Rick Baudé Wrote:
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> Yes, I did read that, that's why we have lumber
> companies to chop down dead and dying trees and
> process them into useful items such as houses and
> furniture (making and using things out of wood is
> something the hominids have been doing for
> millions of years.) and keep the CO2 sequestered.
> OTOH the dead trees are processed by all kinds of
> wood destroying organisms (termites, beetles, an
> assortment of thousands of species of fungi, and
> gazillions of bacteria) that maintain the forest's
> health.


The trees that are suitable for lumber take a long time to grow, and are a minority in many areas of the forest anyway. For forest owners, it tends to be more profitable to use the forests for cellulose, to be used for products of short life-cycle, and to produce heat.

As a result, if we take the current level as a baseline, and try to increase the carbon sinks above the carbon sources, it is not easy to increase the sinks. Living in Finland, a country that dependent on forest industry, we are painfully aware of this.

Globally speaking, in a world with ever-increasing amount of people, and thereby food demand, it isn't a peace of cake to find new and suitable areas to plant trees on.

I'm not very pessimistic about us finding new technical solutions to the issues, but oversimplifying complex problems is of no use in my opinion.



On the other hand, we should also realize
> that CO2 isn't "THE IMPLACABLE ENEMY" of mankind,
> it's as vital as any other gas to maintaining the
> earth's equilibrium. No CO2 or restricted CO2
> means you get continent size glaciers destroying
> everything under the sun. Without CO2 earth would
> be a giant snowball and we would be extinct.


Yes, of course. The issue is that fossilized sources that are our of the short-term carbon cycle have been released in huge amounts in a short time-period.

The technology that has allowed us to do so has brought us many magnificent things, I don't wish to demonize it. But we now know some things we didn't a century or so ago, and need to make some decisions accordingly.




Regards,
Tommi

"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
-Homer J. Simpson