Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Is the artificial tree the solution to climate change? There have been a number of stories advocating artificial trees recently. Proponents of artificial trees believe that normal trees haven’t got the capacity to deliver the CO2 reductions they want. They insist we should try to improve on nature, by replacing natural respiration, with industrial scale absorption and disposal of CO2.
For example, consider the following story;
Is an artificial tree part of the solution to climate change? These guys think so.
… What if we had a way to suck that excess the CO2 right back out of the sky?
Well, actually, we do, says Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
“These are our best ways of capturing CO2 from the air,” Jones says as he walks under a canopy of trees on the school’s campus. “Trees evolved over millions of years to do this very efficiently.”
Physicist Klaus Lackner stands beside a miniature greenhouse in his lab at ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, in which he’s testing out the properties of his “artificial tree. Lackner says he expects a square mile of artificial trees could suck as much as ten million tons of CO2 a year out of the atmosphere. Credit: Ari Daniel Thing is, we just don’t have enough trees to fix our CO2 problem. In fact, the earth has fewer acres of trees every year. But Jones says that even if we planted trees everywhere we could, they still wouldn’t be able to pull enough CO2 out of the air to offset our emissions.
Which for Jones means one thing. “We have to come up with a chemical tree that can effectively extract CO2 out of the air,” he says.
Essentially mimic nature, only do her one better.
Is it just me, or is there something deeply unsettling about the modern green movement, and its infatuation with technological monstrosities? They build bird frying solar collectors, and bird and bat chopping windmills, to save the birds and bats. They ignore devastating industrial pollution in China, to ensure the supply of Rare Earth elements required to build their wind turbines and electric cars. And now they want to build artificial trees, because they think natural trees aren’t up to the job.
How much of the natural world do greens intend to bulldoze, dig, pave over, pollute, incinerate or slice up, in order to save “nature”?
Please check my arithmetic.
1 square mile of land giving 10 million tons of carbon out of the air in a year. By my estimate, that is about 4 tons per square meter. I don’t know the fraction of the weight of wood represented by the carbon in it, but leave that out as conservatism. A ton of wood, when burned, can generate about 1 MW hour of electricity. So by my estimate, we are talking about something in the range of a sustained 0.45 kW per square meter. That seems rather far fetched. It would seem to require pretty much 100 percent conversion of sunlight energy.
As usual, the President has the answer:
http://41.media.tumblr.com/1013d0e9102e726e0fc58684a7181e36/tumblr_ntkjjlBET01rzv6rko1_500.jpg
😎
Aw, yes. Magic trees are the answer.
(What was the question?)
Do any of these artificial trees produce O2?
True, CO2 is needed for plants but we don’t need plants just because they are “green”. We need plants because they are a PART of what life on this planet needs.
“Recycling” at it’s best. Why screw with it?
I am curious to see if it even works. What I mean is co2 levels are climbing at rather consistent rates while human released co2 has multiplied. Meaning we might find out the eco system had been using all the human released co2 anyway and some other factor is driving co2 rates, Im not sure what else explain the near uniform rise of co2 levels while output of the stuff is has risen drastically faster.
Sounds like another way to funnel taxpayer money to political cronies.
A fully grown tree doesn’t reduce atmospheric CO2 at all. (A tiny miniscule amount yes) because what they take in during the day is used at night or in the winter to survive and is released as CO2. Trees breathe and we’re supposed to believe scientists who don’t understand this?
You can’t measure the daylight consumption of CO2 and say “this is what a tree does” you have to measure the life.
Things that make you go “hmmm.” In case you all have not yet noticed, the elitist atheist, God-scoffing intellectuals are hell-bent on mimicking God in almost every way imaginable.
Isaiah 14:14 says we ignore God and declare “I will ascend above the clouds and make myself like the most High.”
God created the earth and everything on it, and the planetary ecosystem is amn amazing balance of an untold number of related, codependent processes far beyond what we might ever hope to describe, let alone replicate.
God made the trees, and we get to breathe their oxygen.
Man now decides that is not good enough, and man needs to make “trees.”
God had Adam name all of the animals; we decided that was not good enough, so we developed the genus/species naming system.
God made us all have diverse languages so we would disperse and inhabit the entire planet.
We decided we should all have one language to combine us, so we developed Esperanto.
God wants us to multiply and populate the earth.
So we have decided we should not be populating the earth, and should be “controlling” our fertility to below-replacement levels, and should force these goals on the communities who have not yet gone so anti-God.
God gave us this planet to live upon, and have stewardship over, so we have decided we are interlopers, have no right of dominion, and animals have rights equal to ours or superior to ours. We are also looking for another planet to inhabit.
God created reproduction and the plan that like would beget like (Gen 1:24), so we have deided like does not beget like, but rather that the diversity of species seen arise from dissimilar ancestors.
God has noted bread, and wine, and animal flesh as desirable dietary components, so we are against carbs, alcohol, and we have gone vegetarian.
God made us man and woman, but we have decided that tehse are just social constructs, and “gender” is fluid, and a man should have the right to have a baby – when Monty Python had this idea in Life of Brian, it was a joke, but we have now progressed beyond that to make this a reality.
We scientist elitist intellectuals have even forecasted how the world will end. of course, our calls of plagues, dead sea life, fires, skin disease, and overwhelming heat are merely copies of God’s revelation of the “End,” except for one detail – in revelation there is no flood but for us there is catastrophic sea level rise. Interestingly, on this one difference, we know that God made a promise he would never end life by one specific means: by a catastrophic flood.
It seems like we either follow God or we are doomed to foolishly parallel His works and plans. Carry on.
Eric wrote:
“Is it just me, or is there something deeply unsettling about the modern green movement, and its infatuation with technological monstrosities?”
No, it’s not just you, Eric. IMHO there is a collective madness endemic in Western Society that either only a cataclysmic event will give cause to shake it off, or it will be a long, slow climb back to sanity, as Charles MacKay wrote in 1841:
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
― Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
The former may well happen the way things are going in Europe right now.
When nature does something, it’s self-limiting. If trees take out too much CO2, they die. Artificial trees will keep on cooking until every photosynthetic organism is dead, followed by us. For a time, the technology will be useful as CO2 scrubbers, that is until the O2 level falls.
Good thing we have AI/robots coming. Otherwise, there would be no legacy of life on Earth at all. We just have to make sure they can replicate themselves before we go.
Not entirely unrelated…. I recommend you watch this movie: These final hours.
Warning: way too many spoilers in this trailer. Just watch the first 15 to 30 seconds.