Comment by culi
4 hours ago
Trees respire. They breath in and out. At night time, many trees emit more CO2.
And trees don't exist in isolation as these napkin calculation articles consider them (spherical cows and all that). Every single tree on earth relies on mycorrhizal fungi for the vast majority of its nutrients. Fungi break things down release CO2.
Most of our oxygen comes not from forest but from oceans (specifically from phytoplankton, algae, and photosynthetic bacteria). Between 50-80% of it in fact. Likewise, most of the CO2 that has been captured has been captured by the ocean not by forests. About 25-30% of all human emissions have been captured by the ocean.
Forests (and grasslands) are tremendously important for ecosystems and our health but I think this focus on CO2 and oxygen is simply misleading. If that's your concern you should really be focusing on the ocean. Which IMO is in an even more dire strait than our forests
Forests do net sequester carbon. But if you want to really sock away the carbon you harvest the trees and pyrolize it. It will give you energy (heat) you can use and elemental carbon (biochar). You could bury that a few feet under or innoculate it with microorganisms and work it into fields. Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.
I mean technically we already do this: renewable plantation timber is a widespread operation (also why I get kind of annoyed at YouTubers talking about how great the timber is in old homes - yes it's great because it was logged from 50 year old old growth forests and now they're all gone because we cut them down).
You can just buy engineered wood products that are much stronger than any old growth lumber. My family lake house built in 1970 has three gluelam trusss beams that support the roof. There are even better engineered wood products available these days.
> Carbon in that form will sit in the soil for hundreds of years. Thousands or millions if you bury it.
And what is the scale that global climate change works on?
Trees do jack shit for carbon on the scale that is important.
The ocean breathes in and out too. Very little carbon sinks down to the sea floor. The ocean does happen to absorb a lot of CO2, but that's from acidification rather than photosynthesis.
Yes agreed. But the organisms breath "out" much more oxygen than anything else. And yes ocean acidification is both what's driving a massive crisis and saving us from the full impacts of our CO2 output. It's not a pretty picture
You could induce artificial algea blooms. All that needs is iron and light + water soluble co2 and / or o2. If you are greedy you pump light down into the depths , go cubic instead of quadratic?
Intentional oceanic iron fertilization (OIF) is actually well-studied. Unfortunately it carries risks of ecological disruption and can lead to deoxygination (dead zones). Which would long-term hinder our ability to repeat this. It also often leads to methane and nitrous oxide emissions which are both very potent (though shorter lived) greenhouse gasses
> Most of our oxygen comes not from forest but from oceans (specifically from phytoplankton, algae, and photosynthetic bacteria). Between 50-80% of it in fact.
That fact checks out: about 70% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. It follows that most photosynthesis, thus oxygen comes from oceans.
it looks like i'm guilty of having never really thought and done some research about this and i'm a bit ashamed to admit i fell in this trap and used to think forests and trees are the most important pieces in the system.
I don't get why media has been fixating so much on trees and forests (Amazonia!) without even mentioning ocean's role in this.
Click bait sells, therefore outrage sells. And how do you film an ocean absorbing(or not) CO2.
But you can film people cutting trees, and protests, and you can blame companies.
And the average person won't understand much about the chemistry of the oceans, the average person can barely read.
(UN literacy numbers are the equiv of a grade 6 reading capability. And again, average grade 6, not bright students).
> Which IMO is in an even more dire strait than our forests
I think you are probably right, but could you kindly elaborate and provide more details? Very curious to hear your view and learn more.
My opinion is largely colored by the IPCC Ocean/Cryosphere report. I closely followed each IPCC report and this was by far the most "doomer" of the special reports released by the IPCC. Some highlights:
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/
Forests on the other hand have shown surprising resilience. And, if they survive the impending destabilization, they might in the long term (I mean looong term) even benefit from increased CO2 concentrations as they historically have.
PS the IPCC reports are more accessible than people realize. Even the technical reports are often not much more difficult to parse than the policymaker reports meant for the general public. I'd quite recommend giving them a try
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/the-ocean-and-climate...
Has a pretty good overview. But in brief: Changes in biosphere due to heat and decreasing pH balance due to increased CO2 can leave species unable to adapt fast enough causing deaths.
It can also cause adaptations to go haywire like temperature dependent sex determination where the ratio of male to females in eggs is set by ambient temperatures, skewing breeding population gender too much in one direction.
wholesale destruction of almost every biome. Overfishing (where 'fish' means anything that swims) with methods that destroy both the fish and the ecosystem-- have you ever considered what a trawler net destroys as it is dragged over the bottom of the seabed?
And now deep-sea mining.
If the ocean is the main hero there, why is the forest still important to our health?
Rainfall
And at least the forest soil has the same amount of carbon stored.
“I couldn’t live with so many trees. They suck up all the oxygen.”