CAN MORE TREES PREVENT GLOBAL WARMING?

For the longest time, trees have been promoted as the best way to prevent global warming.  After all, they suck up carbon dioxide and give us oxygen.  This what we learned in school.

In July a Science article entitled The Global Tree Restoration Potential recommended expanding forested areas by 25% with half a trillion trees to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.

Next, the Wildlife Conservation Agency, World Wide Fund for Nature and BirdLife International advanced the Trillion Trees Project.

In the mix came Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, suggesting that the world has existing parks, forests and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion more trees and cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide.  He said there are already 3 trillion trees growing, and 1.2 million locations around the world available for this effort.

The United Nations Billion Tree Campaign has been at work since 2006, and  has planted 15 billion trees thus far.  The leader is China with 2.8 billion trees, then India with 2.5 billion and Ethiopia (yes, Ethiopia) with 1.7 billion.  The USA?  #12 with 0.3 billion.

All the above sounds great.  Who can question the rationale or motive of those organizers?  Me.  Yes, me.

I've long wondered whether tree planting exacerbated global warming.  On the one hand, sure, if you grow biomass and replace coal burning for electricity, or convert the plant into a biofuel to reduce oil usage, fine, that would make sense.

But if you consider the whole cycle of plant growth and eventual degradation, I saw signs that worried me.  My first confirmation came from the Max Planck Institute of Physics just around the time I was writing SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth.  Their initial thought was that, sure, decaying plants produced the methane, which is worse than carbon dioxide.  Alarmingly, they were astonished to find in lab tests that the plants themselves were also producing methane.  Then, the MP Institute administration put a kibosh on those thoughts, and nothing was heard from them again.

Thirteen years later, this past summer, Yale Environment 360 reported that:

     Scientists Zero in on Trees as a Surprisingly Large Source of Methane

• all trees produce methane
• tropical wetlands are a major source of this second most important greenhouse gas
• trees in the Amazon emit as much methane as all the tundra ecosystems of the Arctic

Sunitha Pangala initially had difficulty publishing her results, for there is a definite bias about scientific journals releasing information contradicting traditional global warming research.  Remember, I saw this from the Max Planck Institute of Germany.

Here is what has been troubling me:

• when trees grow, photosynthesis absorbs carbon dioxide, which is great
• however, trees also produce methane, which is very bad
• when trees die, every bit of that carbon dioxide is returned into the atmosphere over time

• worse, if chemical changes occur in the decay process, more and more methane will begin to be generated, and, depending on the situation, one molecule of methane is from 15 to 125 times worse than carbon dioxide in causing the Greenhouse Effect
• when developers clear rainforests and other areas of trees, they indeed do reduce the absorption of carbon dioxide, but worse, initiate the process of carbon dioxide and methane release

• all you get out of planting trees is a delay action, for you will eventually get back whatever you photosynthesize, plus the methane, which is worse than carbon dioxide
• of greater concern is that in the total life cycle, from beginning to end, the balance towards more global heating by growing trees contributes to this problem by the adding methane into the atmosphere

It is a fact that the methane composition of our atmosphere has been growing.  Some blame cow fart (which is a lot of methane), but as we grow more trees, are we also inadvertently contributing to this plight?

The complicating factor is that methane in the atmosphere is only a temporary phenomenon, for it eventually degrades into carbon dioxide.  But, as the graphic below shows, if methane is 100 times worse than carbon dioxide for the first five years and 72 times for 20 years,  that can't be good.

When I observed that leaders and the media were not taking global warming seriously enough, I thought a two-by-four solution was necessary, so I concocted The Venus Syndrome, a future book, where methane ends life as we know it.  Go to my final chapter of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth, or read my simplified articles in The Huffington Post:

• The Venus Syndrome (Part One)
• The Venus Syndrome (Part Two)
• The Venus Syndrome Revisited

Will my book provide a simple solution for The Venus Syndrome?  You'll need to read it when published.

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Hurricane Humberto will impact the Bermudas, but continue to move away from the USA:

Hurricane Kiko has strengthened into a Category 3, heading straight for Hawaii.  However, water and shear conditions are such that weakening will soon occur:

Tropical Depression Peipah has formed, and is projected to take the same path as Typhoon Faxai, except that the odds are low that much strengthening will occur.  However, further south is another disturbance that could well gain typhoon intensity.

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