estimates and the new figures, a finding that was corroborated by ground measurements, Gu said. The discovery suggests that rainforests are a more important natural carbon sink than previously estimated using satellite data.
And yet, we stand by on the sidelines while narco, wood and cattle organized crime cartels contaminate, log and burn down the rainforests.
IMHO, at least the endangered rainforest belts should be placed under international supervision with a joint military cooperative on a shoot-to-kill order against these kinds of criminals. Think of an UN Blue Helmets mission, but not as a toothless "peacekeper corps" like the usual useless bullshit. The very ability of Earth to provide for human life hinges to a significant part on the continued existence and health of the rainforest ecosystem, and it is obvious now that many of the countries in which these forests lie are fundamentally incapable of maintaining this shared resource.
It feels like we can never catch a break. If we do something like underestimate the amount of CO2 plants absorb it still does nothing to change our fate.
Is there anything in our climate models that if we got wrong would drastically reduce the estimated severity of long term impacts from climate?
We don't ever actually know if any model is accurate -- that is, whether it actually models the underlying physical process. We just have a lot of models that have made predictions about the future that turned out to be more or less correct, much more often that you'd expect by chance, and so we develop trust in that correspondence with reality over time.
It's possible that our current climate models are wrong, by a little or a lot. It's also possible that General Relativity is wrong -- gravity might stop at this time tomorrow.
If you're interested, this issue is called the Problem of Induction in philosophy. (Confusingly, "induction" has a different meaning here than in mathematical induction.)
The trend is what it is, our models only allow us to explain why it is that way and what can be done about it.
What does that mean for all the existing simulations that use the "wrong" values?
BTW: are there any open source climate models/simulations?
Maybe we should pay for working greening efforts - aka artifical algea blooms ontop of the Marianna trench.
Iron, phosphates, Air pumps and light transmitted into the depths where the growthcube rises.
Have a rainforest fall into the depths forever every hour.
There are a lot of people who think humanity will intentionally geo-engineer our way out the negative effects of our accidental geo-engineering. In part because it is something active that a single nation could do for itself. Like, China could just decide one day to do what you’re saying and it’s unlikely anyone would start a war to stop them.
Seems scary because we don’t actually know how to do it, and we only have one planet. We could create horrible side effects like killing ocean life we depend on for food, or admire (e.g. whales). We also have evidence for a “snowball Earth” state at times in the past. What if we overcorrect? Lots of good sci-fi stories about that to chill our bones.
The argument against it happening is that it would be expensive for that one nation, but benefits would not be proprietary. Whereas building out an economy of low-carbon power generation, manufacturing, and transportation creates tons of domestic economic benefits like jobs, trade, profits.
We have already geoengineered the temperature to be 0.2-0.4 C lower by container ships emitting SO2. We have also observed this a lot from volcanic eruptions. We should really at least try.
Maybe we'll get lucky and one of the super volcanoes will go off.
I thought seeding the oceans with iron was already attempted on a small scale experiment and showed unsatisfying results?
Also you probably would want to preserve the Mariana Trench ecosystem, some unique species live there.
Every tech like this has unforeseen consequences. And they could be worse than the original problem.
Every problem has unforeseen benefits. Global warming reduces the risk for nuclear winter when the resulting tribal conflicts lead to the nuclear regional exchange dice landing on that number that cant come up on repeated throws.
I thought I'd read in the past that an uptake in C02 for plants/trees (and therefore faster growing) results in a weaker structure which doesn't stand up to the environment as well as slower growing trees.
CO2 is food for plants
And also a poison for them — just as oxygen is both of those things for us. (If oxygen isn't even a metaphorical food for us, then neither is CO2 for plants).
Unfortunately, "food" is more complex than "how much carbohydrates do you get per day?"
We still have ways to go to that. From the current 400 ppm to about 2000ppm before the apocalypse. Until then the yields will generally improve from today’s baseline. There might be other systems that break before that and we get plantocalypse earlier
And your point is?
Apparently the more of it there is, the more they eat. It's called "an implication", or "logical consequence".
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That’s not what this says.
If plant uptake were counteracting emissions atmospheric CO2 ppm would not be rising so much.
I wonder if it does mean planting trees or de-desertification might be more effective than estimated.
Bro...
Ah the greening earth FUD spread by big oil circa 2000s
HN is playing all the greatest hits of denialism this week!
So perhaps the alarmist climate models were incorrect and most be corrected before they are used to shape public policy?
No. This changes nothing about climate models.
Too bad we are currently too busy scaling up wars all over the place to bother with the planet state.
Perfect. More fodder for the anti-science idiots to prove how clean air isn't a big deal.
You show those anti-science folks with ..... more science?
Selectively reporting scientific results based on how it will be used for fodder (?) just fuels anti-science sentiment.
The messaging of this article is causing people in this very comment section to conclude that climate change is progressing slower (or even not progressing at all) based on a revision of a plant CO2 uptake study that was done in the 1980s.
Like it or not climate science is extremely political and selectively reported science (which this is) that is presented to the public needs to account for the context in which it exists or it is no better than propaganda. The fact that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is primarily funded by the US Department of Energy is plenty of reason to be suspicious of its motivations. They have a vested interest in shaping the public's perception of energy production and its impact on the climate.
So they misrepresented the findings. I stand corrected.
Everyone wants clean air. There is reasonable debate as to what that threshold should be and what human actions should be taken to improve it and this information adds to that debate.
If you were looking for a data point to use as a cudgel against the "idiots" then you are failing in at least to known ways.
You're angry at the good news that CO2 is being absorbed by nature more than previously believed?
That is not at all the sentiment GP is expressing.
Say you have a terminal disease. Doctors evaluated the progression of your illness and estimated you have three years to live. Of course, when you begin treatment changes your life expectancy: start now and you may get twenty more years; start in two years and you’ll only get an extra four.
Your insurance company says “doctors are all quacks, you’re not ill, they’re just in it for the money” and don’t pay you anything. They know that’s a lie and that after you die there is a high probability your family will sue them out of existence, but the people currently in charge hope that will be far enough in the future they won’t have to personally worry about it. In the meantime they will enjoy the money they don’t pay you.
As the months go by, you visibly deteriorate. It’s obvious you are sick. Your insurance maybe pays for some token cheap medicine to make you more comfortable and get themselves more leeway. Maybe that buys you an extra four months. They’ll be horrible but you will be alive and so your family can’t sue. They continue to be off the hook but it’s getting harder to escape the reality.
Then a new doctor comes along and says “actually we overestimated the progression of your illness, you should’ve been given five years initially”. What do you think happens then? Obviously the insurance company will use that as an argument to further delay your treatment and double down on the rhetoric that all doctors are quacks. The damage is still happening but the urgent action needed to stave it off is once again delayed into the future.
That is what GP is complaining about. It’s obviously good news that you’re not so close to death as you thought, but that knowledge may end up hurting you in the long run.
Yes, this specific messaging feels motivated by the bottom lines of energy producers. The information doesn't actually change what we've measured regarding progress of climate change, but it's vague enough that plenty of people in the comments here are confused and acting like climate change isn't real after all.
> Say you have a terminal disease.
Just because a Doctor said so? Shouldn't we do some really good tests here first?
There’s nothing in the analogy which says no tests were run. You have to be arguing in really bad faith to come up with that one.
Well then it's a flawed analogy. There is no credible basis to say the planet is "dying" in same exigent sense you convey with this analogy. It's particularly bad faith to compare the lifespan of a Human with the imputed lifespan of Earth.
Analogies are never perfect, they are a tool to explain an idea by way of drawing similarities. They are not meant to overlap perfectly, that would be a tautology.
It’s not realistic to think one’s family could simply sue an insurance company or of existence. It’s pretty obvious to anyone engaging in good faith that the example is making a point for humans, not attempting to be taken literally by obtuse robots.
it's not good news if forests are disappearing faster than being regrown.
You said it derogatorily, but it is genuine evidence that rising CO2 concentrations are have less effects than previously thought. In theory there could accumulate enough evidence to show anything.
That is exactly it - that's untrue. CO2 absorption was previously underestimated, but that does not change the rising concentration or the effect of CO2 on the climate.
But it might change what we view as a legitimate mitigation strategy.
For example, could we burn oil at 2024's rates with 1900's forests and not have net-positive CO2 levels? Back of the napkin:
- We're producing ~37 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) through burning of fossil fuels at the moment [0]
- The current forestation level is ~4 billion hectares [1]
- The net loss of forestation is ~1 billion hectares since 1900, with deforestation rates peaking starting ~100 years ago. [1]
- 1 petagram == 1 Gt
- Current forests consume 157 Gt/yr [article]
Therefore, the billion hectares we cut down in the past century would consume an additional 157 * 0.25 == 39.25 GtCO2/yr if it were still standing, 2 Gt more than our historical maximum global net output.
Obviously, the burning of fossil fuels is ultimate source of the increase in CO2, but without the deforestation it would still (back of the napkin) be sustainable. At least, we'd not be quite so far down this road.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
No. That is an entirely incorrect interpretation of the study.
It isn't. Greenhouse emissions have remained roughly stagnant for over 30 years, while lung cancer deaths have dropped by 50-60 percent. Of course that's largely due to a decrease in smoking, but without any concomitant increase in mortality from "bad air", I don't see how anyone could think it's a "big deal".
Sources: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...
Those are two different things, though. Both linked to emissions, but in different ways.
Also you had the wrong chart selected from that page, https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Are you seriously arguing that unhealthy air does not exist?
no, obviously not