[otterley]

Dead trees lie on the ground, with all their sequestered carbon sitting there. It's not like the carbon is going back into the atmosphere, at least not without some process like combustion. Coal is basically dead trees. Before we started extracting coal and burning it, it was harmless to the atmosphere.

[m12k]

Doesn't rotting, or being eaten by microbes or termites that eventually get eaten or die and rot eventually lead to the release of the stored carbon?

AFAIK coal is composed mostly of trees that fell back before microbes evolved that could eat through their cellulose walls, and have had millennia of underground compression to further increase their stability - basically that process isn't available naturally to trees that fall today.

[otterley]

It takes roughly twice as long for a tree to decompose as it does to grow; and trees live a lot longer than that! So over time, the net sequestration should be positive.

[redisman]

They release the carbon as the decompose or burn. Sahara sounds like a very likely place for wildfires

[r00fus]

> It's not like the carbon is going back into the atmosphere, at least not without some process like combustion.

Western USA has had a "fire season" for every year for the last like 4 years. Last year, other places like Brazil and Africa join in on the fun.

So planting trees without a robust animal/insect ecosystem to decompose them before they combust is an incomplete solution.