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.
(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]