Science solves global warming
Every once in while someone comes up with a nifty new idea that’s going to save us from facing up to global warming and solving it the old fashioned ‘hard work’ way. Last week we had Helen Clark’s Emissions Trading Scheme that exempts most major polluters. Previously some of you may remember proposals for giant reflective panels that would send all our solar heat back to outer space, or even this from the Inconvenient Truth.
And this week we have this helpful suggestion from Germany:
The scientists, Fritz Scholz and Ulrich Hasse from the University of Greifswald, start with a common idea: Planting forests, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But instead of letting those trees stand (or worse burning or letting them decay so that the carbon is released to the atmosphere) the scientists have a novel suggestion. Landfill them.
The theory aims to replace back into the earth all the carbon we keep digging up in the form of coal and oil, by burying trees. But sadly, it’s a little more complicated than it first sounds:
One little problem with this miracle solution: The world would have to plant 3.8 million square miles of forest every year to counteract current global carbon dioxide emissions. That’s bigger than the size of the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii).
Now who wants to tell America?
And the scientists themselves point out that it’s equivalent to all virgin forests lost in the 20th century.
All of which raises the question, why are we still chopping all those trees down?
May 15th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Have this conception that the carbon credits created by the new forests would be owned by the state. Not the people on whose land and who planted the new trees.
Anyone enlighten me on this?
Maybe a reason why so much marginal land is not being planted.
And how much are those trimmed pine trees in the exotic forest actually soaking up carbon. Not much greenerly left on them when the trunks are trimmed over the 40+ plus years they are growing.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
instead of burying trees why wouldn’t they use them to make furniture & building materials etc?
May 15th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Ah I was reading what I suppose could be called the extended version of this concept in New Scientist yesterday: ‘Burying biomass to fight climate change’ (subscriber only).
It also outlined bio-char (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar) which really boosts soil quality and water retention (good for droughts); rebuilding peat marshes as carbon sinks (up to 10 centimetres per year once a marsh has had a few years to mature.) The particular example that was given had the researchers calculating that reflooding the whole delta and converting it back to tules - a form of bulrush - would be equivalent to swapping all of California’s SUVs for high-efficiency hybrids.
Burying carbon would have to watch against tilling it and releasing it - synthetic fertilizers and oil-based pesticides release carbon dioxide into the air…bit more on organic farmings role in this here http://grist.org/feature/2008/05/09/
summing it up:
May 17th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
You know, a good start on this idea would be to switch back to paper shopping bags. People sending rubbish to landfills would then be sinking small amounts of carbon each time, presuming the paper is a net-sink.