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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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Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @06:12PM
how do you keep the people from deforesting it in the first place from doing it again. There are many many places with sparse populations that, with a little hydrological engineering could be reforested with mixed species ecosystems. But in most cases, the reason they are barren is because the people there can't keep their hands off the local resources. Which is why they live in a desert made up of dried poo particles.
In Europe forests are heavily managed by government. In the U.S. we don't do that, but we do have a lot of parks lands that remain unmolested for the most part. In the AU they are embarking on a massive reforestation project. It will be interesting to see how much of that state owned forest will become private owned as soon as it is ready for harvest.
As an example, there was a project where a threatened dear native to north africa was moved to a military gunnery range in the U.S. where It thrived. It went extinct in north africa, and the U.S. population was sampled to restore it in its original range. The restoration didn't take because you can't tell an ignorant wahabi with a gun much of anything without shooting him first.
The challenge here, is figuring out how to take industrial advantage of a diverse ecosystem without destroying it. The reason the forest it isn't there, is because we value industry above conservation. So the technical problem, is figuring out how to make industry and conservation mutually compatible. Of course this is possible, and permaculture projects in the desert have achieved some crazy things at a small scale. But you only own what you can defend.
So it will come down to finding a group of people who are willing to live in a desert frontier, that is becoming a forest frontier, for a period of decades, and maintain the intrinsic ability to defend it while it is being grown. We are literally talking about thousands of people with a common vision, and a shit-ton of firepower. And that is the only way you can expect to green any desert that isn't already in Western hands.
Yes, what I'm talking about is modern colonialism. But if we are talking about planetary cataclysm caused by ecological mismanagement, what we are saying is that it is them, or ALL of us. Not just them or us.