Re: Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' - sorry, not really. Archived Message
Posted by dereklane on August 3, 2019, 4:50 pm, in reply to "Re: Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' - sorry, not really. "
I would suggest their conclusions are erroneous (they of course don't state conclusions 100%, being scientists), but perhaps such studies are more than enough for the mining companies to begin rubbing their hands together in glee. With 29% of the worlds forest in the boreal regions, I would say there are perhaps some miscalculations going on. Not Least that forest ties the ground together, and gives it some residual warmth and life that in turn holds probably vastly more weight collectively in microbes. Denude a landscape and you poison it (as with the tar and shale mining in Canada's chunk). When you do that, not only do you remove the carbon sinks from ground level and upward biological life, but from below it too. Not only that but the more the global temp rises the further north the permafrost begins. That means that in places where there should be snow reflecting upwards year round now there is not. We won't reverse the problem by unleashing billions of mega tonnes of carbon back into the atmosphere . For the most part the boreal forests remain in tact. I would suggest replanting that which we have destroyed (within the last hundred years) then leave it be. All great forests have a net benefit to the planet rather than a deficit. Crunching numbers via these studies strikes me as cynically best, and perhaps a dishonest manipulation of the numbers (dishonest because weather and climate patterns when we are talking about natural systems are too complex to have everything factored in to a couple of reports in any sensible manner) at worst. By a similar rationale of thinking we'd do well to cook all the sands of the Sahara into glass mirrors and turn it into a giant mirror. Obviously a stupid idea, because the net cost environmentally would be higher than its return, and doctoring a region as big as the Sahara would like likely have a knock on effect we cannot possibly predict. As with everything, I don't think you can go too far wrong attempting to return places to their natural habitats (that we can reasonably know). We can go wrong much quicker by taking scientific studies and presenting them to engineers.
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