Genetically Altering Trees To Sequester More Carbon 279
An anonymous reader writes "Forests of genetically altered trees and other plants could sequester several billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year and so help ameliorate global warming, according to estimates published in the October issue of BioScience. The study, by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, outlines a variety of strategies (PDF) for augmenting the processes that plants use to sequester carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into long-lived forms of carbon, first in vegetation and ultimately in soil."
What happens .. (Score:2)
When we've turned all the carbon in to trees?
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It'll eventually (in a few million years) end up being some really bad-assed coal?
It does bring up a point, though - for a movement that utterly detests genetically-modifying things like food, I wonder how the overly-eco crowd will react to genetically modified trees... 'course, I'm thinking they'll just turn around and complain that humanity should instead modify its own behavior.
Re:What happens .. (Score:4, Funny)
... 'course, I'm thinking they'll just turn around and complain that humanity should instead modify its own behavior.
I for one am ready to pay my air breathing tax to Monsanto.
How to use the Pay As You Breath (PAYB) Calculator:
To predict your monthly PAYE tax, please enter: "Total lung capacity (TLC) is measured by adding together Inspiratory Reserve Volume (IRV), Tidal Volume (Vt), Expiratory Reserve Volume (ERV), and Residual Volume (RV) to come up with the formula, TLC=IRV + Vt + ERV + RV. Tidal Volume is the amount of air normally inhaled or exhaled. Inspiratory Reserve Volume is the amount of additional air that could be inhaled in order to completely fill up the lungs." Please enter these values from you spirometer readings, along with your age, weight, and physical condition - then hit next.
Re:What happens .. (Score:4, Funny)
Pretty sure I'm below average on all of those metrics. Finally it pays off to be a smoker.
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Or non-athletic - being nonactive I produce far less CO2 than those jocks.
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Yes, humanity absolutely should modify its own behavior. The perils and pitfalls of our way of life have been known for a long time. Anyone who wants to claim ignorance can cry me a river. I made the decision to change my ways over 20 years ago and, yes, it did absolutely fucking suck - for about 3 months.
After that, it just becomes part of day to day living - no big fucking deal.
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The fact that they use violence doesn't mean they'll succeed. Those who lack vision, which is most of humanity, fear change. That doesn't mean we must kowtow to them simply because they may turn violent and have superior numbers.
Techno solutions play a part but are NOT and will NEVER be the only answer. We've used tech solutions on our biggest problems and there is always a significant drawback which takes years or generations to overcome.
The use of petroleum vastly improved the human condition, but the sid
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I would love to see someone invent the Shipstone tomorrow but I'm also mindful of the fact that 40 years ago, fusion was supposed to be only 10 years away. Mandate isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can cause a rapid shift. It would be dreadfully ironic if China ends up ahead of the West in energy efficiency and renewable resources simply because they can do things by mandate.
I'm not sure why you resist people changing habits if they are bad ones. But, that aside, it doesn't have to be one or the other. W
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A global ice age hits the planet resulting in the death of the trees. Once the temperature becomes low enough and CO2 is allowed to build up in the atmosphere after millions of years, vegetation growth and the effects of the CO2 build up will end the ice age. This has happened before and it will happen again.
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Should catalytic converters be declared illegal?
Carbon levels are dropping dangerously low, warn climate scientists. But should catalytic converters be banned outright?
"Preposterous," says conservative senator Bert Glanstron. "The government cannot foot the bill for removing all of those converters. The private sector must produce its own emerging technologies to boost carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere before any damage is done."
Some conservatives claim that humans cannot significantly damage worldwid
Re:What happens .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Catalytic converters take the toxic products of unburned fuel and convert them into CO2 + H2O + N2... If we want more CO2, the last thing we need to do is ban Catalytic converters...
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Catalytic converters take the toxic products of unburned fuel and convert them into CO2 + H2O + N2... If we want more CO2, the last thing we need to do is ban Catalytic converters...
Except that creating those catalytic converters has other, potentially greater, environmental impacts by way of mining the toxic metals and the industrial pollution in their manufacture. Most modern engines run pretty clean nowadays anyways so they are not as beneficial as they once were.
Re:What happens .. snowball earth! (Score:2)
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The parent post is a goatse link, ignore it /.
Re:2530? (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks to xpnd.it [userscripts.org] I don't have to rely on being warned. Just have to hover over any shortened link to see where it ends up.
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When we've turned all the carbon in to trees?
The human body has a large amount of carbon. Long story short, the trees will start hungering for us!
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That, and a primitive form of fusion would be all that is required to turn us into 9V batteries.
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Yeah but if there's no sunlight, what do you feed the batteries... I mean humans.
"Dead bodies."
And what happens when you run-out of dead bodies in ~20 years time?
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When we've turned all the carbon in to trees?
The human body has a large amount of carbon. Long story short, the trees will start hungering for us!
Billy! BILLY!! You get yur ass outta that nanotube tree right this minute! What's wrong with you boy, you know that dang thing done et your brother Bobby two years ago!
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attack of the killer tomatoes (Score:2)
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No Treebeard reference...? Ents are scary!
Subjective perspective exaggerated (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Subjective perspective exaggerated (Score:4, Insightful)
We? Our?
Animal species use resources right up to the limit, even when detrimental to all, because they don't have the ability to do otherwise. On the group scale, humans are exactly that intelligent, so I'm not sure what you expect.
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Re:Subjective perspective exaggerated (Score:4, Interesting)
In the case of humans, because we can supplant the necessity to ensure the survival of other species in order to ensure our own, we often disregard this necessity, making our pursuits our "only" concern. This trait ensures that before too much longer there will only be us [citation needed], and our "net loss" pursuits here on earth.
Hell, I don't even think that you believe this shit. I think that you just like repeating it because you think the act of repeating it says something good about your character.
When you put character above intelligence it is a shallow, transparent, character. The only people you can possibly impress with this shit are people that don't care if what you say is stupid or not.. the kind of people that just want to fit in with a crowd of morons.
Re:Subjective perspective exaggerated (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which we partly by reforestation using Mother Nature's own trees instead of the Monsanto Ents.
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I think the point of sequestering carbon in plants is that you *don't* kill them, because then the carbon will eventually be released back into the atmosphere - plant material is biodegradable.
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It's fine as long as you expect it to last.
Timber is a great way of storing carbon- you grown the stuff into trees, use the trees to make houses, furniture, novelty ornaments, etc., and then expect those objects to last for decades. The population sems to keep on growing, so there's a big demand for the stuff. When it wears out (and so goes to the great biodegradation pit in the sky) it gets replaced with more timber. It's obviously not a limitless way of storing carbon, but it is a good way of tieing up a
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China's been trying that one for 30 years. It hasn't exactly worked so far- 3 decades since implementation and population continues to rise year-on-year by millions. Good luck reducing the population by 270 million people in only 50 years more.
A two-child policy would be a little more tolerable, and would still result in a shrinking population (seeing as not all babies will have a full 2 children of their own, thanks to homosexuality, inferitility, early death, etc.). Would be a less extreme upheaval of dem
Re:Subjective perspective exaggerated (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>We should change our behaviour,
Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy. They are responsible for global warming, not SUV drivers. If they were gone, we would have no CO2 from electricity today. We already have the technology to make gasoline and diesel in nuclear powerplants, it just needs to be put together and scaled up. So, we would likely have no CO2 from cars today, either.
Doomsayers have been saying we'd starve by 1980, then 1990, then 2000, then 2010, then 2020. When will they realize that the principles of Malthus are simply wrong at their core? Julian Simon [juliansimon.com], a man before his time, took a bet about resource scarcity with doomsayers. The doomsayers lost, big.
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Um. The free market killed nuclear. Consider how long environmentalists have been battling mountaintop removal coal, and how comparatively ineffective they've been. Nuclear doesn't power the world because it's more expensive than fossil fuels when you don't count the costs of CO2 and other pollutants, and because the established coal/oil/gas industries have been very effective in protecting their market.
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You do know that most of the oxygen we breathe in comes from algae, right? In other words, trees simply aren't necessary *on that ground* at all.
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You do know that trees not only eat carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, but also stop the wind and prevent soil erosion, right?
In other words, without trees fertile land becomes steppe or even desert.
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I agree 110%! Instead of changing our environment to suit our needs, we should stop using tools all together. No houses; caves were fine for great^nth grandma and pa, they're fine for us! No fire, no cooking, no agriculture, no domestication of animals, definitely no medicines or vaccines, no clothes, no nothing.
Or, instead of being alarmist, we can try to modify our behavior (knowing full well that only some people will do so) while also using that big glob of gray goo in our heads to find ways to compensa
Re:Subjective perspective exaggerated (Score:5, Interesting)
What are you suggesting, that we revert to a medieval lifestyle?
I have already changed my lifestyle. I live close to where I work, so that I can walk or take the bus, and the trip only takes 15 minutes. I live in a smaller residence. I wear sweaters in the winter and lower the thermostat a bit. And I have reduced (though not eliminated) my meat consumption. I buy local fruit when possible, eating apples during the northern apple season, avoiding New Zealand or Chilean apples at all cost. I consume less overall, and it has not made my life any poorer. When you consume too much you become a slave to your stuff. It builds up. It weighs you down. You buy things, only to find that they don't make you any happier.
I don't think my life is anything close to medieval, and yet I probably produce way less than half the carbon dioxide of the average person. If you want to see what medieval looks like, I suggest you attend a Tea Party rally. Their abandonment of reason, their willful ignorance and self-delusion is an excellent model for Dark Age behavior.
Why not plant more trees? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the difference between planting trees that capture X% more carbon and planting X% more trees?
Re:Why not plant more trees? (Score:4, Insightful)
Coppicing (Score:2)
You don't have to replant trees. Many simply keep growing when you cut them down, and in fact they grow faster because the root system is already in place.
Combined with pyrolysis/charcoal making => agri/biochar for farming gives you an energy positive, economically positive mechanism for sequestering vast amounts of carbon.
As if that really was the problem.
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Trees aren't replanted just because people don't bother - trees are cleared to claim land and to use that land to feed the growing population.
So planting more trees is not an option unless you are politically ready to limit food production, and the global warming doesn't seem urgent enough yet.
(Of course, the largest increase driver is that more and more people can afford to buy meat, so much of the increased output is used to feed tasty animals - but it's still agriculture for our food chain)
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Well considering that, that's done in some parts of the APCR, and South America. Everywhere else in the world, I'll bet that there's been nothing but a net gain for the last oh 400 odd years.
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If we were using that land effectively it wouldn't be anywhere near as big a problem as it is now.
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You seem to be more correct than my initial opinion - I went to the statistics (http://faostat.fao.org/site/377/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=377#ancor) and it appears that the agricultural land use stopped growing at ~1995, and has been stable for the last 15 years.
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People do plant trees for all sorts of reasons. Trees are planted along side motorways to block the sites and sounds of it to the local residents. There are tree farms for timber. Town garden parks are planted full of trees and other plants for pleasure-seeking urbanites.
None of these uses can be easily increased in size. A tree farm is only as big as the land the farmer has, motorway sound barriers only follow a motorway, and a park is only as big as the space for a park is.
You could plany GM super trees i
Re:Why not plant more trees? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't patent unaltered trees.
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You can't patent unaltered trees.
But you can patent a new business model based on them.
LK
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The first two posts are false dichotomies. Way to go, Slashdot. Nerds are supposed to be smart.
It is possible to reduce carbon emissions, plant more trees, AND plant trees that capture more carbon.
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Nerds are supposed to be smart.
No, nerds are supposed to be borderline autistic.
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We had these... (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rain-forests-release-carb [scientificamerican.com]
Very, very good link and worthy of a bump. Granted, it doesn't mean we need to cut down trees to reduce CO2 but it does demonstrate that we can't just view the situation in such a simplistic "more trees -> less CO2" viewpoint.
Oh teh ironies! (Score:2, Insightful)
I would deeply, deeply love to see this pan out and become a viable approach with scientific evidence to back it up, if only so the rabid Climatology factions would have to eat crow and maybe apologize to Freeman Dyson (you might remember the outrage from the Climate Change community over his book reviews: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/ [nybooks.com] ). Not because I'm for super-trees, but just because I hate the fanaticism being brought to this whole issue.
He was me
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who basically pointed out that the economics of the the environmental solutions espoused by the Climate Change community just didn't make sense
I'm sure he didn't really mean 'economics.' Viewing the larger historical picture, man has continually raped the environment, whether for timber or mining or farming or fishing or whathaveyou, for profit. As no one had to actually pay for the Ocean or the Earth or the natural resources that live on or are found under it —we just found it laying there and picked up what we wanted— it seemed at the time like like a free lunch we simply sold to someone else for profit. No one would expect actually
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(No... didn't click your links... and I'm certain my response just doesn't make sense either... but only if 'economics,' wasn't a poorly chosen term).
Yeah, actually he DID mean economics ... cuz he's an economist.
Cripes, man, I gave you links. You could have even googled the name and gotten articles. I suppose you at least admitted you were so dead-set on saying your bit that you wouldn't want to be bothered actually getting informed about what you were responding to ...
Which kind of proves my whole point: people aren't having a conversation or even discussing this stuff, they are just talking at each other. Like you just did :-)
Time and cost (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that we have workable approaches in a short timescale - consumption reduction using insulation, legislation and smaller vehicles. We have workable approaches in the 5-10 year scale (wind and offshore wind), and in the 10-20 year scale (nuclear and replacement of coal with gas fired plants). All the bio and geo engineering approaches have huge potential downsides and would be unlikely to be proven safe for use, or workable in much under 20-30 years. And then we have fusion, which in 1960 was 10 years in the future and now in 2010 is reckoned to be 60 years in the future, if you believe the reports in that treehugger rag Scientific American.
Lomborg now seems to be significantly backtracking on his earlier views, and Dyson is simply negligible - he is a retired physicist, from a generation when physicists were generally quite ignorant of statistics, not a climatologist or a mathematical modeller. It is hard to find any qualified people who would support him.
The issue here is that you AGW deniers simply have a new tack - the argue that we need to do "some science, some research" because you don't like the results of all the science and research so far, and so simply extend into the future the time when we actually need to do anything. You are like people who are trying to prove that a coin isn't biased. Every time it's tossed it comes up heads, and you keep asking for one more toss in the hope it comes up tails - somehow imagining that the one tail will somehow negate the long sequence of heads. It is human nature - but it is not science, or a good basis for public policy.
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I'd mod you up to 11, if I could
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"from a generation when physicists were generally quite ignorant of statistics, not a climatologist or a mathematical modeller" Interesting given that main criticism levelled at key Climatologists is their lack of statistical competency; something I have verified for myself by pulling apart a couple of papers published by the national weather bureau in the country I live in.
"Every time it's tossed it comes up heads, and you keep asking for one more toss in the hope it comes up tails" So there is clear and u
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Trolling for funding (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Altering our behaviour isn't really that hard or expensive. Installing extensive insulation, an efficient boiler and solar PV, and converting a small patch of wasteland into a vegetable patch, has reduced our carbon usage by around 30% in little more than a year. Many people could achieve much more; a lot of people in the US and the UK still don't have double glazing, which reduces heating and aircon loads alike, and there are still far too many single-occupancy SUVs and light trucks on our roads. What's more, these things actually save money - if AGW turned out to be a myth tomorrow, the financial crisis would still be here and I would still be better off because of the actions I've taken.
Messing with plants should be a long way down the list, after simple things that can be done with established technology have been fully utilised, and not before.
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I've heard of this solution before via people like Dyson (his infamous book review; see my earlier comment). I'm not sure this is proposed as a "just keep abusing the world and make super trees"--although I'm entirely sure there are some who would do just that. It's been more championed as an elegant hack to the big issue: yes, we can alter our behavior, but if the models are right we are screwed, screwed, screwed because CO2 is going to cook us all.
Again, I'm sure there's some loon who thinks we should b
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This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Are you shitting me? If a biologist wants some R&D dollars, she takes an interest in cancer or alzheimer's research and writes grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health. The NIH's research budget ($32 billion) is five times the *total* budgets of either NSF or NOAA -- and of course, environmental science research makes up only a
Profit! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Mega-corporations design genetically altered trees to sequester carbon and patent them.
2) Lobby the government for huge tax breaks and subsidies. Then work as contractors to plant the trees. Or plant them to offset environmental damage claims from mineral exploration (The Gulf of Mexico for example).
3) Profit!
Seriously, these solutions are ridiculous. I went to a lecture by a guy from IIRC Princeton. He was researching carbon sequestration using money from.... oil companies. What a crock. It was riddled with wishful thinking, e.g. "we find an unfractured geologic formation...". It was also so complex it look like a ISO standard butt-load of pork for private contractors.
And then at the end "after the sequestration, long term monitoring can be handed off to the public sector." In other words, privatize profit while socializing risk. And we all see how well privatizing profit while socializing risk worked when we bailed out the financial system.
Land biomass is a lousy carbon sink (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple comparison of the size of the biological carbon reservoir on land (2000 gigatons C) and the rate at which it exchanges carbon with the atmosphere (120 gigatons/year) suggests that growing trees is a terrible way to store carbon in the long term: extra stored carbon will return to the atmosphere in a couple of decades.
This is confirmed by a variety of real-world experiments in forest artificially enriched with CO2 [sbc.edu] and in naturally growing forests [agu.org].
You may call a dead tree "sequestered carbon", but there's a whole ecosystem full of organisms that call it "lunch". If you want to get rid of carbon, you need to either store it in a place where organisms can't get to it (for example, in the deep seafloor) or in a form that's not tasty (for example, as CO2 or carbonate rock.).
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That's why you pyrolyse it (Score:2)
And form charcoal, which is mostly inedible.
Google "Terra preta".
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That'd work, but you've gone from a mostly hands-off, passive technology to a massive industrial process involving harvesting and processing ten billion tons of trees a year.
And if you're going to harvest 'em, you might as well burn them completely as biomass. After all, mining coal, burning it for energy creating CO2, reclaiming the CO2 in trees, converting the trees *back* into coal and dumping the coal back in the ground is crazy: might as well just skip the coal step.
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Easy with the shouting there, buddy, I'm an environmentalist like yourself, I just care enough to do the math to find solutions that will actually work.
To sequester enough carbon to offset the 7 gigatons of carbon burned annually, you'd have to build an American-sized house for every family on Earth every 4 years or so, and never, ever demolish them. (assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
That's kind of a little more housing than we need: there's no way housing can suck up th
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(assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
Correction: I assumed 30 tons of wood, which is about 15 tons of carbon.
what I'd rather see (Score:2)
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Why bother with GM, (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes less than a year to mature rather than 10-20 years with trees.
It needs no fertilizer or insecticide, and is unaffected by increased UV.
It grows almost anywhere the climate is right, and that covers a big area.
Grow it, cut it down, give the nutrients a few weeks to leech back into the soil then haul away the cellulose and fill old mines with it, use it for paper, plastic feedstock, etc..
No GM needed.
The plant?
Hemp.
(cue old lame jokes about getting high, comments in general opposition, etc.)
_
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Chemical pleasure interferes with worshipping Jesus. Any pleasure religion cannot control is bad and must be punished, hence the War on Some Drugs, and the war on commercial hemp cultivation.
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I think it's a great idea ... (Score:4, Funny)
Big, Fat Trees (Score:3, Funny)
While America seeks to shrink the waist lines of its population apparently we intend to raise some really huge trees. Or as an alternative maybe we could just encourage kudzo vines to grow. We can blanket America with Kudzo with almost no effort at all.
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How About Just MORE TREES? (Score:2)
With the effort put into GM'ing trees, with all the unknown risks and huge costs of any significant deployment, how about just planting more trees that naturally evolved to survive in these ecosystems? Making more things out of wood, and less out of concrete and plastic, sinking atmospheric carbon instead of generating more mines.
That might not sound as sexy, but it does offer profits to the old and powerful owners of large tracts of forests, and countries with historically forested lands that don't have lo
Sequestering carbon with known technologies (Score:3, Informative)
The Amazon soil, normally red, is scattered with dark patches. These are charcoal residues from human occupation, some of them thousands of years old. Elemental particulate carbon is a good cation exchange medium - it sequesters nutrients - and it makes these patches extremely fertile when compared to untouched soil.
A good plan might be to is to char biomass and simply plough it into soil, if carbon sequestration is what you are about. This can eb combined with conventional agriculture. (NB by the way, that a field covered in soya or sugar cane exchanges as much carbon as a tropical rain forest: it's just and energy-in energy-out issue. Standing tropical forest holds about twice as much carbon as uncharred sugar cane, but less if the residue bagasse were to be charred and storred.) The issue with forests is biodiversity, not net photosynthesis.
Consider another practical CO2 sequestration project. Provide the simple, locally-sourced technology and then pay India small holders to set up cheap windmills, not for power but to grind chunks of the immense Deccan Flats to a powder. Why? Because these hundreds of cubic kilometres of rock are made of a basic basalt, one that rapidly absorbs CO2 when it is ground up and so exposed to air. What you get from the residue are new rice paddies.
It is thought that the reason that the climate got cold after the 15C-hotter-than-now Eocene is that the newly-forming Himalayas began to erode, fixing CO2 as they did so. The resulting carbonates are under Bangaldesh and in the Bay of Bengal.
Another good scheme is to use biomass-based carbon as a spine on which to hang solar (etc) derived hydrogen. The result is called diesel or gasoline. Doing this uses 1950s technology, and is a lot cheaper than many alternatives. You can of course burn it in cars, using established technology and known, safe handling systems. You have tens of millions of trained technicians already on stream. Hydrogen is, by contrast, a nightmare fuel: low energy density, hard to store and with a tendency to embrittle anything in which it is stored, essentially explosive in any contact with the atmosphere. And as to electricity! Has anyone seen a Lithium battery on fire? Think disruptive crash - fizz, crackle, boof.
Wow. Just wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
What next: "Majority of US politicians say that there was no oil spill this year"?
Or maybe: "You know, toxic chemicals are actually good for you".
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Depends really. Lots of things that are important for you are deathly toxic, so eh whatever. I'll almost bet that in 10 yeas you'll find that the oil spill was massively overblown as scientists figure out exactly how much life there is dependent on oil. And we'll see explosive microbial growth because of it.
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Pelicans and crabs don't exactly do well on oil.
Oil spills mean good news for some microbes and whatnot, bad news for plenty else. When some of the "plenty else" are endangered, and others are major cash-generating produce, that tends to make oil spills not so good from a human point of view.
Incidentally, this isn't the world's first oil spill; the effects of them have been observed many times before, some of them continually now for decades.
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You're an idiot.
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So wait. You're saying that a group of the people most heavily invested in the status quo believe that the status quo is going to continue? Incredible!
"Cleveland Browns Sure to Win Superbowl", says man who bet his house on the Browns.
There are a few valid reasons to question economic impact forecasts of climate change, but "The Bilderberg Group says it won't happen" is not one of them. Time for my favorite quote again:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his
Re:Can we get over it already? (Score:4, Interesting)
Among scientists, there is no doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will increase the temperature. The only questions remaining are, "how much?" and "what will be the effect?" Personally I am looking forward to global warming and drive my car as much as possible to encourage it, but even I know that CO2 warms the earth (ok that was a joke, but still....)
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Add in the extra carbon and it goes down hill from there.
aside: ever notice how we say "down hill" when we mean something negative/declining? Is it because the path to increased disorder is always the easiest, like going down a hill?
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"Nature in balance" is a fairy tale.
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The path to a "natural" solution is to put the planet back on the track it was 40,000 years ago or so. Trees growing where it is reasonable for trees to grow and no humans getting in the way of that.
We could go back to that with small groups of people living on subsistance farms. No electricity. No fossil fuels. Eating what the grow with little or no trade between groups because of limited transportation (no fuels) and no manufacturing. Earth would likely recover nicely in a few hundred years.
The probl
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Pollution is still a harmful thing even if global warming isn't real. It's true that we don't know much about our environment, but cutting down on pollution would be a good thing no matter what.
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Pollution is still a harmful thing even if global warming isn't real. It's true that we don't know much about our environment, but cutting down on pollution would be a good thing no matter what.
But if anthropogenic global warming isn't real, then carbon dioxide isn't really a pollutant (it's plant food).
BTW, I almost type anthropomorphic global warming. Now that would be neat.
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BTW, I almost type anthropomorphic global warming. Now that would be neat.
Keeling curve (Score:3, Informative)
Look here [wikipedia.org]
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Excessive oxygen produced by a runaway growth of genetically altered trees has resulted in a firestorm that burned up some of the runaway trees, consuming some of the excess oxygen and keeping everything in balance.
Fixed that for ya. Ma Nature is a glorious beast even when you try to beat her at her own game.
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Oh, also, even if your dangerous trees consumed every drop of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, oxygen levels would only rise by a tiny fraction of a percent.