https://medium.com/s/how-geoengineering-really-works/the-tricky-future-of-capturing-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-218963d12f97
"If you’re thinking the solution is as easy as planting trees, I have some bad
news for you: While it’s true that photosynthesizing plants take in carbon
dioxide and “exhale” oxygen, they really only take up enough carbon to build
their own cells. And when a plant dies and decays, most of that carbon ends up
right back in the atmosphere.Forests aren’t so much “lungs” that constantly
filter out carbon dioxide as they are standing stores of it. That means that,
practically speaking, reforestation could only pull as much CO2 out of the
atmosphere as past deforestation put up there in the first place.The latest
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report estimated that human changes
to the landscape (mostly deforestation) added about 180 billion tons of carbon
to the atmosphere between 1750 and 2011. Globally, the next decade of our
greenhouse gas emissions could just about equal that amount. So even if we
expanded forests to their pre–Industrial Revolution extent (an unlikely
proposition), climate change would be far from solved."
GR That's not to say that there couldn't be ways to secure the carbon fixed by
plants (biochar, BECCS), but it's not obvious that this should involve forests
if land use efficiency is to be maxed, nor necessarily using land plants. Then
the usual DAC discussion. No mention of enhanced weathering, listed by the IPCC
as having no biophysical limits, unlike plant-based methods.
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