"Negative Emissions": Burning trees, burying the CO2

So their cunning plan is to reduce CO2 emissions by felling trees that turn CO2 into wood and O2 so they can burn them then take the CO2 emitted out of the chimney stack and pump it into a hole in the ground and hope it doesn’t re-emerge.
I think even Baldric could see the problems with that one.

Let’s look at this with a sharp pencil.
A tree buried in the ground rots to methane if it is moist enough so burying wood (or ‘mechanical paper’) doesn’t help by 2100 because methane hangs around a long enough time to out-perform CO2 in the GHG department by a factor of about 25 fold over 20-30 years.
Burying charcoal has a chance, in that charcoal is pretty much inert which is why we find evidence of caveman fireplaces. Those promoting the magic of biochar are marketing this approach hard.
But it is the trees that worry me. Trees make wood out of CO2, water and a few minerals, and sunlight of course. They produce oxygen in the daytime. During the night they produce CO2 which apparently was a big surprise to NASA even though Indian farmers in India have for years been building five foot high plastic checker-board walls around their little veggie gardens to trap the nocturnal CO2, resulting in enhanced growth in the morning.
A tree is not completely efficient. People produce CO2 as we all know, but people also produce 1.6% CO (16 parts per 1000 parts CO2). Trees are like people except they produce methane as an incomplete process of trying to make wood out of CO2 and sunlight.
The GHG forcing value of CO2 is 1; the forcing value of methane is about 25. That means the GHG forcing of CO2 absorbed (96% of 100) is more than offset by the 4% methane (4 x 25 = 100). So for 20 years at least, a tree produces no net ‘cooling’ through the absorption of CO2. Further, the activity of bacteria in the roots (wrapped around the rootlets like a sock of jellybeans) liberates CO2 and methane from the soil that would have otherwise remained trapped there. All said and done, there is no ‘cooling’ to be had from growing trees for at least 20-30 years, and by the year 2100, nearly no real gain.
Why is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rising then? We cut down a heck of a lot of forests and burned them, we burned a lot of coal, oil and methane from underground. We also planted billions of trees in places where there were none before (people forget colonial African forestry, the New Deal and the work done under the guidance of Dr St Barbe Baker). We have been growing billions of tons of food drops which we eat, poop and sequester in the ground, even in the ocean. As the earth warmed 0.8 deg over the past 150 years, the forests in the NH have been marching slowly north and every tree south of (what was) the tree line grows a little more and a little faster than it used to (and that is one heck of a lot of extra tree mass).
It seems that the only direct attributable cause of a sustained increase in CO2 is the evidence that such a rise follows a significant atmospheric warming 800 years before. It appears this evidence was being ignored in Paris. Contemporary proof exists in the monotonic rise in CO2 concentration (diatonic, if you include seasonal variation) through economic upswings and downturns. During these huge changes in AG emissions there has been no detectable impact at all on the slope of the rise in concentration.
It’s the oceans. Burying trees, burned, half-burned or whole, will make no meaningful difference to the average global temperature by the year 2100. Why? Because it will take 70 years to grow it, and during that time there will be no net GHG forcing change as a direct result, because trees are just about GHG forcing neutral, and the methane will still be 15 years later.
Lest anyone fret that ‘thereafter’ there will be a net benefit in CO2 concentration, the difference will be lost in the 3rd decimal place. Proof? Current emissions are undetectable, undiscernible from natural fluctuations, therefore how detectable will be our efforts from putting a tiny fraction of it into the ground? Not at all.

I’d love to conduct a little thought experiment with an average, guy-off-the- street greenie. Tell him/her/it that there are 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere right now but they have three big red buttons in front of them. If they press button number one they’ll cut that in half, 200ppm; button two halves that, 100ppm; button three gets rid of all of it. Those that press button one learn that they’ve just starved billions of people to death by seriously reducing agricultural productivity. They might shrug that off so I’d be sure to add that the reduction also applies to all the vegetation wildlife depends on. Button number two will let them initiate one of the most extensive extinctions the planet has ever known. Button number three is wipeout.

If they bury CO2 they also bury O2. All life on Earth will be wiped out.
[No, there is too much O2 present for the removal of the oxygen molecules with the little bit of CO2 being removed is non-measurable. .mod]

“Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians, who in the West usually have a legal rather than a scientific background, ran their ideas past a few engineers before announcing their latest inspiration?”
This last sentence is incredible. Does anyone reasonably expect politicians/lawyers, who are trained that lying is acceptable, to actually let engineering and scientific facts get in the way of their preordained conclusions?