[counting dancing angels on the head of a pin~cr]
S.J. & JESSIE E. QUINNEY COLLEGE OF NATURAL RESOURCES, UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY
CREDIT: JAMES ST. JOHN
Having a solid estimate of the amount of carbon that forests can pull from the atmosphere is essential for global accounting of climate change—leaders are counting on forests to pull a good chunk of human-produced carbon back to earth. But in reality, forests’ ability to sequester carbon isn’t as straightforward as it might appear on paper. In a new research synthesis, Justin DeRose from Department of Wildland Resources and colleagues from across North America offered an alternative strategy to counter the uncertainty of calculating the carbon that forests can sequester, using tree ring data from forest inventory plots.
Oceans, soils and forests are ‘carbon sinks’—they have the ability to pull more carbon from the atmosphere than they put into it. Countries around the world depend on carbon sinks in their tally for achieving net-zero emissions. But the complex and delicate ecology of these systems are still somewhat unpredictable. Questions remain about how exactly forests will respond to the changing climate, and how to calculate what forests can do to help balance carbon accounts.
The global total for carbon pulled from the atmosphere by carbon sinks is traditionally estimated indirectly, by figuring the difference between human-produced emissions, the amount of carbon in the world’s oceans and the level of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Supplementing that indirect calculation with data from existing (and future) collections of tree rings could provide an on-the-ground, direct record of the carbon gained by individual trees and forests, with the specificity of an annual time stamp, DeRose said. And from there, researchers could scale up to estimate forest-wide and continent-wide carbon savings. Some existing tree ring data from recent inventories exists, but more work is needed to to interpret what this data offers as applied to carbon sequestration. For such a system to work, a few things need to happen first, DeRose said.
Tree ring samples, along with the collection of associated forest data, could be collected nationally by efforts like the U.S. Forest Inventory and Analysis Program. The goal of these programs historically has been to understand forest change, but they are a perfect tool to also help answer questions about carbon and climate systems. Although tree core samples have been collected during some inventories, their continued collection in all forests will require a concerted effort.
“We need to get organized,” said DeRose, “with a more cohesive, forward-looking approach, nationally, continentally, and globally.”
Tree ring data collected from these forest inventories provide a wealth of tree- and plot-level information, DeRose said. Building a systematic, large-scale sample of tree rings could create a record of tree growth across space and time, from microsite to macrosystem and from years to centuries, with added detail to tease out the environmental and human-influenced drivers of growth.
“Adding tree ring data to the carbon equation would provide a much more nuanced, richer perspective about how forests are responding to the changing climate system,” he said.
The authors of the synthesis make the case for sampling tree rings in the forest inventories across North America to bring together key data to quantify and understand how forests are changing, and how much carbon they can hold as the world continues to fight global climate change.
JOURNAL
BioScience
DOI
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Data/statistical analysis
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Adding Tree Rings to North America’s National Forest Inventories: An Essential Tool to Guide Drawdown of Atmospheric CO2
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
8-Dec-2021
Forests cannot do anything to reduce atmospheric CO2, because Drax the Destroyer is trying to burn every tree in America.
Drax is the UK’s largest power station at 4 gw, and because of EU rules against coal it has reinvented itself as a wood-burner. So now it burns 10 million tonnes of American and Estonian trees every year, which are logged, transported by road, pulped and pelleted, shipped across the Atlantic, and then railroaded to Drax the Destroyer.
Who knows how much energy that takes, in comparison to using the coal that resides under this power station..! Some estimates say that Drax is now outputting 50% more CO2 than when it was a coal-burner.
And what is the problem here? CO2 is plant-food, and the most important gas in the atmosphere. Without CO2, all life on Earth dies. During the ice ages, upland vegetation died due to a lack of CO2, causing vast CO2 Deserts to form, which caused the 10,000 years of dust storms prior to each interglacial warming period. It was the thick dust that lowered ice sheet albedo, and allowed interglacial warming.
Conversely, the extra CO2 in the modern era is greening the planet, especially in arid locations (extra CO2 reduces stomata openings and thus reduced transpiration in arid locations). Thus extra CO2 is feeding a billion people with extra agricultural output. Indeed, it was the very high levels of CO2 during the Jurassic era that allowed dinosaurs to evolve. More CO2 = bigger plants = bigger herbivores = bigger carnivores. So traditional images of dinosaurs standing in semi-desert landscapes are completely wrong.
Think about it – oil and coal companies have saved the biosphere from certain extinction. Three cheers for fossil fuels, for releasing all that essential CO2 back into the atmosphere.
/rant.
Ralph
They wasted little time.
“a solid estimate of the amount of carbon that forests can pull from the atmosphere is essential for global accounting of climate change”
No it isn’t. But here’s where this is going
“Reliable estimation of future carbon sequestration, which is critical for designing strategies to reach net-zero atmospheric CO2 accumulation”
And
“Conceptual model of how the collection of tree rings from NFIs would result in better carbon accounting to meet the obligations for the Conference of the Parties of the climate change convention”
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biab119/6449092?login=false
All part of the narrative.
I think it says it all in the summary at the foot of the page..
“SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable”
Whenever I see articles on tree rings, I cringe in horror with the memories of how many trees died in vain to produce hockey sticks.
That said, I like forests. They’re relaxing places for a quiet walk, the more the merrier…_
Will all readers in the U.K. please circulate and support the petition to Parliament for a referendum on NetZero by 2050. Thanks…_
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/599602
There are studies estimating how much CO2 is sequestered by a tree.
Northeast, maple–beech–birch forests
a) 25 year old forest: 12,000lbs of carbon/25 = 480 lbs of C per acre
per year x 44/12 =1,760lbs of CO2 per acre per year
b) 120 year old forest: 128,000lbs of carbon/120 = 1,066 lbs of C
per year per acre x 44/12 =3,909lbs of CO2 per acre per year
c) 25 year old forest: 1,760lbs of CO2 per acre per year/700 trees
= average of 2.52lbs of CO2 per tree per year (rounded to 3
lbs)
https://medcraveonline.com/FREIJ/FREIJ-02-00040.pdf
From the article (Emphasis, mine): “Although tree core samples have been collected during some inventories, their continued collection in all forests will require a concerted effort.”
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Something I’ve always puzzled over about core samples, and the picture at the head of the article is as good of an example as any, is how much would the interpretations vary depending on the direction taken to extract the core?
In the picture above, it seems to me you’d come to different conclusions if the core was taken at 12:00 vs 3:00 or 6:00 or 9:00.
I don’t buy into trees as treemometers, but if you’re going to study the entrails of trees, I’d rather see someone basing their pronouncements on cross sections rather than core samples.
If you’re gonna tap into a tree, at least make sure it’s a Sugar Maple so you get some good** out of it.
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**Maybe send the sap over to the Chemistry Department and see if they can make something out of it. If they ask to also send over flour, baking powder, and buttermilk, they are probably onto something. 😉
First of all- even if we assume that there is a climate crisis and that we need to find ways to increase carbon sinks- and we assume the forests are a great carbon sink- the idea of doing tree ring analysis in the FIA program is nuts- the kind of thing an idiot academic would come up with.
Now, it’s a fact that FIA data is almost worthless because the sampling rate is absurdly low- something like 1/6000. And, much of this work is done by interns, students, low level workers who have little understanding of forests the way an experienced forester will. And, they do measure the diameters of the trees. The FIA plots are the same plots done over and over again. They are marked with special paint and GPS to find them. So, if a tree is measured from the outside at exactly the same height- over time- we can find out how much it’s growing- you don’t need to drill in and remove a sample. And, if you do that, it takes a lot of time to do correctly and to analyze it- when all you need to do is measure the outside of the tree and compare to the last time it was measured. And, you can’t keep going back to the same tree and drilling it multiple times before you cause major injury, possibly introduce infection that could cause the tree to slow down its growth and possibly die.
Also, many trees have ongoing rot- not easy to determine even with a core extraction. An experienced forester might be pretty good at estimating it- but not the people doing this work. If you don’t estimate this decay- any measurements of how much carbon is in the tree and how much will be over time will be poor quality data.
Now, where are they going with this? What they really want is a new concept called PROFORESTATION- which is to lock up all the forests so they’ll do nothing but sequester carbon. A truly brain dead idea for countless reasons which I won’t get into at this time. This concept was imagined by Bill Moomaw, professor emeritus at Tuffs- who I know all too well. I can elaborate if anyone cares to know more.
CO2 is important, but not as some apocalyptic temperature control knob. It is the essence of life, plant life to be more precise. Plants die when CO2 reaches ~150 ppm. And plant death means all life dies too. Forests are not the main sequestering agent for carbon, calcium carbonate rocks produced from shell and skeleton building of marine organisms are the dominant sequestration of carbon.
The problem is as Patrick Moore points out in the following paper, that earth’s ecosystem has been on a downward slide of this major sequestration of atmospheric carbon into marine sediment and then Calcium Carbonate rocks (limestone, marble, chalk, etc) for 140 million years. Releasing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is actually restoring the atmosphere to previous levels, required to sustain and enhance life from the plant biomass! And to prevent the extinction of all life if the downward slide of atmospheric carbon dioxide continued without mankind’s actions! (we are not the enemy of nature, we are it’s savior in this respect)
http://ecosense.me/ecosense-wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CO2-Emissions.pdf
Quote:”leaders are counting on forests to pull a good c….
Is that a fact?
If so, please explain Drax power station and dozens more like it across Europe
While you’re about it, tell us about Biofuel, Biomass and in your own time as long as it’s sometime before yesterday, explain the term “Net Zero”
Quote:”Treasure in tree rings
Wrong wrong wrong
As is the way when most folks go treasure hunting, they take a shovel, spade or some other sort of digging instrument
If you really do think you want trees to capture carbon ## show them some love and feed them. It is quite surprising what they like to eat and no, not especially, it is not gaseous.
If you live near Scotland, it comes by the truckload
## If when you do go treasure hunting with a spade, you may notice ‘some quantity’ of water. Not liquid water – Damp Water
Contrary to Popular Opinion, it is actually that stuff which controls climate
IOW: Scientists, educate yourselves. Spend some time down on a farm, in a garden or a real-glass greenhouse. Get your hands dirty.
(The Vitamin B12 bacteria that’s in that dirt might just save your life, at least stop your going crazy that’s fo’sure)
Also go for walks and observe. Notice water wherever it it is.
Ask yourself, is the water you see causing temperatures to rise or is the water having a cooling effect.
Ask yourself why it is that when ‘scientists’ claim water is having a (climate) heating effect, it is ALWAYS in places nobody goes and when it’s in a form you cannot see.
Then take your Snake Oil home and do with it as you please & will. (I don’t really want to know. Please no.)
You could please everybody else on this planet by simply binning it.
(Why does ‘Burning Man Festival‘ come to mind at this juncture – or is that just me – could hardly be more appro either way)
Carbon sequestration is all very well but at some point all that carbon will end up in the atmosphere again. Sometimes over an afternoon
Australia had a lot of tax credits associated with “carbon farming” and was very proud of how they were using nature to counteract emissions. Then they had a drought and huge wildfires.
California cut forest management and they had wildfires.
Growing trees is a great thing (I like trees, everyone likes trees) but it is not a good long term method of reducing CO2.
There is no evidence showing that CO2 needs to be sequestered.
CO2 is a benign gas essential for life on Earth.
It seems like it took only a handful of Bristlecone Pine tree rings (or maybe just one or two) to ‘prove’ a hockey stick temperature profile, so why should it take a concerted study of thousands to reinforce it? Besides that, it seems like simply counting trees and estimating their size and moisture content would be no less accurate, and maybe even more accurate.
The real issue is what happens to their ‘carbon’ after they are cut or fall. A high percentage goes quickly back into the eco system.
All this hysteria about having to reduce CO2 emissions is a total waste of time. Mind you there are many making a lot of money with it at the expense of the rest of us.
It is now all about global political control of energy being the agenda of the Communist Party which has taken over the policies of the UN and its acolytes such as the IPCC et al.
Never against collecting data, as long as it’s used in a scientifically correct manner without biased interpretations, “corrections” or manipulations.
Expect pushback from “Earth Firsters” for disturbing sacred “burial grounds.”
It is all a bit of a tree ring circus innit?
“Justifying our research grant request with the obligatory climate change reference”
Great, more misuse of tree rings…
The old hammer and nail theory is evident again; that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Now, it’s tree ring researchers ignoring everything that affects plant growth so they can allege tree rings provide accurate estimates of carbon sequestration.
Accurate? Not even for government use.
Forest service time would be better spent preventing forest fires than in damaging old growth forest. While it is hard to prove successful prevention of any event, it would surely be better for everyone, including carbophobics, to prevent the release of millions of tons of carbon compounds in to the atmosphere and destruction of forest habitat.
When somebody who is familiar with ecology starts talking about “delicate and sensitive ecosystems” we can only presume that they are projecting their own traits into the ecosystem. Ecosystems are more or less sensitive to perturbation but what part of an ecosystem is delicate? How can an agglomeration of soil, biota, topography and climate be described as delicate in any sense that has any scientific meaning? If ecosystems are dramatically changed by minor perturbations then that is just their nature, being inherently unstable doesn’t imply that anybody or anything has an obligation to protect them from change.
That wood slice image makes a nice iPhone wallpaper
From the above article:
“Oceans, soils and forests are ‘carbon sinks’—they have the ability to pull more carbon from the atmosphere than they put into it.”
Well, this “peer reviewed” blurb from Utah State University totally ignores one of the largest carbon sinks around: natural rain.
Natural rainwater at ground level has a pH in the range of 5.0 to 5.5, its acidity resulting from absorbing CO2 as it falls through the atmosphere.
Considering the area of Earth’s surface, especially across tropical and temperate latitudes, that experiences rain frequently, this represents a largely unrecognized carbon sink with most of that captured carbon ending up in the oceans, in biomass, or in eroded rock . . . but such is NOT “pulled from the atmosphere”.