Fundamentally, to avoid catastrophic climate change we're going to need to reduce fossil fuel consumption. But it's also going to be necessary to look at other things we can do, so this bury trees to sequester their carbon scheme is probably worth exploring.
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Bury The Trees!
09 May 2008 05:16 pm
Comments (36)
Killing off a large percentage of the human population would probably help as well.
That's a freakin' stupid idea, and, no, it's not worth exploring.
Trees are valuable to people. We like to make things out of them. And dead trees are enormously valuable to wildlife and are the basically the engine that keeps forests going. (Here's a trick--if you want to see a lot of wildlife activity in your yard, leave some dead wood lying around. You'll be amazed.)
Instead of an industrial-scale worldwide tree burying effort, maybe we should "look at other things we can do", like cutting our fossil fuel emissions.
Oh, let's go all the way: Submerge what's left of the Amazon Rainforest basin under eighty feet of concrete.
Politicians in the region who have been taking bribes for years from developers and subsidiaries of American corporations will love it, though I suspect a few die-hard tree-huggers up here will squawk a little.
Howard Stupish
President, American Concrete Manufacturer's Ass'n.
Captain disco is on the right track. Obviously you can't use trees, for habitat reasons. But algae, on the other hand, can sequester carbon just as well as trees, and nobody will care if we bury algae.
Captain disco, there is something similar which happens in the Gulf of Mexico. All the fertilizer used in the plains states runs into the Mississippi and down into the GOM creating a huge bloom of phytoplankton (which is algae). There is nothing to eat the algae, so the phytoplankton die and sink to the bottom and create a huge anoxic zone that kills everything. Doing this on purpose is a very bad idea.
Matt, "avoid catastrophic climate change" is an ignorant statement. You really should simply stop discussing science. Either that or get back to us after you've "explored" the virtues of deforestation.
Okay, this seems utterly insane to me at first blush, but for those who are curious, here's the full article, which considers many of the objections that sprung to my mind. I'm still not convinced, but maybe others will be.
This would be a great idea, but unfortunately it will be killed in Congress by AEPAC (The American Ent Public Affairs Committee).
There are a few ideas like this that are floating around that probably are sensible on a small scale. doing this on the enormous scale comtemplated here is nutty, but figuring out ways to long term sequester say 10% of what he is suggesting might be doable and not cause huge ecosystem damage.
There is nothing to eat the algae, so the phytoplankton die and sink to the bottom and create a huge anoxic zone that kills everything. Doing this on purpose is a very bad idea.
Well, what about if it were out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the bottom is 8 miles down?
You know, trees grow very slowly. Bamboo, on the other hand, is a grass that is one of the fastest growing plants on earth. So maybe a "bury the bamboo" plan is more - well less crazy. This is still a bad plan.
karl - yeah, that's what i mean about likely having some serious negative consequences. but the difference between runoff and river discharge and the kind of thing i was discussing is that they do it in the open ocean in different spots whereas rivers keep dumping stuff in the exact same spot over and over.
but on the scale something like this would require, a better understanding of the ripple effects is really important. i'm certainly not promoting it. but it does seem smarter than burying trees.
this kind of thing can also be done on land too. biodiesel operations are rushing to figure out how to affordably create massive amounts of algae to get oil to make biodiesel. if you just leave off the "make biodiesel" step, you get carbon sequestration. and in most cases, the nutrients and gasses that biodiesel feedstock producers want to use to grow algae are co2 from power plants and waste water from septic systems. if they ever can find a way to do this cheaply maybe it could be transferred to carbon sequestration, especially as the costs of carbon become real for people.
I commend Dr. Zeng for attempting to think outside of the box, but there is a much more energy/capital efficient means of sequestering carbon: GROW MORE FSCKing TREES.
Yes, these added trees will rot and eventually release their carbon, but you'll have more living trees at any one time. I hear that many species grow quickly enough that they can be profitably grown and harvested on a rotating basis!
The sun provides the energy, allowing chlorophyll to do the work. Trees die, and become grist for more trees. Worked great for a half billion years.
Or we can send work crews out to grab dead trees, dig a trench, and bury them. What's the net energy/carbon budget on that?
The amazing thing about what a dumb idea this is is that the very post Matt links to points out that it sounds like a really dumb idea. But Matt thinks it's awesome anyway, because apparently he doesn't bother to read about science and the environment even when it means reading the article that he's linking to.
re: dumping iron
http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/29093
Iirc, iron was already been dumped into the Pacific for some experiment in the 1970's, but I don't recall why. I've got to go to dinner so I don't have time to follow up.
As an aside, carbon sequestration in the deep sea also has the potential to be an incredibly idiotic idea as well.
Consider that it takes abyssal water about 1000 years to circle the earth. Some of that water wells up at various locations, notable because of the nutrients it brings to the surface, prime fishing areas.
Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that deep sea carbon will come back to bite someone else in the okole within the foreseeable future. Or, are we going on 99 year lease plan for the ecology?
One little detail I like from the article itself: Zeng envisions a worldwide workforce of 2 million for trench-digging alone.
I've always advocated for buying tanks of carbon dioxide and burying them. It's not like they're not available.
Didn't I tell you that trees pollute?
How can anyone seriously believe that such a preposterous proposal would be either feasible or effective? The solution to our past wholesale destruction of the natural order of life on this planet, is a further wide-scale destruction of the forests? Who pays this guy, a lumber company?
Let's reprocess tons of biomass and bury it. Millions of years from now, they'll call it "coal" and "oil".
I guess big-time pundits who are required to post four times an hour can't be bothered to think even a little about the details. But according to my calculations, Zeng's proposal would require ~2% of the earth's surface area to be buried every year. That's an area the size of the continental United States.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2008/05/burying-trees-to-stop-global-warming.html
Clearly ridiculous.
I guess big-time pundits who are required to post four times an hour can't be bothered to think even a little about the details. But according to my calculations, Zeng's proposal would require ~2% of the earth's surface area to be buried every year. That's an area the size of the continental United States.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2008/05/burying-trees-to-stop-global-warming.html
Clearly ridiculous.
I guess big-time pundits who are required to post four times an hour can't be bothered to think even a little about the details. But according to my calculations, Zeng's proposal would require ~2% of the earth's surface area to be buried every year. That's an area the size of the continental United States.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2008/05/burying-trees-to-stop-global-warming.html
Clearly ridiculous.
"How can anyone seriously believe that such a preposterous proposal would be either feasible or effective? The solution to our past wholesale destruction of the natural order of life on this planet, is a further wide-scale destruction of the forests? "
Er, no, I think the idea would be to grow new trees, maybe Eucalyptus which isn't useful for timber, and bury them in, say, old salt mines.
Currently-existing trees hold carbon from the past. In order for this to make any sense at all, you'd want new trees that contain only recently-absorbed carbon.
I guess big-time pundits who are required to post four times an hour can't be bothered to think even a little about the details. But according to my calculations, Zeng's proposal would require ~2% of the earth's surface area to be buried every year. That's an area the size of the continental United States.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2008/05/burying-trees-to-stop-global-warming.html
Clearly ridiculous.
I guess big-time pundits who are required to post four times an hour can't be bothered to think even a little about the details. But according to my calculations, Zeng's proposal would require ~2% of the earth's surface area to be buried every year. That's an area the size of the continental United States.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2008/05/burying-trees-to-stop-global-warming.html
Clearly ridiculous.
Someone remind me why we recycle paper? Why don't we bury that, too?
The thing that everone is overlooking is that drastic, irreversible actions never have unintended consequences.
So we've got that going for us.
If only trees didn't contain phosphorous and, especially, nitrogen, which will be buried along with the carbon.
I know --- let's use coal to make nitrogen fertilizer to replace the nitrogen that will be lost.
Maybe we should bury ass faces instead.
You have to expend a lot of energy to dig big freaking holes for the trees. On the other hand you can burn the dead trees -- or any kind of agricultural waste for that matter -- with very limited oxygen and use the heat to drive turbines. The other output is charcoal which is basically crystalized carbon in a format that is resistant to weather degradation for hundreds to thousands of years. Then you can cheaply spread the resulting charcoal on top of agricultural land where it adsorbs nitrogen and other nutrients and holds them at the surface of the soil, preventing run-off and leaching and making them easily accessible to crops while more or less permanently sequestering the carbon.
This process, currently going by the name "agrichar" is under development at a lot of academic centers and with a couple of demo plants being built. The production of charcoal can also be performed particularly quickly under pressure with the introduction of metal catalysts. That's a cutting edge way of making something that has been made for thousands of years.
In the Amazon there are soils called "Terra Preta" that were deliberately built with the introduction of charcoal. These soils are fantastically fertile and have maintained that fertility for millenia. Agrichar is really a win-win proposition using ancient technology to solve a modern problem.
Google Terra Preta and agrichar for more info.
Google 'biochar'
There was a piece in a recent Science which initially caught my eye, but turns out info is easy to come by.
Very basic idea: Heat up biomass, it gives off gases which can be pretty cleanly burned to power the process plus a bit extra (assuming it is done 'right') to power generators or whatever. What is leftover is basically charcoal, which could be burnt fairly cleanly for more power... or buried to sequester the carbon.
Turns out that burying charcoal (actually mixing it with soil to be more precise) is actually a very cheap and stable way to sequester carbon. More research is ongoing about the stability part, but all indications are that it is probably more stable than underground (pumping into porous rock formations) sequestration. It also has positive benefits for many soil types with respect to growing more plants (aka agriculture).
PS: Charcoal briquettes are basically biochar smashed into a little brick shape. Old tech... the twist is just mixing it into soil instead of burning it.
You might be interested in seeing some of the talks from climate researchers here, where video from this week's conference on "Frontiers of Climate Science" in Santa Barbara are posted. There was some discussion today on geoengineering, and more to come tomorrow.
Travc and JBean,
Yes, the Terra Preta soils are really good for agriculture. It's amazing what the Amazon Indians were able to do with minimal technology. I was corresponding for awhile with a professor who is working on biochar as his latest research interest. The high carbon levels are good in an of themselves, and the charcoal also helps to hold positively charged ions and prevent nutrients from leaching. Buried carbon can last quite a long time if you don't till the soil.
It would be better to say 'heating' the wood instead of burning it since you're actually trying to ensure that the carbon _doesn't_ burn and is converted to charcoal.
Perennial grasses are what I'm working on right now and they have some potential to sequester carbon as well (they are a net carbon dioxide sink as opposed to annual agriculture which _at best_ is a slight carbon dioxide source.) The issue with all these things is a matter of scale of course, you would have to do them on quite a large scale to have an effect. I'm skeptical of the iron seeding of the oceans idea but who knows, some experts take it seriously and it might actually work.
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Heads in the Sand
there's a similar thing going on at sea. i forget what the exact name is but it's something like plankton seeding or something. they go out in big ships and dump (i think) iron powder which spurs massive plankton growth. or maybe it's algae. either way, massive growth of carbon dioxide breathing life. as the microscopic organisms grow they slowly sink, eventually to the sea floor taking with them lots of CO2. supposedly it works like a charm but what it does to ocean ecologies is unknown (and probably bad). it's one of the options you have if you're a biz looking to buy "carbon credits" - you can give the companies doing this some money, then they go out and use your money to fund their operations (and profits).
Posted by captain disco | May 9, 2008 5:28 PM