Renewable Revolution

Quote from: agelbert on May 29, 2017, 07:19:24 pm

We can’t count on trees to solve our global warming mess — there’s just too much CO2 out there

LAST UPDATED ON MAY 29TH, 2017 AT 5:10 PM BY TIBI PUIU

SNIPPET:

Massive reforestation can’t save us from runaway global warming, despite what intuition might tell us. According to a recent study which simulated CO2 removal from a biosphere point of view, biomass plantations would be inadequate in steering us away from a potentially disastrous 2 degrees Celsius global warming scenario. Instead, we have to cut off fossil fuels immediately and plant biomass at the same time if we’re to have a winning shot at this.

Trees — don’t overestimate them

We all know deforestation is running rampant all over the world. According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earth’s natural forests already have been destroyed. Up to 90 percent of West Africa’s coastal rain forests have disappeared since 1900. This destruction is continuing on a daily basis. The U.S. State Department estimates that forests four times the size of Switzerland are lost each year because of clearing and degradation. That’s because every year our cities grow bigger, and so do our crop fields and industrial centers to support an ever growing and affluent population.

Here’s what the forest cover in Central Europe used to look like some 1,100 years ago.

Credit: Michael Williams (2006) – Deforesting the Earth From Prehistory to Global Crisis, An Abridgment. University Of Chicago Press.

Trees are incredibly useful. They provide shelter and food for millions of species, enrich the soil, and — perhaps most importantly — suck out CO2 and expel O2. That’s literally the reverse of human respiration and for millions of years, this delicate interplay has worked out just fine for everyone. But then humans started digging and burning billions of tonnes of carbon that was stored in the crust for ages. Coupled with massive deforestation, human activity has released so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that the world is now nearly 1 degree Celsius warmer than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Though alarmed, some people might feel comfortable knowing that we can always replant our forests to offset all the damage we’ve caused in the last 150 years. But that’s just wishful thinking, according to an international team of researchers who simulated what would happen if we grew biomass under three scenarios: business as usual (unabated burning of fossil fuel resources), Paris Agreement (190+ countries pledged to reduce or cap emissions on a case by case basis. For instance, the U.S.  pledged to lower emissions by at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025), and very ambitious CO2 reductions.

The team found that if we continue to burn fossil fuels at this current rate, the number of trees we’d need to plant would be simply staggering and impractical. Even if we’d plant nothing but poplar trees or switchgrass, which have some of the highest density of stored biomass (50% carbon), under this scenario the size of the plantation would replace natural ecosystems around the world almost completely.

“If we continue burning coal and oil the way we do today and regret our inaction later, the amounts of greenhouse gas we would need to take out of the atmosphere in order to stabilize the climate would be too huge to manage,” says Lena Boysen from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, lead-author of the study published in a journal of the American Geophysical Union, Earth’s Future.

In the case of scenario #2, even if all the Paris pledgers put their money where their mouth is, we’d still be in trouble. The biomass plantations required by mid-century to extract all that remaining excess CO2 from the atmosphere would be enormous. We’d have to replace natural ecosystems on fertile land the size of more than one-third of all forests we have today on our planet. If that’s not an option, we can always convert a quarter of the land used for agriculture into biomass plantations. But in doing so, we’d seriously jeopardize global food security.

Lastly, if the world was very serious about climate change and ambitiously decided to reduce carbon emissions, then fierce competition for land and food could be less pronounced than in the other two scenarios. However, even in this scenario, we’d have to use high-tech carbon-storage-machinery that captures more than 75 percent of extracted CO2 to limit warming to around 2°C by 2100. 

“As scientists we are looking at all possible futures, not just the positive ones,” says co-author Wolfgang Lucht from PIK. “What happens in the worst case, a widespread disruption and failure of mitigation policies? Would [color=greents[/color] allow us to still stabilize climate in emergency mode?”

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“The answer is: no. There is no alternative for successful mitigation. In that scenario plants can potentially play a limited, but important role, if managed well.”

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The fact is, there is no simple solution such as ‘planting more trees’ to such a complex problem like global warming.

Consider the following:


http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/trees-cant-save-us/

Considering that trees can self-reproduce, and spread themselves throughout suitable areas for their species, how much more likely is it that replacing FF-fired power stations with solar panels, which are energy-intensive to manufacture, will be possible?  The danger of watching the Dollars instead of the Kilowatt.hours (Energy) should be obvious. 
 

The only thing rather obvious is that you are a study in cherry picking irrelevancy. Self reproduction is NOT the issue, Einstein. The ISSUE is the RATE of self reproduction that you conveniently ignored.

If you were seriously debating this issue (which you certainly are not), you would bring up duckweed, which can double it's population every 48 hours or so. Duckweed (e.g. Lemna minor - there are several species) also has a longer growing season and greater temperature tolerance than any tree. IOW, it can grow where trees grow AND in gigantic swaths of the planet where trees cannot grow. However, there are problems with the duckweed approach that, again, require a multifaceted, multidisciplinary biosphere remediation approach that, of course, requires, as a sine qua non part of the approach, a 100% transition to Renewable Energy within a decade or so to actually give us a fighting chance to make it through the Catastrophic climate years now upon us.
 
But you are merely trying to throw mud at solar panel technology, and just found another duplicitous way to pitch your ATTACK on Renewable Energy in defense of the UNSUSTAINABLE fossil fuel "real world" polluting status quo. It's really quite clever of you because your pitch appears to be cheerleading nature in general and trees in particular, RATHER than a backdoor attempt to defend the biosphere destroying fossil fuel CO2 producing profit over planet. Nice try!   


As Thom Hartmann recently pointed out, he worried back in 1996 about the issue you fossil fuelers are so fond of repeating ad nauseam. THAT IS, that you need fossil fuels to make solar panels. Guess what, Einstein? THAT AIN'T necessary no more! Solar powered factories NOW can can routinely produce the temperatures needed to make the glass (the highest temperatures needed to make solar panel components).  So your argument is DEAD.

AND, all along I have, as Thom Hartmann and many others have, advocated using fossil fuels to build the renewable energy infrastructure to permanently get off of fossil fuels.  During all that time, people like YOU have claimed, "its too hard" or "the ERoEI is too low" or other assorted foot dragging BALONEY pushed by the fossil fuel crooks and liars.

YOU were wrong with your convenient (for the fossil fuel industry  ) arbitrary narrow focus. YOU are STILL  wrong. Maybe someday, when you actually bring yourself to compute the ENERGY COST of pollution on human health care COSTS, you will get your mathematician head out of your cherry picking ASS and see what a ruinously LOW (as in NEGATIVE NUMBERS!) the ERoEI of any fossil fuel POISON is.



Chow down, Palloy!