[ta8908695]

I could be majorly misunderstanding how it works, but as far as I'm aware plants/trees are not really a solution. Plants are part of the carbon cycle and the issues is that we took sequestered carbon and injected it into the carbon cycle. To make plants a solution you would need to take all the plant matter after the plants die and sequester it somewhere where it can't decompose. I think planting trees helps delay large scale issues, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. Maybe there's some increased plant to land area ratio that means a larger percent of the carbon in the carbon cycle is always spent in solid plant form? Even if that's the case it requires always maintaining this amount of plants even as populations grow or cutting down trees after they grow and storing the wood in a vacuum chamber or something like that.

[notabee]

You make a good point, but I'm sure the rate of decay matters a lot in this situation as well. Properly treated wood used as building materials could last decades or even centuries without significantly decaying if planned and managed properly[0], but a dead tree on a forest floor will decay very quickly. If we start rapidly growing trees en masse, it might work almost as well to imagine some grand building projects in lieu of giant sealed burial pits. Likely, we would need to do both. And like each offered solution on this topic, plants alone will not fix everything. I'm also interested in some of the novel engineered materials we might be able to make with wood if we discover efficient processes to do so[1]. It irritates me a lot when people lazily say, "just plant trees", but they can for sure be part of the solution.

0. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190717-climate-change-w...

1. https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-researchers-create-supe...

[willlma]

Plants ferry carbon into their roots and into the soil, where it remains in a stable form. Also, increased CO2 is only one of the reasons temperatures are rising. Cloud coverage has an impact on temperatures too, and plant transpiration puts a lot of water into the air, so even planting in soils that already are already saturated with carbon will have an impact.