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The world's forests are increasingly taking up more carbon, partially offsetting the carbon being released by the burning of fossil fuels and by deforestation in the tropics, according to a new study.
The findings, published in the journal Biogeosciences, suggest that forests are growing more vigorously, and therefore, locking away more carbon. Even so, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still on the rise.
[...] The increased plant growth in global forests could be due to several factors, including higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warmer temperatures and increased availability of nitrogen.
Perhaps we should re-forest the deserts of the world.
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World's Forests Increasingly Taking up More Carbon
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There *__is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday February 25 2019, @08:51PM (15 children)
As I understand it, the carbon emitted from a forest fire is all carbon that the forest has already absorbed.
If that's correct, then your statement above is wrong.
--
"Phonetically" doesn't even start with an f.
Crap like that is why aliens fly right by us.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snow on Monday February 25 2019, @09:05PM (10 children)
I think the take-away is that it's burning/dying from bugs faster than it's growing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday February 25 2019, @09:30PM (9 children)
I think the take-away is that the article in question is putting an arbitrary limit on carbon absorption in order to characterize the burning as doing something it's not doing.
Those forests did not emit more carbon than they absorbed.
To put a low limit on when they absorbed it is disingenuous; If I burn a 20 year old tree in my yard and say that's it's a net carbon emitter since 2013, I'm not being even slightly honest about the characterization of what that tree has done.
When you say a tree burns, and talk about what that's done WRT carbon sink/source, that discussion only has useful meaning if you consider the entire lifetime of the tree.
Anyone can short-time a carbon sink and claim it's a net contributor; if you had a sponge that cost 100x carbon to build and had absorbed 100x carbon over its 10 year lifetime, but then said "considering how much carbon this has absorbed in the last year (which would be about 10x), this sponge is a net emitter", you'd be framing things exactly the way that article did.
It is written to fool the unwary. Unfortunately, there are a lot of those.
That said, try not to burn trees, and to stop such burns when they happen. Of course.
--
I have CDO. It's like OCD, but all the letters
are in aphabetical order, as they should be.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday February 25 2019, @09:47PM (7 children)
CO2 emissions are usually measured using tonnes/year.
Currently, Canada's forests emit more CO2 then they absorb. That is not true for all of time, but at this point in time, that appears to be the case (at least according to the Weather Network).
I understand what you are saying though, and yes, you are correct too :).
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday February 25 2019, @09:57PM (6 children)
The beetle kill is pretty insane up there. Canada needs to cut down the deadwood, build a big new beautiful forest, and make Japan pay for it.
Given that people want to "help" the environment so they can virtue signal there is probably profit in curating/restoring the forests to get them back to where they are carbon positive. Ask for donations from rich liberals and use the money to bulldoze the beetle kill, or maybe burn it for power in a plant that can sequester, and replant new GMO fast growth high carbon consuption trees in the same place.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 25 2019, @10:15PM (5 children)
The time to do that was when Japan was lending money with negative interest...
I don't think you quite grasp the scale of the beetle kill. Forestry equipment is big, expensive stuff, and not much of it actually lays around unused a whole lot of the time. Even if you put the equipment on full utilization with double shifts, you might only process 3x the wood that is normally processed in a high output year for commercial production.
Now, if you can convince the homeless and out of work that they need to be out in the woods with hand tools felling trees, that still won't help as much as you think due to the relatively low output of hand forestry as compared to modern machine driven forestry.
About the only thing that can "take care" of beetle kill scale deadwood in any kind of timely and economically feasible fashion is arson.
It's just another in a long line of species that have bit the dust in the 6th MEE. That song "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..." comes from a time, not so long ago, when Chestnut trees were common in North America.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snow on Monday February 25 2019, @10:30PM (4 children)
All of February has been cold as balls up here. 'They' are hopeful that this extended cold has decimated the beetles.
I think in the last month, there has been ONE day where it briefly popped up above freezing.
Remember that polar vortex that everyone was bitching about that lasted like 3 days. We have been living that for a MONTH!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @11:19PM
Only here does snow complain about it being cold.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @12:11AM
That isn't cold you are feeling, it is heat freeze. The way you described it (as if due to an actual cooling) is highly misleading.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:12AM
I don't clearly remember. Was it you who gave me those Righteous Chocolate Chip Cookies?
I greatly prized the wool gloves you sent me. I think it was you. Recall you sent them during the 2015-2016 Winter; that was our coldest in several years before or since.
But two or three months ago I gave them to a young woman on the bus who, in the driving rain well before Sunrise, was wearing just a windbreaker.
I damn near gave her my coat. "Take care of yourself before you take care of others" indeed: to have given her my coat and I would have been in a real fix.
But it's cool - so to speak. I got new gloves at the Portland Rescue Mission.
I gave that second pair to my girlfriend, a Heroin and Benzo Addict who spends most of her time outdoors turning tricks.
Since then the Mission hasn't had any gloves, but it's OK I've still got that coat, and it hasn't been as cold as in '15.
And I have an apartment now.
BEHOLD:
No takers yet, but I have something even better:
A STUDENT.
After quite a long talk I realized that his repeated insistence that "I want to learn the notes" could mean only _one_ thing:
"You want to learn Music Theory."
That yesterday was my birthday led me to take the whole day off to screw around with with GarageBand all day yesterday, then all night, then all day today as well as likely all night tonight.
I'll be posting a YouTube soon, with this done up in at least six parts, maybe eight:
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:33AM
Just because the beetles get knocked back once doesn't mean they won't bloom again... in the absence of natural predators your forests are to the beetles just like coal waiting to be devoured by a human mine, and you know how the human population explodes when it gets cheap energy (coal and oil...)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:13AM
Canada's forests are dwindling. Taken to its extremes, they will be gone, just like the Amazon will be someday.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:29AM (2 children)
A lot of that carbon is in the soil, that is now gone and took 10,000+ years to generate. There is also a lot more ways that carbon is getting released then the massive fires of the last 2 years. Here in BC, the forests seem to sequester about 28 million tons of CO2 a year and have been releasing 245 million tons a year. Sure in a few thousand years it'll balance. BTW, officially we (BC) emit 63 million tons a year, so over double what the forests can absorb. A good chunk of BC is also rain forest, which probably absorbs more CO2 per hectare then most forests.
Long range predictions are also a drying trend here, which will mean more fires.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/11/30/opinion/bc-must-stop-ignoring-surging-forest-carbon-emissions [nationalobserver.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:37AM (1 child)
I think rainforests absorb /less/ carbon. I might be remembering this wrong, but the humidity causes more rapid breakdown of organic matter, and it never gets a chance to be incorporated into the soil. Most rainforest soils are actually pretty poor, the fertility is because there's so much water.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:35AM
You might be thinking of tropical rain forests, which are quite different from the temperate one that grows along the coast from California to Alaska. There's some pretty fertile soil in the bottom lands but there are also a lot of steep mountains where the soil has a habit of washing away without trees to hold it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:53AM
Right, by your logic burning fossil fuels also doesn't count.