[MOARDONGZPLZ]

So I see what you’re saying. You’re talking about the whole system. Take land and then plant trees, the trees sequester carbon as they grow, some of them fall to the forest floor continuing to sequester carbon. But, I think the issue with your argument is, this process isn’t indefinite. The natural cycle is that these trees will decay, fall, rot (releasing carbon naturally) or natural forest fires will burn them anyways (releasing carbon naturally). Then more trees will take their places and sequester carbon, ad infinitum in the cycle that has taken place for the last 2 billion years since the Paleoproterozoic era.

But I see no difference between humans speeding this cycle by planting quick growth trees, cutting them down, releasing their stored carbon, planting more. It’s the same thing being sequestered and released continuously.

[wizzwizz4]

The planet isn't infinite: by running the cycle more quickly, you knock the "baseline" atmospheric carbon up a few more ppm. This has knock-on effects.

[lazide]

Even if we converted all arable land in the United States to forest, best case we would take many years to sequester even a single years fossil carbon emissions. And we’d all starve to death in the process.

Any co2 released by harvesting a forest, is very shortly taken back up again by the forest regrowing. Within a lifetime for sure.

Trees are nice, I get it. But this is all in the noise.

[wizzwizz4]

Where do these numbers come from?

[lazide]

USFS studies, and US data on overall arable land. I broke it out in a prior thread exhaustively, but it’s been covered in other areas too. Here is one [https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_wo059.pdf]

The US emits a truly massive amount of fossil carbon. [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...], “Total emissions in 2022 are 6,343.2 Million Metric Tons of CO₂ equivalent”. Yes, that is 6 billion metric tons of co2 equivalent a year. 6 trillion kg. Or about 20,000 kg per person in the US, every year.

Currently (since ~ 1990), US forested land is estimated to offset ~ 13% of fossil co2 emissions. Forests cover 36% (!) of US land area, and have been slowly increasing since ~ 2000.

Farmland covers another 39% of US land [https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Censu...].

Pretty much all the rest is either 1) waterways, 2) cities, 3) non-arable land like steep mountains and deserts with no ready source of water.

So even with a back of the envelope, easy math, if we changed all our farmland to grow forests, we’d roughly double the amount of carbon we could sequester - which would still be ~ 25% of the amount of fossil carbon we’re emitting, every year.

And then we would still need to DO something with all that wood, because burning it or letting it rot just releases all it’s co2 back into the atmosphere.

And we’d all starve to death in the meantime.

[dmbche]

Go look at the article about the effects of the introduction of wolves back in yellowstone that was frontpage yesterday.

That f'ing with one species.

Now imagine the impact of f'ing with the forest itself.

Could the capacity to sequester carbon be affected by second or third order effects?