| When I started this project I also had that feeling that we were running out of trees. But my motivation never was to alarm people that we were running out of them, my intention was to make actual deforestation data accessible and approachable to the public so they could decide how big of a problem this was. I have myself learned that I should probably worry less about it than I used to thanks to this bot, and that's fine. I also think you are not seeing the big picture here. 30 years is pretty much just the minimum for the average tree to grow to a size where it can foster other biomass. On the bigger picture: "Forests cover 31 percent of the world’s land surface, just over 4 billion hectares. […] This is down from the pre-industrial area of 5.9 billion hectares." -Earth Policy Institute. http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/ 1.9 billion hectares down in about a century and a half. My viewpoint now is that there is a deforestation problem in the sense that we destroy forest dependant biomass faster than what it takes for it to recover, but we are still in the time window where the already made harm and the future impact of our deforestation can be reversed, from the viewpoint of Hansen et al we seem to have reversed the negative tendency in tree cover. |