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Does anyone have access to the article? And/or can explain the graph

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Looked interesting, a shame about the paywall...

We could cover every square inch of land with the most carbon efficient trees and it wouldn't put a dent in atmospheric co2. The last hundred years had been burning coal and oil that was accumulated over millions of years.

Trees and forests are great for a lot of reasons but they are not going to be an effective carbon sink.

look like this article, it is open access. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22050-1 I just search author's name and rainforest. it say the effect is 294 tgc(edit:this is only in 2017, article mentioned more other data) in abstract.

Yeah but grasslands may be. Season after season if they’re properly maintained they can regenerate inches of topsoil that stores gigatonnes of carbon across the planet. There is an upper limit to how much soil can be regenerated but we’re nowhere near it iirc. It stores much more carbon than trees and can be done for years before that limit is reached.

You know a paper is going to be good when they have to salt their premise with "likely".

That's all fun and games until you want to eat, unfortunately.

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We currently have very large sections of land that aren't really being used for agriculture (or are being used for very inefficient ways of growing food) that we could return to local native grassland. We can't solve a huge problem with only one solution, but we can make dents in it (through things like habitat restoration) that will help in combination with changes to our behaviors and upcoming technology.

We can't just plant trees and get out of this if that's all we do. But it'll help. Same as we can't just switch to solar and resolve every problem, even if that will help.

So once the elites figure out how to thin the human hurd, restoring the planet to a livable condition will be entirely possible.

But it won't affect the warming levels of co2 this side of the industrial revolution.

Before we started burning fossil fuels, there was this thing called a carbon cycle. Carbon gets emitted by lifeforms, through various methods including decay, as well as by digestion/respiration. And that same exact carbon gets recollected by lifeforms, usually plants. Those plants were collectively eaten by animals, or decayed straightaway, and were the cyclical source of the carbon in the air, just as well as being the cyclical recovery system.

If we removed what you might call a carbon bank, such as a tropical forest, then we've disrupted that original carbon cycle (in addition to the harm from burning fossil fuels). If we put the forest back, it isn't undoing our industrial revolution. It's only returning a proper piece of that slightly older carbon cycle.

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What Kradget said, but on top of that, we would do that using cattle grazing. Most of the land suitable to be grazed can't be farmed...which does not fit the common misinformation that cattle take up farmland that would otherwise be used for crops. It wouldn't. About 2/3 of all arable land can't be used for farming. Sequestering carbon in those soils would be a huge dent because thats a TON of land. idk the math, but there are soil scientists out there who think it's possible. Have fun going down that rabbit hole.

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> Season after season if they’re properly maintained they can regenerate inches of topsoil that stores gigatonnes of carbon across the planet.

Do you have a source that documents their carbon sequestration potential?

Sadly true, and it's admitted in the title. We have emitted/are emitting gigatons of carbon, so sequestering megatons has only a marginal inpact.

I have to point out that if you have cattle grazing the land, said cattle will be collect as much carbon as they can into themselves instead of the topsoil, as well as that cattle, on the whole, are the number one producer of a different greenhouse gas that we really would like to reduce if possible.

I thought this was basically an established fact already.

Technically, building wooden buildings with lumber from tree nurseries is a noticeable form of carbon capture.

Unfortunately wooden buildings also light on fire from time to time.

Your description of a carbon cycle seems to be missing geological activity. Did you just not mention it or is that actually ignored?

A quick google search makes it seem ignored.

Cattle grazing helps build soil through grass root shedding. They graze and the grass sheds it’s roots which ends up sequestering carbon into the soil. It takes time but works. And then the grass grows and builds more roots. And the cycle continues. The Great Plains used to be covered in FEET of topsoil.

The methane cycle of cows is actually a net neutral because it does end up back in the ground. Just takes 10 years. The carbon we worry about is the stuff we’ve burned from fossil fuels. Can we get that into the soil?

We’ve eroded so much soil over the last 100 years that maybe if we applied these strategies with technology helping to optimize them, they could sequester massive amounts of carbon. Plants are the only thing that really sequester carbon and store it. Animals will break down unless they’re all buried which livestock are not.

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It is very annoying how people expect a "one-size-fits-all" solution for climate change.

I guess I see why. If you know there's a main driver, it makes sense to assume there's a reasonable way to address it everywhere - we're kind of conditioned to expect things to scale massively and apply no matter where you are.

It's just that this isn't one of those situations, because the effects are diverse and a single solution wouldn't necessarily apply everywhere.

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If only there were something we could do.

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Yes?

No?

What’s up dude?

You know... The other day on this very sub, i got hammered for saying plants absorb carbon. This is why reddit is just entertainment.

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