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tuyop posted:If only someone would go into a store and add those stickers by hand! 🤔 Only if the sticker has a sticker for how much CO2 the sticker production caused.
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Jul 6, 2019 04:39
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It's still so amusing to me that industrial reforestation on an unimaginable scale is so often presented as an "easy" solution. I don't want to poo poo on it, but, like, come on. If we had that level of global coordination and a willingness to commit that much of the global economy to a solution then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
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Jul 6, 2019 05:02
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An estimate from 2015 is that there are (or were, back then, considering deforestation has only ramped up since) around 3 trillion trees on the planet. Just gotta go out and plant around one-third as many trees as there already are.
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Jul 6, 2019 05:29
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Paradoxish posted:It's still so amusing to me that industrial reforestation on an unimaginable scale is so often presented as an "easy" solution. I don't want to poo poo on it, but, like, come on. If we had that level of global coordination and a willingness to commit that much of the global economy to a solution then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. I think it's an idea worth making GBS threads on. No one seems to be asking why these areas are deforested in the first place and what it will take to get trees to grow again. In the tropics nuking the encroaching industry and human population might be a start, but tropical soil is not particularly fertile - most of the nutrients are (or were) locked up in the biomass before removal. Something will colonize, but what? Will seedlings just fold up and die, waiting for something else more suitable to pioneer the succession? Someone above referenced a new paper showing California trees during the recent drought sucking up all available moisture past 15 metres then shutting down photosynthesis and starving to death even after the rain returned. Are the rains going to return often enough now to allow seedlings to establish? (Once the forest stops burning, of course). Same question for my corner of B.C. Biomes are shifting north and doing weird poo poo. What do we plant that isn't going to croak in five or ten years? The native Douglas Fir seems to be o.k. so far, but if we are rapidly headed towards a savanah type biome here good luck with that continuing. Maybe we need to focus our attention on the botanical equivalents of the cockroach like Paulownia and changing our attitude towards alien invasive species. Or maybe I'm just grumpy and lacking faith after my experience groundtruthing a substrate model developed in the lab.
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Jul 6, 2019 06:51
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Tree planting is also, by far and away, without any close second, the most physically demanding and grueling job. You can't automate it, and it loving destroys you. Good loving luck finding the manpower to plant a trillion trees, such that they remain viable and don't loving die, within that time frame.
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Jul 6, 2019 07:01
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Rime posted:Tree planting is also, by far and away, without any close second, the most physically demanding and grueling job. You can't automate it, and it loving destroys you. All you have to do is just not use land and trees will automatically plant themselves there.
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Jul 6, 2019 07:06
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Ah yes, and we're hosed.quote:Still, projecting a plausible diminishing rate of loss into the future would mean that something like 70% of the soil carbon would be lost by 2100. Contrast that with prevailing estimates of 5% to 15% by 2100 and it's clear that the new results are raising eyebrows.
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Jul 6, 2019 07:18
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It totally makes sense to plant a quadrillion trees while still keeping everything fossil fuel powered.
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Jul 6, 2019 07:32
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Something worth reading into, regarding this tree-planting-bonanza, is that due to the available tree-planting locations it's got a lot of parallels with the site-reclamation that was supposed to happen in the Canadian tarsands, pretty much every reclaimed site is dead or dying post-planting last I checked (this was a few years ago, mind you, but it's not likely that it's any better now, unsurprisingly this got virtually no press coverage)
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Jul 6, 2019 08:23
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Rime posted:Tree planting is also, by far and away, without any close second, the most physically demanding and grueling job. You can't automate it, and it loving destroys you.  A pretty strong nah on that one and I'm gonna expand on it because rewilding is extremely my poo poo. https://i.imgur.com/JJuqZXC.gifv It's probably not going to get done on a significant enough level, but don't pretend it's especially hard or out of reach- what you describe as the most physically demanding and gruelling job is something both my kids did happily did multiple times before the age of 9. The sour cherry tree above is my daughter's.  Clear brush, dig hole, loosen the remaining soil. Potentially add a dressing to the soil- I use gravel/sand and sometimes fertilizer, always some compost. Add sapling, potentially tie to a support/protection, fill in the ground, add some weed proof mat/gravel around the base to stop it being overgrown too easy. https://i.imgur.com/jqNcK23.gifv Depending on where it's planted, it's might need water- irrigation is something that can be combined with the digging of pits for burying old trees, or in combination with good small scale farm irrigation techniques/hedgerow management/pond and lake building. https://i.imgur.com/T1HZymE.gifv It can also only be done at certain times of year- if I tried doing it now, I would want to die, because it's hot and the ground is tough as hell and it's far more sense to do it in spring or autumn.  If I did nothing else but plant trees I would end up wanting to die but it's very much not just about sticking trees in the ground- theres lots of other work all year round to help push start the rest of the ecosystem and make sure it has what it needs, but in terms of food it can also make sure I have what I need, if I wanted to and put in a bit more work. Good free food is an excellent motivator even when there's no problems getting it in a shop still. https://i.imgur.com/sn29Upz.gifv I have done a fair bit of it with fruit trees and bushes/vines to good effect- working with basic tools/infrastructure on a limited budget and no training I'm getting good survival numbers and seeing the the wildlife around benefit.  You probably don't need to actually plant that many either, because with sensible planting and rewilding that allows land to rest and room to grow, nature will take care of a bunch more biomass all by itself. It's loving awesome at it, actually- when humans step the gently caress off a bit. https://i.imgur.com/sWzqemb.gifv It can at least be semi automated- use drones to drop clay/poo poo balls with a few prepped tree seeds in each while others go around seeding fruit bushes or wild grasses/flowers/whatever. Flocks of the fuckers automatically carpet bombing selected areas with targeted species mixed for the situation. Drones can be used to flit round and check on trees, even take samples even spray for disease- all GPS tracked for accuracy. I dream about doing it to posh golf courses at night with a bunch of aggressive wild flower seeds, actually.  It can be done. I'm doing it, and plan to get better. (Not the drone thing that's expensive) Every tree, every bee, every motherfucking blade of grass is important- certainly more effective than posting "we are hosed" again. We are. Get up and fight. It's not a binary thing, an on/off switch between heaven and hell, each positive act now just makes it a tiny bit easier on what is to come for future generations.
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Jul 6, 2019 11:07
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You guys realize trees just grow without human intervention, right?
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Jul 6, 2019 11:42
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Unormal posted:You guys realize trees just grow without human intervention, right? Not at anywhere near the scale required, either in numbers or time. Reforestation at a level needed to combat climate change is a global industrial project and it’s not doing anyone any good to pretend that isn’t the case. We’re talking about growing trees on 11% of Earth’s land surface, in areas where trees are currently not growing despite those areas being non-urban and non-farmland.
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Jul 6, 2019 12:54
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A global industrial project to grow trees where they won't grow on their own doesn't sound like a great way to save the environment, compared to letting trees grow on their own where they are able to. If that requires a different land mix then perhaps that's the problem.
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Jul 6, 2019 13:51
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DesperateDan posted:
I am referring to at-scale reforestation operations, where planters are dropping a tree every 2.5 seconds, for 11 hours, in lovely terrain. Not spending an afternoon gardening in your backyard. 
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Jul 6, 2019 14:11
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pointsofdata posted:A global industrial project to grow trees where they won't grow on their own doesn't sound like a great way to save the environment, compared to letting trees grow on their own where they are able to. If that requires a different land mix then perhaps that's the problem. “The environment” is loving ruined. We’re talking geonengineering to stave off the extinction of 96% of all life on earth for millions of years. I’m sorry that some precious marshland and rolling fields will have to be despoiled by trees, but we don’t get to have nice things anymore. Only trees and tree trenches, onward and upward, forever.
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Jul 6, 2019 14:15
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tuyop posted:“The environment” is loving ruined. We’re talking geonengineering to stave off the extinction of 96% of all life on earth for millions of years. I’m sorry that some precious marshland and rolling fields will have to be despoiled by trees, but we don’t get to have nice things anymore. Only trees and tree trenches, onward and upward, forever. Plantations capture less carbon than naturally regenerated forests. Lots of currently non forested land (e.g. most of Scotland) is kept that way artificially (in Scotlands case for sheep farming and grouse shooting). Just letting it go wild would be very effective, no need for a bit industrial project E: The sheep bit js important. Sheep and cattle suppress forest growth heavily, just removing them would be sufficient to let forests regrow. You don't need to drive a load of machinery over the land or force forests to grow where they wouldn't otherwise distortion park fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Jul 6, 2019 |
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Jul 6, 2019 14:20
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Rime posted:I am referring to at-scale reforestation operations, where planters are dropping a tree every 2.5 seconds, for 11 hours, in lovely terrain. Then maybe you should have actually referred to that by saying it in the first place? We could have had a discussion on how loving wasteful it ends up being given the survival rates, and how to do it better. let me know when sitting around miserywanking yourself into a deep  "oh god now we are really super hosed" ever gets a tree in the ground- then we can wheel this thread out into some scrubland and climate change will be reversed in a day
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Jul 6, 2019 14:31
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pointsofdata posted:Plantations capture less carbon than naturally regenerated forests. Lots of currently non forested land (e.g. most of Scotland) is kept that way artificially (in Scotlands case for sheep farming and grouse shooting). Just letting it go wild would be very effective, no need for a bit industrial project Again, this ignores both the scale of the problem and the context of the study that's being discussed. The gains described by the paper require reforestation over roughly 11% of the Earth's land surface. That's a great goal because the amount of carbon sequestered by those trees will be significant, but this is not just "letting trees grow." Yes, there are tons of places where we can and should do that, but simply changing land management habits will not make a significant dent in the problem that we're facing and the study in the question doesn't suggest that it will. More importantly, this is a solution that comes online too late, which is something that this study actually does address. We basically need to do all the really hard stuff that this thread already talks about to entirely stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and then we also need the trees (or some other form of negative generation) to attempt to undo some of the damage that we've done. On top of that, if we don't correct course and crash decarbonize, the upper bounds of how much reforestation is feasible drops significantly.
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Jul 6, 2019 16:10
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DesperateDan posted:Then maybe you should have actually referred to that by saying it in the first place? We could have had a discussion on how loving wasteful it ends up being given the survival rates, and how to do it better. it's kind of on you to realize that when we are talking about hail mary geoengineering trying to stop climate change that we aren't talking about backyard gardening. The post you quoted specifically mentioned planting a trillion trees. 1,000,000,000,000 trees. You just need to find about one hundred billion more people to trowel around in their lush, temperate backyards and everything will be fine.
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Jul 6, 2019 16:31
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Given this new paper, we had a discussion a while back regarding findings that mass planting of trees and building up new, natural forests can actually increase the CO2 output rather than being a sink for it. Does this paper challenge that, was that just a misinformation, or am I simply remembering completely wrong?
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Jul 6, 2019 16:50
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I'm not sure exactly what you might be referring to, but there's been some concern that increasing wildfires and droughts can easily lead to forests becoming huge carbon sources as the trees die off. I feel like I vaguely remember something about the forests on some specific island turning out to be a net carbon source because of that? That's why people in this thread talk a lot about planting and burying trees. Living trees are dangerous. From what I've read, the study addresses it indirectly by pointing out that the maximum reforestation potential will decrease if we can't curb our emissions. Basically, the more CO2 we pump into the atmosphere, the less we can rely on trees to pull back out. The paper's optimistic projections of the impact of reforestation are based on an optimistic assessment of our ability to curtail emissions.
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Jul 6, 2019 17:12
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DesperateDan posted:Then maybe you should have actually referred to that by saying it in the first place? We could have had a discussion on how loving wasteful it ends up being given the survival rates, and how to do it better. The context of the discussion is planting a trillion trees to counter CO2 emissions. I think it's reasonable to expect one to understand we're talking long shifts planting hundreds of trees for hours at a time. Not putting in one cherry tree with your kids on a slow afternoon
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Jul 6, 2019 17:45
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iirc it's something about a trillion trees not reflecting as much sunlight as the ground otherwise would. So there's CO2 absorbed but now even more needs to be absorbed to counter the increased energy coming in from the sun. E: yeah like a coniferous forest has less than half the albedo than grass does. Deciduous trees aren't much better. So iirc the argument is that a trillion trees planted decreases the planet's average albedo which means less sunlight reflected away. Less sunlight reflected away is more energy trapped in the greenhouse gas cycle so you need to remove even more greenhouse gases to account for that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo#Terrestrial_albedo EE: cloud seeding might unironically help?? Dunno what other side effects to that there'd be... EEE: lol humans are gonna scorch the skies like in The Matrix. Moridin920 fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jul 6, 2019 |
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Jul 6, 2019 17:47
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It's enough trees that it will affect global albedo, providing some warming just through that, yeah.
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Jul 6, 2019 17:53
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I think I remember that article and it theorized a short term temperature increase from the albedo change but a long term drop as ghg are removed. Assuming the trees even survived though.
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Jul 6, 2019 17:57
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It's 12C in Longyearbyen on the island of Svalbard currently, where the average for July is normally around 4 or 5C. Temperatures are expected to remain above average through 14 days, with a low of 7C throughout (the normal high of July for them is 7C).
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Jul 6, 2019 18:07
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I suspect fire is the tertiary stage for a lot of forests. It certainly is on the northwest coast of North America. Douglas Firs have tall bare trunks and thick bark for a reason - they survive the periodic burns that naturally clean out the understorey species every few decades. The Douglas Fir gets charred and carries on while everything below gets turned to carbon. There's some thought that the terra preta soils of the Amazon (beloved by biochar enthusiasts) is actually the result of forest fires, not necessarily slash and burn agriculturalists. According to this soil scientist the archaeological case for human origin isn't as strong as presented by the enthusiasts. If left on their own forests here start regenerating in succession. The first actual trees to become established are something like red alder. Vigorous and deciduous. Between the nitrogen fixing nodules in the roots and the leaf fall it does wonderful things for the soil, but if it doesn't burn it's on the ground and rotting (and doubless releasing greenhouse gases) inside of 50 years, to be replaced by something longer term when a hole opens up in the canopy. And in the meantime the climate is changing and the species mix with it. Among other things, does tree pollen have the same problem as squash and tomatoes and quits working at high temperatures? Biochar sequestration isn't a long term solution either - the soil scientist referenced above summarizes a bunch of studies showing that the longevity of the biochar depends on how long you cook it. If you want something to sequester carbon for 10,000 years you have to completely carbonized it to powder. If you can still recognize the original wood structure in it the longevity is probably more on the order of a couple of centuries or even decades. Haven't seen an estimate yet on how much GHG you need to emit to get carbon powder... The more I think about this the more muddied things become. Hopefully the modeller who came up with this suggestion isn't as simple minded as the press reporting. Rime posted:I am referring to at-scale reforestation operations, where planters are dropping a tree every 2.5 seconds, for 11 hours, in lovely terrain. NWC tree planters are a "special" breed. Never done it, never wanted to abuse myself like that. Not a job that can be automated, at least on this terrain. Maybe the Prairies. I planted fifty trees/tall shrubs last winter. Took me much longer than two minutes. Complete loving amateur.
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Jul 6, 2019 18:25
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Well, this ain't great. Headline: Alaska’s governor is trying to destroy its universities. The state may never recover Byline: Mike Dunleavy wants to cut the Alaskan university system by $130m – a staggering 41% of its budget quote:[Gov. Dunleavy (R)] announced 182 line-item vetoes to his state’s 2020 budget last week. He thereby cut the budget proposed by the Alaska legislature by almost $410m in general funds. Almost one-third of the cuts will come from the University of Alaska system, which will see its budget cut by $130m – a staggering 41%.
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Jul 6, 2019 18:25
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goonsRus is remembering the study that found some trees put out a lot more methane than formerly thought it at no point said they were now net carbon emitters, just that the methane offsets some of the carbon capture. iirc it was one study of one place too, so we really can't extrapolate poo poo about any given forest from it, and if there were ever a trillion-tree project it'd be obviously managed/mitigated. this is an object lesson in the information digestion process that goes: study -> science blog -> social media aggregation -> echo chamber amplification -> vague oversimplified recollection -> utterly false contrarian and yet conventional wisdom
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Jul 6, 2019 18:58
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Accretionist posted:Well, this ain't great.
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Jul 6, 2019 19:03
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Unormal posted:You guys realize trees just grow without human intervention, right? Can they grow without water too?
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Jul 6, 2019 19:12
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StabbinHobo posted:goonsRus is remembering the study that found some trees put out a lot more methane than formerly thought It was just that vague memory I read ITT at some point, because at that point we also talked about the sheer possibility of planting a ton of trees to act as a carbon capture method, hence why I asked. Honestly just didn't remember properly, I didn't mean to suggest trees might turn bad, sorry.
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Jul 6, 2019 19:38
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Goons Are Great posted:It was just that vague memory I read ITT at some point, because at that point we also talked about the sheer possibility of planting a ton of trees to act as a carbon capture method, hence why I asked. Honestly just didn't remember properly, I didn't mean to suggest trees might turn bad, sorry. redleader posted:Although trees cool the globe by taking up carbon through photosynthesis, they also emit a complex potpourri of chemicals, some of which warm the planet. The dark leaves of trees can also raise temperatures by absorbing sunlight. Several analyses in the past few years suggest that these warming effects from forests could partially or fully offset their cooling ability. But yeah it's not even nearly good or close enough to be a magic bullet. We'd probably have a lot of transportation emissions of moving people, carrying saplings, planting trees, water sourcing, and everything. In addition, trees are only really a carbon sink if they're sequestered somehow after they grow otherwise they just fall down and decay back into CO2--so we'd have to have a large-scale management program to cut down and remove dying ones which transporting out would be difficult. Also it's especially becoming increasingly difficult between wide swaths of land alternatively becoming inundated followed by megadrought and dying off in 60c weathe--and then burning up in flames from flash undergrowth turning into a tinderbox. And only a few places will be stable-enough weather-wise, and have to have enough natural moisture/groundwater for serious viable forest growth as a carbon sink. And yeah trees will increase the albedo (i.e. more sunlight absorbed to the earth instead of reflected outward into space) which generates more heat meaning the carbon offset isn't as great for reducing global rising temps. It's still worth doing because 2.6c is better than getting to 2.8c and getting long-term CO2 out is better even if it doesn't reduce global temperature--so yeah we should be razing some of the lovely 9999999999 acre mono-cultural corn n beef farms and getting trees if they're grow, but like, it's not going to be super effective to stabilize anything. The tree thing is particularly bad and disingenuous because every single person knows enough dangerous knowledge to understand "trees eat co2" at a rudimentary level to presume that if we just did it at large we'd be fine--so it gives them hope that there's some solution out there that we're just waiting on to get the global will to plant them, ez pz crisis averted no need to sell my SUV and stop mining bitcoin.
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Jul 6, 2019 20:03
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Rime posted:I am referring to at-scale reforestation operations, where planters are dropping a tree every 2.5 seconds, for 11 hours, in lovely terrain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVQuU22c_oo
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Jul 6, 2019 20:04
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What happens when Moscow uses up all their water?
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Jul 6, 2019 20:09
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Turtlicious posted:What happens when Moscow uses up all their water?
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Jul 6, 2019 20:11
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Well, Moscow's previous water source dried up so they just switched to taking their water from a different river. That was like 10 years ago though.
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Jul 6, 2019 20:19
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That would be a lot more difficult on a hillside.
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Jul 6, 2019 20:19
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Goons Are Great posted:It was just that vague memory I read ITT at some point, because at that point we also talked about the sheer possibility of planting a ton of trees to act as a carbon capture method, hence why I asked. Honestly just didn't remember properly, I didn't mean to suggest trees might turn bad, sorry. but if you read xaris's link you see that in the end it was basically one studies model that went through the take-cycle and then got ... i won't say disproved, but shown to be mostly moot.
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Jul 6, 2019 20:22
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Xaris posted:I believe this is what your were remembering: Yes, that was it! Thank you. I definitely feel you there, because when I first read it I felt some slight feeling of "actually, this is unironically not bad news", but the details are highly complicated and it certainly not a magic solution. At least we know that trees remain somewhat a positive first step. StabbinHobo posted:turns out I had a vague and wrong recollection of it too, it was VOCs not methane (directly), and a global model not a local study. You definitely had a good point regarding the recollection, because yeah, my head broke it down to "There was some negative implication about this", which is either way not a constructive way to get into it.
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Jul 6, 2019 20:44
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