Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Excess carbon dioxide, emitted by burning fossil fuels like coal and petroleum, is one of the most important factors in driving global warming. While the world is focused on controlling global warming by limiting these emissions, less attention has been paid to the capacity of vegetation and soils to take up and store carbon.
One of the most popular approaches to carbon storage is protecting tropical rainforests. If a rainforest is cut down, the carbon stored in the trunks and leaves will be released to the atmosphere. But plants in alpine communities in Norway also have a role to play in storing—or releasing—carbon dioxide.
"We don't think about how much carbon is actually stored right in our own backyard," says Mia Vedel Sørensen, a PhD candidate at NTNU's Department of Biology who is studying carbon storage in shrub vegetation in the Dovre mountains, in mid-Norway.
Sørensen compared three types of vegetation that are typical of the Norwegian mountains:
- Shrubs (willows)
- Heath (crowberry and heather)
- Meadow
"I wanted to figure out how much carbon these three vegetation types store and release. My hypothesis was that shrubs store more carbon than heath and meadow vegetation because shrubs have more biomass, and thus have higher rates of photosynthesis," she said.
But it turned out to be the opposite: Shrubs, even though they are tallest, actually store the least carbon.
"It surprised me that meadows actually store a lot more carbon than shrubs. The carbon in meadows is stored mostly below the ground, next to the roots," she said
The amount of carbon stored in heath vegetation is greater than in shrub vegetation, but less than in meadows, she said.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 24 2017, @09:01AM (5 children)
A lot of times the trunks are turned into furniture. In which case the carbon is locked up for quite a long time.
And even if they are turned into paper, paper tends to decay very slowly in an anaerobic landfill. There have been reports of newspapers still being readable after being decades in a landfill.
A static old forest doesn't actually take much carbon out of the atmosphere. If you want to take more carbon out of the atmosphere what you can do is keep chopping down and replanting a renewable forest of fast growing trees and storing the wood and pulp (as furniture, books, paper archives etc).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 24 2017, @04:38PM (1 child)
Agree. I've never understood the profound confusion environmentalists display when it comes to tree farming vs. slash and burn. Trees, from what I understand, can be just another crop.
That being said, I'd love to see meadows in cities. I just think meadows are pretty.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 24 2017, @06:30PM
Forest farms are worse for bio-diversity but better for carbon-locking.
a) When a rainforest is cut down they're not going to burn most of the wood. The wood will be used and thus carbon will be locked.
b) When a rainforest is burnt then CO2 is released.
What replaces the rainforest in both cases tends to be stuff like palm oil plantations, farms, ranches or denser human habitats (towns/cities). The first bunch tend to be carbon neutral by themselves (cattle ranches do produce methane though which is more greenhouse warming than CO2). Then for a) it's carbon locked up, then carbon neutral; for b) it's carbon released then carbon neutral.
In the case of new human habitats that can indirectly result in more carbon released as long as more humans = more fossil fuels burnt. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 24 2017, @07:35PM (1 child)
Of course. And processes involved in turning tree into paper et al is completely free of carbon emissions, right?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 24 2017, @09:10PM
No process in life of a mammal is completely free of carbon emissions. Even your writing stupid posts.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 24 2017, @07:48PM
There's no such thing as a static forest, but I wouldn't expect you city slickers to understand that.
Further, a long lived forest does not release much carbon into the atmosphere. Trees that die take decades to rot (sometimes over a hundred years) and most of that carbon goes back into the ground, where it feeds new trees.
https://naturesdepths.com/nurse-logs/ [naturesdepths.com]
Furniture is disposed of all the time, and because wood is a fuel a great deal of it gets burned eventually.
It is FAR more likely that the carbon in the harvested tree will be emitted into the atmosphere before the carbon in the fallen tree.
Vary little "used wood" discarded lumber, paper, stays out of the fuel cycle on a world wide basis. (Even if it does get landfilled in the US, this is not the norm).
We cleared millions of square miles for farming. Great sections of North America was hacked out of forests. The British Isles and much of the Europe were virtually denuded for farm land and cattle and sheep grazing. And virtually no new forests are being planted, nor are new prairies being allowed to flourish.
The thing is, we need and are using LESS farmland today (as a % of land inventory) than we did did 100 years ago. Yet we run mowers/baling machines over cleared land to keep it cleared, and often we leave the bales in the field, having no actual need of it. You'd be suprised how few sheep it takes to keep 100 acres as grass land.
Farms are fearful of letting the farmland revert to forest, or even prairie. (Keeping it clear is easier than clearing it again should the need arise, (and there are soil bank payments to be lost if farmland is not left fallow).
Waste paper destined for recycling often ends up in land fills, because there is at best, a fickle market for it. Virgin pulp from forest harvest is still cheaper. With China refusing to take recycled paper [soylentnews.org] any more, there is likely to be more paper in land fills. I guess you'd call that a good thing. I remain unconvinced.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.