They were for several hundred million years. What changed?
Comment on Entropy? Never heard of it.
WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoUnfortunately, this is one area human imagination and intuition fail. Trees are great, but the math shows they simply aren’t remotely viable as a means of bulk carbon sequestration.
mindaika@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Delta_V@lemmy.world 5 days ago
The evolution of micro organisms capable of eating dead trees and emitting CO2 as a metabolic byproduct.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
don’t forget the role that the Great Oxidation Event played in this.
Basically, earth’s atmosphere was devoid of oxygen from its beginning, and it took billions of years to change that. it wasn’t until life had learned about photosynthesis before large amounts of oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere.
however, oxygen is a necessary prerequisite for most animal/fungus consumers, as they use oxygen to break down the organic materials. that is probably when major fossil fuel production stopped.
WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Nothing. You’re just asking trees to do something they’re not meant to do. Absorbing a single year of carbon emissions would require half the planet’s land area of trees. And that’s just while the trees are growing and absorbing a lot of carbon. Trees just aren’t efficient enough on a per acre basis to make a dent in carbon emissions, let alone capturing the carbon already in the atmosphere.
Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml 5 days ago
Trees never evolved for the purposes of mass capturing carbon from the air as efficiently as possible. Yes, they convert CO2 to O2 as part of their life cycle, but algae and other organisms have a much bigger role in capturing CO2 and turning it into O2.
Furthermore, so much of the CO2 that we emit is CO2 that was sequestered in the past over those very same 100s of millions of years. Meaning that going the natural route will take that amount of time.
Oisteink@feddit.nl 5 days ago
What about sea weed? And sink it to the ocean floor?
artificialfish@programming.dev 5 days ago
I think you have to cut them down and bury them (or at least don’t burn them) for the carbon to “go away”.
That’s how it got underground to begin with.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
yes, you are correct, it makes more sense to focus on electrifying our big consumers first.
however, cleaning up could happen eventually. maybe some politician in the future will sell it as some “jobs program” or sth.