A Tree-Myth - Carbon sinks that don't work and what to do about it
It occurred to me that it's all very well having someone plant a tree to offset your cheap flight to Florida. And for the first few years I can't argue. The tree breathes in the CO2 and turns it into wood. The carbon is scrubbed from the air and all looks fine and dandy.
A few years later the tree dies - as all trees do. It could be cut down and used for firewood, it could just fade back gently into the forest or it could be turned into trendy modern furniture.
For the first two options all the CO2 it locked up during its life is released back into the atmosphere again immediately. In the third option it is turned into several bits of furniture and spends the next few years keeping breakfast, lunch and dinner off the floor in a nice family house in the suburbs.
Eventually its ability to break breakfast's fall is undermined when the new puppy chews one of its legs off. It then gets to follow either or both of the first two choices; rotting or burning. Either way, the CO2 gets back into the air.
So do trees really work as a carbon sink? If they do then it's just as a temporary store and the greenhouse gasses you created on your way to Disneyland or wherever will come back undiminished.
When we rely on biological sequestration of the problem carbon that we're producing then it will always come back.
Have I got this wrong?
If this is true and I am right then should we really be looking at methods that lock up carbon in the rocks where the return is as slow as geology. Now here my chemistry goes way out on a limb. I believe that CO2 reacts with air to form carbonic acid. Carbonates are stable entities and tend to sink to the bottom of the sea. Subduction zones will do the rest.
I know that it will still probably come back but at least that's millions of years away and we have time to work something really clever out.
Simon Morice
Framing Questions for Interviews
The fourteenth century is not one which the English celebrate with any great pride - if, indeed, at all. The population had been halved by the Black Death, two kings wrested from their throne, and English dreams of empire had crumbled in the attrition of the hundred years war. Not quite the end of the world, but you could definitely see it from there. In the candlelit Kentish dark, and with his quill on vellum, the then Clerk of Romney wrote up his Register. Daniel Rough added a short epigram which may well have been his critique on the times in which he lived: Si sapiens fore vis sex servus qui tibi mando Quid dicas et ubi, de quo, cur, quomodo, quando. If you wish to be wise I commend to you six servants Ask what, where, about what, why, how, when. Some six hundred years later, the relationship with France was healing, the British Empire far exceeded expectations, and a journalist called Rudyard Kipling had a story published in a womens' magazine. The Elephant's Chi...
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