array9

Woods are not a good carbon sink.

Wood rots.  It does not last long, unless carefully used and stored.  And only a fraction is economic to handle this way.  The brash burns or rots.

Nothing intrinsically makes the tree better at solar capture, ( except perhaps snow effects ).

So the store of carbon is really the volume of living standing wood, plus the volume of human maintained or rot proof wood products ( house elements, books, bio-char, etc )

You might be able to achieve better carbon storage with bio-char made from straw, scattered on the fields.

Tree trunks look impressive compared to ( say) heather, grass, bracken, but maybe it is not so obvious which is better for storing carbon in the long run.

Crude oil and coal are obviously good at storage.  Maybe dumping straw on the bottom of the ocean would be as good, producing oil and coal sometime in the distant future.

So what we really want is a perennial harvest-able crop which is just heavier than water.  Coppiced teak?




martin

Trees have too few predators.

Trees are large living things that basically do not have predators, but only parasites and diseases.  With the exception of man.

They are really the dinosaurs of ecology.

There are a few species that will take out small trees, such as elephants.  And a few specialised grazers, such as giraffes.

Given how trees dominate, with a wide range of weapons, ( namely shade, herbicide, insecticide) , it is surprising that more things don't complain!

Man is the only predator, taking advantage of structural supplies that can be roughly shaped, and energy supplies that can be stored.

But what if these structural and energy elements had better competition?  What would happen?  Well we already know.  Forestry is a declining industry, despite ecological biases.

Timber is basically too variable and unstable a finished product for modern construction.  Wood is hard work as an energy provider, despite aesthetic pluses.

Forestry is very capital intensive, needing power and scale to be viable.

Making use of smaller plants, combined with reforming technology ( composites, chipping, etc) is probably much more practical and economic proposition.

So maybe trees will loose their only predator, over much of their domain, and be seen as the weedy bully that they intrinsically are.

Woods will be replaced by fields of harvested saplings or modified grasses, for supply of energy and cheap composite fillers.  A move away from batch processing to continuous processes will also be beneficial.

Trees will go the way of the dinosaur, while keeping some specimens and bonsai.  Diversity will be the only argument for them.

Martin

Would we kill off dinosaurs?

Bird DNA probably contains sufficient dinosaur DNA for use to recreate dinosaurs.  While interesting to do, would we bother?  Would it increase diversity?  Doubtful, it being better to stop existing losses of diversity.

Could it be economic?  Again doubtful, since we can just keep messing around with birds themselves for food animals.

But if we did create large herbivores or carnivores, would we keep them other than for curiosity?  Unlikely.  Large animals are capital intensive to keep ( relative to small animals) and maybe the only advantages are in controlling other large environmental species, such as trees, which currently do not have a decent predator.

I think we would kill them off.  Anything much bigger than man is just too expensive.

Lets hope extraterrestrials are larger than us !

martin

How do you make wood sink?


- attach something heavier than water
- soak for a long time (roughly a version of above)
- choose your wood
- make the water lighter ( aerate)
- take out the air and submerge ( roughly a version of the top one)
- squash it
- drag down under water, wait and release ( combination of above)

If it were easy, then burying carbon would be easy, just float down stream.

I wonder why it is difficult?  Trees liking to float?


martin