When trees die, they release every molecule of CO2 they ever consumed back into the atmosphere. Planting trees won’t solve anything in the long run. It can only ever give us mere 70 years. If we don’t destroy ourselves/the planet earlier that is.

good thing our current co2 levels are basically suffocation for the plants I guess

when CO2 levels rose on earth historically it always made vegetation grow like crazy, because they had more of their "oxygen" so could grow bigger

some greenhouses release CO2 inside to help the plants grow, in case that sounds bogus

(also dead trees take a long time to "release" that CO2. compost takes years. what if the tree becomes my bedside table? I found it side of the road and it's probably like 40 years old now! what about the planks inside my walls?! this suburb was built in the 1800s, one of the first settlements in the north Americas by the white man)

That doesn‘t sound right.
IIRC, trees are made of carbon which they mainly get from CO2. But when they die, they don‘t just evaporate back into CO2.
All that former CO2 remains in the matter of the tree.
The tree will slowly decompose and that might release some of the CO2 but probably not even half of what went in.
Unless we burn it.

Stick to writing code, Kiki. Environmental science isn’t your strong suit unless this is well disguised bait.

@Lensflare plants release O2. So the plant keeps the C. I am honestly surprised there isn't a plant that shits diamonds.

Did I miss the bit in school where we were taught trees spontaneously combust when they die?

Wood has carbon in, which the tree got from the atmosphere. The carbon is released back into the environment but that's quite different from the atmosphere.

Not completely. Their leaves fall in autumn and are mostly digested on the ground, but not all the carbon is re-released.

Also, trees only re-release carbon when they rot completely. It takes multiple years/decades for this to happen.

Also, trees lock carbon inside of themselves. So the more trees are out there - the more carbon they'll consume. Younger trees tend to grow mass faster, making them quite efficient in this job.

If you need to recover land from trees -- don't burn them. Either lock that cellulose+lignin in a form of furniture, walls, etc, or char it and perhaps burry it as well. Pure carbon is hard to metabolise by microflora, this is why it takes sooo long for the burned forests to recover.

Lock that carbon.

Planting trees IS the solution. Planting and NOT burning them

Have no knowledge about this at all but just can't swallow this.

Unless you bury dead trees deep into the ground, what I said stands true

Rotting is very slow burning. Same process.

@kiki is chatgpt your only source?

@kiki fungi release some of the carbon back into the atmosphere but they also increase in mass, ie they capture some of the carbon in themselves. And then it dies and the cycle repeats. It's not all immediately released back into the atmosphere.

@atheist I never said this process was immediate, I just said it was real. At any rate, trees won’t meaningfully decrease carbon dioxide levels in the long run, despite what some proponents say. They do harm by shifting the focus away from searching the real solution.

@kiki I couldn’t tell if you were trolling until you pulled out GPT

@kiki giant algae farms.

@kiki the real solution is CO2 has no meaningful effect on temperature and the climate changes all the time and species adapt to it over time so the whole thing is nonsense

@jestdotty apparently the Greta mind virus is real.

@AlgoRythm so what? Dismantle the argument, not the author. Just because gpt said it doesn’t mean it’s automatically wrong

@kiki I'm mixed on that, there's a lot of spam security issues created, eg in curl repo, which *sound* almost real but are wrong. It's not acknowledged that it's ai generated and wastes devs time.

So I asked GPT where it got this stat:

"Studies estimate that 85–95% of the carbon stored in a tree over its lifetime is released back into the atmosphere through natural decay."

It cited 3 sources and none of them had hard numbers anywhere. So I have no idea where that stat comes from. It talked about big numbers of CO2 going back into the atmosphere through decay. But no relative figures for CO2 going in vs going out.

I got to thinking about this. We, as a planet are historically low on CO2. Some scientists believe it is low enough we are risking planet death. So if the carbon cycle is close to 1:1 for trees then it is not a loss. Carbon is important to life. Trees and other plants provide oxygen. Without it animals die. So the goal should NOT be CO2 reduction. That is folly. If the stats are true then trees won't contribute to planet death. But planting trees always has a gain for life in general.

@kiki The author is actually important because it's a machine that feeds you information not based on fact but mostly based on your prompt.

The entire foundation of what you're saying is based on half truth. Caron isn't destroyed when a tree undergoes photosynthesis, this is true. It's also true that an amount of the carbon the tree "cleans up" returns to the atmosphere as CO2 via various means.

But please for the love of god google the carbon cycle. It's a very basic fact of life and environment.

@kiki And just to prove my point, you can lead GPT into saying basically anything you want just by changing how you prompt it.

@AlgoRythm what I said still stands. Dismantle the argument, not the author, even if the author is a loaded gpt (it wasn’t)

@kiki the fact that you’re ignoring me doing so doesn’t mean that I haven’t done so.

Carbon is a cycle. Trees absorb and store carbon for long periods of time. Sometimes indefinitely. That’s what coal and oil are.

Your edgy anti-tree propaganda is unfortunately not based. In fact it is cringe.

@AlgoRythm this cycle won’t offset what we did with industrialization. That’s all I’m saying

@kiki that’s your opinion or you have numbers? Seems like you have an opinion because you think the climate discourse is annoying. I agree, but that doesn’t make me anti-tree. Trees help. Plants are still our primary mechanism for carbon capture. Trees are plants. Other plants do a better job. But trees help too. Not to mention they are a source of resources that we need. Totally weird to be anti-tree but you do you.

@AlgoRythm nah, I'm not a climate change denier. So according to you, it's a cycle. So you think the “forever storage” part of this cycle, e.g. coal formation, which is clearly minuscule, will happen faster than we pollute the planet? How much coal do you think was formed over the last 70 years, and how much CO2 we released to “offset” it?

@kiki time and time again the planet has adapted to elevated or decreased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants are able to thrive in these conditions and begin to work harder.

Permanent storage isn’t even a requirement. As long as the current active plant biomass offsets the environmental carbon, which it does (as evident by the fact we aren’t dead yet) then the cycle is working. In order to avoid disaster we will likely need additional players in the game, such as more carbon-hungry plants.

We produce a lot of carbon but the planet consumes a lot of carbon too. It’s a very intricate balance that is within our approximate understanding, but outside of our exact understanding.

@AlgoRythm sounds good, but the temperature keeps climbing. It's not “balance” anymore then, don't you think

@kiki we produce more carbon and simultaneously reduce the land dedicated to vegetation. This IS the cause of the climate crisis and bring it back into balance IS the solution.

@AlgoRythm or maybe just stop burning coal/oil

@kiki hence bringing it back into balance

The hard part is there’s no way to “just stop” people would starve and freeze to death within months. Of course everyone knows that this is a monumentally difficult problem that can only be worked in in small steps, not sweeping change

@AlgoRythm I wish there was #TeamNuclearEnergy to complement #TeamTrees

@kiki I’m behind the adoption of nuclear energy but I don’t think we should transition to it 100% yet. The technology is still misunderstood and poorer countries with more lax standards will fuck it up. We need international collaboration on things like thorium reactors and failsafe designs. I’d rather my house sink under the ocean than give Iran a reactor of their own.

@AlgoRythm ugh. I'm afraid you're right about Third World countries. Well, I hope we don't destroy ourselves/the planet until a large-scale safe nuclear energy adoption.

About trees though… to offset USA's carbon footprint, we'll have to plant 40 million trees per DAY. https://youtube.com/watch/...

@kiki of course, trees naturally plant themselves. 40 million per day is actually not much considering the total population of trees is likely measured in tens of trillions.

These are just talking points to make you feel like the task is futile. It’s not. We can make a difference. We just need to care a little more.

@AlgoRythm he is testing sodium-based fuel that takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere

@jestdotty and then there will be ancap with no vaccines, yay

@kiki one more thing. If everyone in America was able to plant trees, and we all shared the workload evenly, 40 million trees per day would only be planting one tree every NINE days per person. That’s not nearly as scary sounding.

And that’s just trees, which I have said multiple times, are not the optimal climate crisis fighting plant.

DO I SEE A CLIMATE DISCUSSION? Nice, climate is meh, nothing to worry about. Everything what this earth survived and it would go down by a few degrees. We're so brainwashed always wantinh the weird news to be true that we actually believe this shit. If climate kills some animal or whatever, that's just nature and we didn't cause that much on her own. For people putting cows on a diet to fart less, special place in hell. People got so crazy. If climate is a problem in your life, you have a good life for sure. Climate 😂😂😂

@retoor because of past and current human history, most major cities are located near water. I live in Florida where coastal hazards are very costly even without the water getting closer. Things like erosion, salt causing corrosion, and high winds make it very expensive to build and live on the coast.

Now imagine the economic impact if the ocean started rising even at a slow pace.

That’s why most people should care, even if you couldn’t be fucked about our natural environments.

@retoor I just saw we have 26% more arctic ice than in 2012. I also knew they would always show videos of the side of Antarctica that was melting. Knowing full well the others sides were growing.

@Demolishun That's not because we're getting more and more ice, that's just because 2012 was a particularly tragic year for the total square coverage of ice year over year.

Whatever source you got that from was trying to lie to you with numbers. Here's the data since the 1980s courtesy of NASA

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-sign...

Not only are we clearly declining in the amount of ice there is, but the ice is becoming thinner and overall weaker too. This is allowing huge glaciers to break off more commonly.

@AlgoRythm a dude I dated worked for NASA and said they were just space politicians

like, that they lied about everything for PR and were highly empty inside as people

soooo fuck NASA. after all, they told musk they can't build the rockets he wants and then he did it for 1/10th the price they were doing it at

@jestdotty of course they’re space politicians, it’s a government space agency and 90% of stem majors are blue haired raging liberals.

I honestly don’t think they would fabricate data though.