[Syonyk]

No, they release the stored carbon from the tree in various cycles.

Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon).

Nature is circular. Any "waste" from one process is an input into another process. It's humans that think in linear "Resources into products into waste" ways.

[rsj_hn]

Carbon is fungible, so trees will consume carbon emitted by any source. So in equilibrium the carbon consumed by trees and other sources will be equal to carbon emitted by decaying trees, or wildfires, or any other source, whether man made, or coming from a comet or volcano. To the trees, it's all food.

But outside equilibrium, the forest canopy will expand until equilibrium is reached, or the forest canopy will shrink until equilibrium is reached. You will also see more hungry plant life supported in environments with more carbon again until starvation levels are reached.

It is like any other kind of food. We can think of food as sequestered in the living bodies of a population, with deaths matched by births, a constant amount is sequestered. But increase food and population goes up until starvation levels are reached and now more is sequestered. Decrease food and population falls so less is sequestered. It doesn't matter where the food comes from. Currently 20% of the earth's carbon is sequestered in plant biomass. This is why various carbon offset programs do include increasing forests as a legitimate offset, but the land has to be allocated to the forest in perpetuity. It's not like you can grow 10 trees, the point is to support a bigger forest where there are 10 more trees permanently.

Thus nature regulates carbon levels at those altitudes that trees can feed from. I have no knowledge about equilibrating mechanisms in the atmosphere as a whole, this discussion is for carbon accessible to plants.

[gruez]

>Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon).

No, you can get it to sequester carbon if you plant trees (or other plant matter), harvest it, convert it to charcoal, then spread that around. Apparently in that form (biochar) it stays sequestered for a few thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

[Syonyk]

Yes, but that's neither geological scale times, nor something nature does. I can make a forest sequester carbon if I dig big holes and bury trees in them, but that's not a particularly natural process either.

Left alone, nature's cycles are mostly carbon neutral.

[aguasfrias]

I am not a scientist but I don't think that's right. A decay and rot situation should put some amount of carbon in the ground. Where else would all the peat that formed coal have come from otherwise?

Obviously violent combustion will put a great percentage in the air, but I don't see a strong reason to believe that a rotting tree trunk will completely put carbon in the air and none of it in the ground.