From the “has anyone told Earth yet?” department and the wild alarmists of the Schellnhuber school of climate doom, comes this claim that’s just another headline grabber made up mostly of opinion. It’s really little more than a transparent attempt at keeping the Paris accord intact.
Meanwhile, ignoring these fools, the Earth is greening and deserts are increasing [their greening] in size globally, and CO2 is the cause.
Climate stabilization: Planting trees cannot replace cutting CO2 emissions
Growing plants and then storing the CO2 they have taken up from the atmosphere is no viable option to counteract unmitigated emissions from fossil fuel burning, a new study shows. The plantations would need to be so large, they would eliminate most natural ecosystems or reduce food production if implemented as a late-regret option in the case of substantial failure to reduce emissions. However, growing biomass soon in well-selected places with increased irrigation or fertilization could support climate policies of rapid and strong emission cuts to achieve climate stabilization below 2 degrees Celsius.
“If we continue burning coal and oil the way we do today and regret our inaction later, the amounts of greenhouse gas we would need to take out of the atmosphere in order to stabilize the climate would be too huge to manage,” says Lena Boysen from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, lead-author of the study to be published in a journal of the American Geophysical Union, Earth’s Future. Plants suck CO2 out of the atmosphere to build their woody roots, stems and leaves. This is low-tech terrestrial carbon dioxide removal that could be combined with high-tech carbon storage mechanisms, for example underground.
Three scenarios: Business as usual, Paris pledges, or ambitious CO2 reductions
“Even if we were able to use productive plants such as poplar trees or switchgrass and store 50 percent of the carbon contained in their biomass,” says Boysen, “in the business-as-usual scenario of continued, unconstrained fossil fuel use the sheer size of the plantations for staying at or below 2°C of warming would cause devastating environmental consequences.” The scientists calculate that the hypothetically required plantations would in fact replace natural ecosystems around the world almost completely.
If CO2 emissions reductions are moderately reduced in line with current national pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement, biomass plantations implemented by mid-century to extract remaining excess CO2 from the air still would have to be enormous. In this scenario, they would replace natural ecosystems on fertile land the size of more than one third of all forests we have today on our planet. Alternatively, more than a quarter of land used for agriculture at present would have to be converted into biomass plantations – putting at risk global food security.
Only ambitious emissions reductions and advancements in land management techniques between 2005-2100 could possibly avoid fierce competition for land. But even in this scenario of aggressive climate stabilization policy, only high inputs of water, fertilizers and a globally applied high-tech carbon-storage-machinery that captures more than 75 percent of extracted CO2 could likely limit warming to around 2°C by 2100. To this end, technologies minimizing carbon emissions from cultivation, harvest, transport and conversion of biomass and, especially, long-term Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) would need to improve worldwide.
Drawing upon all possible measures instead of waiting for first-best solutions
“As scientists we are looking at all possible futures, not just the positive ones,” says co-author Wolfgang Lucht from PIK. “What happens in the worst case, a widespread disruption and failure of mitigation policies? Would plants allow us to still stabilize climate in emergency mode? The answer is: no. There is no alternative for successful mitigation. In that scenario plants can potentially play a limited, but important role, if managed well.” The scientists investigated the feasibility of biomass plantations and CO2 removal from a biosphere point of view. To this end, they used global dynamic vegetation computer simulations.
So far, biomass plantations as a means for CO2 removal have often been considered as a comparatively safe, affordable and effective approach. “Our work shows that carbon removal via the biosphere cannot be used as a late-regret option to tackle climate change. Instead we have to act now using all possible measures instead of waiting for first-best solutions,” says co-author Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter, UK. “Reducing fossil fuel use is a precondition for stabilizing the climate, but we also need to make use of a range of options from reforestation on degraded land to low-till agriculture and from efficient irrigation systems to limiting food waste.”
“In the climate drama currently unfolding on that big stage we call Earth, CO2 removal is not the hero who finally saves the day after everything else has failed. It is rather a supporting actor that has to come into play right from the beginning, while the major part is up to the mitigation protagonist,” says co-author Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of PIK. “So this is a positive message: We know what to do – rapidly ending fossil fuel use complemented by a great variety of CO2 removal techniques. We know when to do it – now. And if we do it, we find it is still possible to avoid the bulk of climate risks by limiting temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius.”
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Article: Lena R. Boysen, Wolfgang Lucht, Dieter Gerten, Vera Heck, Timothy M. Lenton, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (2017): The limits to global-warming mitigation by terrestrial carbon removal. Earth’s Future (open access AGU journal). [DOI: 10.1002/2016EF000469]
Weblink to the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000469/full
Gee mods, I didn’t use any nasty words in my long post!
“As scientists we are looking at all possible futures, not just the positive ones,” says co-author Wolfgang Lucht from PIK. “
The worst case being, what if it suddenly turned very cold.
“Planting trees cannot replace cutting CO2 emissions”
Absolutely true. There’s no way that just planting trees will lead to Western deindustrialization, prevent African and Asia from developing, or fill the coffers of all the trough-gobbling environmentalists, green tech companies and socialist leaving political organizations, nor will planting trees fulfill the world domination dreams of the Club of Rome. Their just trees. They can only do so much.
Ron Williams – that’s an admirable number of trees! I thought my twenty thousand or so was good going, but then that’s just what I do in my ‘spare’ time.
To me it is blatantly obvious that restoring woodland in balance with improved agricultural crops and methods is a necessary and wise thing to do. The benefits are endless, renewable in fact -such as preserving and enhancing biodiversity, landscape, human amenity, wood fuel, ecosystem ‘services’ (I think that’s what they call it) etc etc.
Land cleared of its trees can be difficult to re-wood in the presence of deer, sheep and goats (desert makers) that no longer have natural predators. I put a six foot fence around a bit of ground adjacent to a wood – five years on I can hardly get through the re-growth. Nearby un-fenced areas have no regeneration.
I live in The Scottish Borders within the stunning Cheviot Hills, glittering loch etc. It is idylic!
Well almost…
The hills are pretty much naked – rough grazing, the occasional block of monoculture conifers such as Sitka spruce and relatively miniscule patches of natural deciduous species of trees.
The potential for woodland restoration with all its benefits is huge…
…sadly we have a dictatorship known as the Scottish Nationalist Party obsessed with not only Independence, (economic suicide) but also renewables, commonly in the form of those giant icons of greed – wind turbines.
My neighbour, a rich arrogant bully, also benefits from the idylic setting. He however, does not appreciate just how fortunate he is…four times he has attempted to blanket his hill land with turbines, that thwarted he has now conned the local council (with the most devious and dishonest planning application I have ever seen) to install an Anaerobic Digester CPH unit of such an excessive scale it cannot possibly be fed from his own land despite his claims. His crows of ‘being green” are a joke as, along with many other things such as digging up archeology and ripping out trees, walls and hedges, he also burns plastic within the loch wildlife reserve and shoves any unburnt residue into the so called protected loch.
As we all know, the Green Blob Madness has gone so far beyond anything actually environmentally friendly, they have proved beyond doubt that it is about money, greed and power rather than anything actually of use.
Just imagine how far humanity could have advanced over the last decade or so with focus, funds and effort on restoring woodland, sensible safe GM crops, real pollution control and realistic energy research and development into technologies such as Thorium Energy.
So Ron, please keep planting and encourage others to do so too. We are doing our bit!
As for the western world’s current malaise, it really is time for the Green Blob to pause, look at itself in a mirror and ask “What have I become?”
I sort of noted with their scenario 3 that it would require large quantities of fertilizers. Didn’t they stop to think that that probably will require large quantities of petroleum stock to produce. The same stocks they want to keep in the ground. Add to that the large quantities of water. The same item that will cause social instability, mass migrations, crime and the heart break of psoriasis? At least that’s the other boogey man if National Geographic’s “Parched” series is anything to go by. These guys need to keep up.
I thought that Freeman Dyson had worked out in the mid 1970s that planting trees would do the trick.
Freeman Dyson? That piker! He doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of this guy (who’s name I can’t quite remember).
Let’s be serious; anyone born before 2008 has no grasp on reality.
….if you mean “post-normal reality”, you’re probably right. 2008 was a real point of decline.
Negative message (threat):
no viable option, unmitigated emissions, greenhouse gas, a late-regret option, substantial failure, reduce food production, growing biomass, stabilize the climate, too huge to manage.
Positive message (promise):
ambitious emissions reductions, aggressive climate stabilization policy, advancements in land management, high inputs of water, globally applied high-tech carbon-storage-machinery.
Conclusions:
“What happens in the worst case, a widespread disruption and failure of mitigation policies? Would plants allow us to still stabilize climate in emergency mode? The answer is: no.”
So there you have it. We’re doomed. Again.
And of course, it’s worse than we thought.
Only a climate scientist could consider a hole in the ground to be “high-tech”. No wonder all their models seem to be “state of the art”.
So Domino’s claim that planting trees to obtain “carbon free” sugar (I think they really mean carbon neutral) isn’t going to cut it. We’re all doomed anyway. (As if a 2° rise in global temperature is going to hurt anything but warmists doomsday scenario.)
Jim
Let the warmists first tell the world: what is the realistic relationship between CO2 raise and temperature raise? Not the hypothetical like IPCC, more than half type.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Oh, no!!! Green? Say it isn’t so!
Those promoting fears that increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations signal the end of the world as we know it, are clearly mortified that trees may lock up sufficient carbon (50% of tree biomass) to negate the panic they are trying to engender. Indeed the current article is an entirely foreseeable response given the large body of hard data now showing that the world is greening ( doi:10.1038/nclimate3004 ) and that trees are increasing (in cover and/or density) in Australia ( http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~jasone/publications/liuetal2015.pdf ) , Africa ( doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0081 ) and around the world generally (e,g, doi: 10.1126/science.aam6527 ; doi:10.1038/nature14967 ). Most of these increases are not from plantation forests but from natural processes with trees/shrubs simply responding to changed management conditions (notably the advent of domestic livestock grazing – Americas, Africa, Australia – and/or altered burning regimes).
Such population switches in our vegetation (especially rangelands) have been in train for a long time (e,g. Hastings and Turner’s classic “The Changing Mile” ( http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2661.htm ) and as a result of the scale and extent of the phenomenon it is not surprising that scientists are observing pauses in the growth of atmospheric CO2 – due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake ( doi:10.1038/ncomms13428 ). For example Detmers et al. 2015 ( https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/327830 ) recorded an enhanced carbon sink in Australia in 2011 amounting to some 2800 Mt CO2-e. This contrasts with the continent’s reported net greenhouse gas inventory emissions for the same period, of just 552 Mt CO2-e!
The Detmers et al. findings were based on inversion of column averaged CO2 concentrations measured from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere to its surface. The authors employed sensors on Japan’s GOSAT satellite platform. Today NASA’s OCO-2 provides better coverage of the Earth and about four times the precision of GOSAT. And most importantly inversion of atmospheric CO2 integrates all sources and sinks. .After all it is the putative effect of the CO2 molecule, not its origin, that is the crux of the ongoing argument.
Targeting atmospheric CO2 concentrations also eliminates the fiddles and plain bad estimates we make when we try to do above- and below-ground sampling of carbon in vegetation in the field, or undertake modelling (e.g. of soil organic carbon fluxes) not verified by field validation. Again what is measured in these inversions is the parameter of prime concern to all those seeking to reduce GHG effects. Analogously it would seem to be intuitively sound to base all alleged temperature responses on atmospheric recording platforms, to likewise avoid widespread criticism of unrepresentative/inaccurate measurements and subsequent adjustments made to ground sourced data.
Just a question or several: If carbon is so very, very bad, and plants are essentially just carbon-based organisms (like all other life on this planet), how can planting more trees do any good, when they release CO2 and O2 as a byproduct of sugar production?
Have these ‘tree people’ forgotten that there are other plants that trees? In a square mile of grass alone, the grass sprigs (plants) outnumber humans by the quadrillions.
I’m just trying to understand the seemingly intentional lack of information on the part of the people who make these strange pronouncements, especially when it comes to planting trees as a solution to the problem. Do they realize, even a little, that every ecosystem is different and not all trees will grow in all areas? Do they know that cacti respirate the same as other plants? Do any of those morons know anything at all about biosystems?
Sorghum plant, Castor plant, Cactus plant — Is it not so?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Corn, oats, wheat, barley, rye – are they not all grasses? Think of the grasses! #grasseslives matter!!!!
Cacti would not be widely planted in an urban setting due to legal liability.
The concept of trees contributing to ozone is very old study. Goes back at least to the 70’s. The example always given at that time was the haze over the Rocky Mountains from the trees, particularly certain species. They do not all emit the same.
UN figures state:
“Due to drought and desertification each year 12 million hectares are lost (23 hectares/minute!), where 20 million tons of grain could have been grown”
Does anyone have figures to counter that assertion?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/16/study-earth-is-becoming-greener-not-browner-due-to-climate-change/
Desertification stopped 30 years ago.
I thought that the weeds and grass growing in the Sahara (want pictures?) and the end of California’s dreaded immortal drought would be enough of a rebuttal… but what do I know?
Trump and his team are under huge pressure to take the easy way out and to fall in line with the climate obsession. If he falls for this not only will he breaking his word, he will be doing the objectively wrong thing. Breaking the back of the climate social madness is the only way to help America and the world. Killing the Paris “Agreement” is the only viable option. Helping America and the world return to a pro-science pro-people energy and eco policy structure started with ending the climate consensus.
It’s often forgotten that over-grazing by goats contributed to the Sahara. Experiments have shown that when a seemingly arid area of the Sahel is fenced to exclude goats trees grow (Niger). Farmers father south in Zambia know this well. In the drier areas thickets of varying heights are controlled and preserved to enable vegetable crops to grow beneath.