To Save the Planet, Don’t Plant Trees.

[elleng]

AS international leaders gather in New York next week for a United Nations climate summit, they will be preoccupied with how to tackle the rising rate of carbon emissions. To mitigate the crisis, one measure they are likely to promote is reducing deforestation and planting trees.

A landmark deal to support sustainable forestry was a heralded success story of the last international climate talks, in Warsaw last year. Western nations, including the United States, Britain and Norway, handed over millions of dollars to developing countries to kick-start programs to reduce tropical deforestation. More funds are promised.

Deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. The assumption is that planting trees and avoiding further deforestation provides a convenient carbon capture and storage facility on the land.

That is the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

In reality, the cycling of carbon, energy and water between the land and the atmosphere is much more complex. Considering all the interactions, large-scale increases in forest cover can actually make global warming worse.

Of course, this is counterintuitive. We all learn in school how trees effortlessly perform the marvel of photosynthesis: They take up carbon dioxide from the air and make oxygen. This process provides us with life, food, water, shelter, fiber and soil. The earth’s forests generously mop up about a quarter of the world’s fossil-fuel carbon emissions every year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/to-save-the-planet-dont-plant-trees.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0

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OK, I'm going to the river!

[Shrike47]

1. Sorry, trees good, I plant. They were here before we got here and things were OK.

Planting trees just seems right.

[NorthCarolina]

10. Same here. nt

[NYC_SKP]

2. I think the article is misleading.

Practically any argument can be made around the complex topic of climate change, carbon cycle and sequestration, and the human components, depending upon the details.

Most readers will take this article and conclude, "oh well, screw that rainforest decimation problem, I'm going to McDonalds!".

Generally, restoration of forests and wetlands to their natural state is going to be the right thing to do, it will NOT make matters worse.

What we need is to get away from meat-based diets, reduce our population, and retreat from our consumer addictions and change our values

As it turns out, the oceans have been sequestering much of our excess carbon, much to the detriment of sea life like our precious coral reefs.

Some of the article reads like typical climate change denial tripe:

In order to grow food, humans have changed about 50 percent of the earth’s surface area from native forests and grasslands to crops, pasture and wood harvest. Unfortunately, there is no scientific consensus on whether this land use has caused overall global warming or cooling. Since we don’t know that, we can’t reliably predict whether large-scale forestation would help to control the earth’s rising temperatures.

Worse, trees emit reactive volatile gases that contribute to air pollution and are hazardous to human health. These emissions are crucial to trees — to protect themselves from environmental stresses like sweltering heat and bug infestations. In summer, the eastern United States is the world’s major hot spot for volatile organic compounds (V.O.C.s) from trees.
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Continue reading the main story

As these compounds mix with fossil-fuel pollution from cars and industry, an even more harmful cocktail of airborne toxic chemicals is created. President Ronald Reagan was widely ridiculed in 1981 when he said, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” He was wrong on the science — but less wrong than many assumed.

Really?

[Tikki]

3. AH reagan said trees cause pollution and rmoney said trees are just the right size...

I say: plant a tree, a bush or a shrub....yes I will, Mrs. Johnson.


Tikki

[Shrike47]

4. Bad trees, bad. Sorry, I just can't go with that.

[Politicub]

5. Same argument that teaching sex in schools

leads to more teen sex.

Why?

The author basically is saying planting more trees will lead to more deforestation.

We can plant more trees and benefit from their natural process to convert carbon to oxygen. And, reduce deforestation at the same time. Won't be easy to slow deforestation down, but a broader environmental movent will help curtail it.

It seems the NY Times is taking the buzzfeed-esque approach of headlines written as click-bait.

[jwirr]

6. I think there is a bit of a conflict here. I don't know if this article is right about trees and

carbon levels but I do know that cutting trees down (say for more acreage for farming) lowers the water levels. When I was younger farms in NW IA had trees in the fence lines and along the roads and rivers. Today those trees have mostly disappeared to add acreage to farms and what many do not see is that as the trees disappeared the water levels got lower. Wells on many of the farms are now dry. Farmers actually buy water for their farms and their homes from wells further down in river valleys.

[enough]

7. Whatever this is, it is NOT an argument for continuing tropical deforestation.

snip from the article>

.....Besides the amount of greenhouse gases in the air, another important switch on the planetary thermostat is how much of the sun’s energy is taken up by the earth’s surface, compared to how much is reflected back to space. The dark color of trees means that they absorb more of the sun’s energy and raise the planet’s surface temperature.

Climate scientists have calculated the effect of increasing forest cover on surface temperature. Their conclusion is that planting trees in the tropics would lead to cooling, but in colder regions, it would cause warming.

snip>


I need to read this thing a couple more times before I know what to make of it.

[Scootaloo]

8. A real problem is the bad habit of just planting whatever trees, wherever

The logic being that any tree, crammed into a place where there was no tree before, is good.

That's not necessarily so. Disturbing certain soils leads to a chain of oxidization and decay that releases large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere; this is especially true the further north you go, as cooler temperatures and more acidic soil means organic matter gets trapped without rapid decay in the soil, until it's exposed. Others are super-delicate, and breaking ground cna lead to rapid and dangerous erosion, as is the case in China's loess plains, and the US' great plains.

Futher, each species of tree is tailored to a particular environment and locale. You can't just chuck the fastest-growing tree you have into some random environment and hope for the best. This also tends to lead to uniformity in plantings; monoculture non-forests that do not take into consideration the needs of local fauna and flora.

Reforesting isn't a "bad" thing. But as with ANY form of environmental manipulation, reforestation with halfassed research and an emphasis on speed rather than ecological continuity almost always is.

[cheapdate]

9. In a steady state, the organic world is "carbon nuetral."

The process of photosynthesis removes roughly 60x10^9 tons per year (60 billion tons.) In a steady state, precisely the same amount of carbon dioxide is returned to the atmosphere each year by all the processes of respiration and decay of plants and animals, provided only that none is permanently lost in the form of new coal, oil, and other organic deposits. Natural disturbances will return to equilibrium in relatively short times scales.

The two most important contributing factors from the inorganic world are the release of carbon dioxide from the interior of the Earth by hot springs, volcanoes, and other sources and the formation of carbonates in the weathering of igneous rocks. They happen to be nearly in balance. The first one adds and the second subtracts about 0.1 x 10^9 tons per year to the atmosphere.

By far, the largest contribution to carbon dioxide comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, which adds something like 56x10^9 tons of carbon dioxide per year (56 billion tons) to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a significant influence on the planet's climate. They absorb energy in infrared wavelengths which prevents some of the Earth's radiated heat from escaping back into space. They trap heat and warm the planet.

Planting trees is wonderful. I love trees and forests. I'd rather be camped out on a bald in the Southern Nantahala Mountains than almost anywhere else in the world right now.

Trees should be planted for the shade, shelter, and beauty they provide. But planting trees isn't a long term sequestration strategy for carbon dioxide. Trees become part of the present organic carbon cycle. What carbon they remove from the atmosphere returns to the atmosphere when they die and decay.

Stop burning fossil carbon.

[Cartoonist]

11. How trees tap water

As the leaves emit oxygen, they create a vacuum that lifts the sap up the trunk and out the branches. This vacuum lifts water from the ground. Since we need both water and oxygen, trees are what sustains life on this planet. Cutting down a tree is a crime against humanity.

[MFM008]

12. NYT on ignore

My tree is a large blue spruce is doing great and will probably blow over onto my sons car at the first wind storm....those windy fall days are almost here.......

[Nitram]

13. Trees perform far more valuable ecosystem services than just carbon sequestration.

The thesis here is remarkable wrong-headed and short-sighted. Strikes me as being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Trees perform invaluable services in preventing erosion, stabilizing river banks, shading streams to keep temperatures lower, taking in nutrients that would otherwise cause water pollution, breaking pollutants down, essential habitat, food for the insects on which all baby birds depend, and more.