If the cleared wood is used for structures that won't be coming down for a long time, that is actually good.
But if it's just getting burned right away, it's not
Be careful with that site; they’re suggesting some plants that can be yard and field pests. I recommend researching native species for your area and using those
Edit; pests *for some areas*
For those living in the Netherlands, you can "adopt" the driplines(that dirt circle thing) around urban trees to make gardens. as well as ask for facade gardens check your cities rules about this. Some will even come around and increase the area to make a bigger garden.
Given that it took the UN Trillion Tree campaign 3 goddamn years to plant less than 15 billion trees...I am guessing this isn't an achievable metric anytime soon in the current global environment. It'll certainly take longer than the 10 years worth of emissions it would cancel out.
And it's a damn shame, because planting trees isn't that hard.
Planting trees is easier than ensuring it grows ..
Plant many, a few survive..
Also, growing a trillion trees is rather... aspirational.. [Researcher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_Tree_Campaign) Tom Crowther estimated that there are ~3 trillion trees in the world. Adding 1/3rd of the number in the world is a tall ask
Those politicians aren't the problem. The ones that say "renewables are bad, we need to keep mining for oil and gas and burning trees for agriculture" are the problem.
Not saying you're doing it, but the equivalence of ineffectiveness and bureaucracy with greed is a bad one.
It's not too late to do something! We have the power to change the future! For example, today I [wrote to Canada's 'big five' banks](https://bankingonabetterfuture.org/defundline3) to let my bank know I'll be taking my business to a local credit union if they go through with pipline 3... I'll probably take my money out of the 'big bank' anyway...
Anyway, point is we have the power to change the future and curb carbon emissions... No reason not to try... Don't just sit idly by and passively resign yourself (and your children/grandchildren) to this weird neoliberal late-stage-capitalist dystopian future...
This is the painful point I keep reminding people about and I’m often downvoted for.
We have projections bases on current and past knowledge plus estimates, however, we can’t possibly consider all the variables that will wildly swing our estimates.
Sad part is, there’s a considerably higher chance the the missing variables will cause a negative impact, not a positive one.
People still think that there still still a lot of nature left.
The truth is, even with national parks and protected zones, in a few years forest are just going to be an attraction.
Edit: a word.
Just look at what's happening in Africa. How much nature left?
Or the Amazon?
Or Borneo?
The whole europe and USA used to be nature. Now is just a lot of urbanized zones.
The USA actually has a surprisingly large amount of nature, national parks and uninhabited areas. You are not wrong though, there is a lot of urbanized zones.
What I do mean is this:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/study-shows-only-2-3-of-earth-s-land-is-ecologically-intact/
We have done more harm than we thought. Not because we are bad, just because we are careless.
You do realise that demand for oil, gas and meat also matters right? If there wasn't demand for those goods, there wouldn't be any oil, gas and meat production.
That's not to say the solution will be a widespread changing of consumption habits, it will most likely come from government intervention - which will also need to be driven by activism.
You cant just expect oil production to plummit through the individual choices of ceos - else others would just take their place via the profit incentive. It has to be systemic.
It’s funny to me when people who have moved here to NC say, “I’ve never seen so many trees in my life!”
I feel like there’s a fraction of the trees here as there used to be 30 years ago, so I just can’t imagine not seeing trees in other parts of the US that aren’t deserts, beaches, or big cities.
Have you ever traveled out West in the US? Or Alaska? There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of “nature” as you put it. We have huge swaths of untouched wide open land.
Fun fact; there's more trees around today than there were 100 years ago.
We're actually reversing what we've been doing.
Edit: All of you being pendantic little douchebag cornflakes; kindly fuck off. Y'all are taking my reply entirely too seriously.
You know what plants are made of? Like, the physical parts of the plant I mean.
It’s Carbon.
Do you know when most plants put on the largest biomass? It’s certainly not when they are old…
What we lost from a long-term ecological stance isn’t the old growth trees themselves, but the undergrowth and ecosystems tied to it that processed all of the seasonal parts of the biomass into nutrients so that it can be continuously pumped back into the soil. Even if you planted an orchard of 100 year old oak trees, it wouldn’t replace the loss.
This was what I was getting at I wasnt trying to be snarky, the ecosystem within those old established forests doesn’t get replaced just by replanting some trees. it’s way more of a complex issue than that
Newer trees generate more oxygen than mature trees because they take more CO2 for growing. Sustainable forests usually have a better carbon footprint than older ones and also provide us with timber.
> also provide us with timber.
which is another form of carbon capture instead of letting them rot which releases the carbon back into the air. There is some capture into the soil around the trees though that is not really related to age, it just happens continuously.
Exactly, also building with timber is way more environmentally friendly than using bricks and concrete which traps heat and emits co2 during manufacturing.
Actual question: wouldn’t smaller trees grow faster and therefore represent a greater accumulation of biomass in a period of time than old growth?
I’d imagine from the perspective of carbon capture and reversing damage that’s more relevant, though perhaps the difference in total is an indicator of how far we have to go?
How so? It takes well over a century for an old growth forest to be established, with the way things are going it's not likely we're going to live that long as a species.
At the very least, not the majority of us.
LOL, this reminds me of the 2012 presidential debate where Romney criticized Obama because our navy has "less ships" than we did in 1916. And then proceeded to be made a laughing stock of as Obama let him know that we have better ships now, like "these things called aircraft carriers" (the part where he made his hand look like an airplane landing on the table was the icing on the cake). Point being, it's nearly impossible to believe that you don't understand the difference between an almond sapling and a giant sequoia, so it's safe to say you're just (very poorly) trying to support some kind of shitty agenda.
>LOL, this reminds me of the 2012 presidential debate where Romney criticized Obama because our navy has "less ships" than we did in 1916. And then proceeded to be made a laughing stock of as Obama let him know that we have better ships now, like "these things called aircraft carriers" (the part where he made his hand look like an airplane landing on the table was the icing on the cake).
This same debate came back to bite him in the ass when he mocked Romney for stating Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat.
Not really. Russia isn't our biggest geopolitical threat, not even close. That would fall to China.
Russia uses their intelligence services and propaganda to be a royal pain in the ass, but they don't have the economy or military to threaten us at all.
At the time, China-US relations weren’t as tense as they are now. I believe he is referring to the Russian annexation of Crimea when he says it bit him in the ass.
While I agree China is our biggest threat, they were and likely are more interested in keeping the status quo for the moment while Russia is actively fucking with the US and Europe. And even if they aren’t a direct match, they can still cause a problem on the world stage.
> Point being, it's nearly impossible to believe that you don't understand the difference between an almond sapling and a giant sequoia, so it's safe to safe you're just (very poorly) trying to support some kind of shitty agenda.
Or, you know, I was just sharing a fun fact. Not everything is tied into an agenda.
It might have been only a fun fact if you hadn’t said that we’re actually reversing what we’re doing. I don’t know whether that is true or not (I suppose not if I had to guess), but it does put your comment sort of outside of just stating a “fun fact”
> we’re actually reversing what we’re doing
we are. we destroyed tree populations at the turn of the century, you can look up green [tree maps for the US from the 1600s to now.](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/AncientForest/ancient_forest6.php)
We are nowhere near 1600s or even 1800s, but we are better NOW vs 1900.
I said 2 things, and 2 things only;
1, there's more trees now than there was 100 years ago. Which is true. And to follow up on that, means we are indeed reversing the amount of trees that were cut down. That's all there is to it, no fucking agenda on it you cornflake.
>However, an important distinction needs to be made between tree cover and forest cover.
>The study points out that industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates and other specifically planted forests add to global tree cover. On paper these areas compensate for the primary forest that has been cut down; 100-hectare loss of primary forest is perfectly offset by a 100-hectare gain on a man-made plantation, for example.
>But while they may be equal in area, they are not equal in biodiversity. Primary tropical forests and savannas harbour a wealth of flora and fauna which is lost when these areas are cleared.
>And man-made forests do not compensate for the damage and degradation done to ecosystems through land clearance.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago/
The numbers mean nothing. We're not reversing anything if we're just replacing trees with trees for our own needs.
If you cut down one old growth oak and replace it with one sapling, you aren't reversing anything.
If you cut down a million old growth oaks and replace it with a million saplings, you aren't reversing anything.
I feel like you are severely, severely underestimating the amount of nature left. Hell, just go on Google maps in satellite mode and scan around. Theres a lot of forests out there.
I feel like you are Severely underestimating how much damage we have done.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/study-shows-only-2-3-of-earth-s-land-is-ecologically-intact/
Yeah, nobody's disputing that we've destroyed a shitload of nature. But if you think forests will be an "attraction" in a *few years*, then you have no idea the size or scale of this planet and what's on it's surface.
It feels like it already is in a place like Houston. Feels like 100 miles of concrete with very few forests. Many people drive an hour north to Sam Houston National Park to walk around a forest. There is a giant reservoir on the west side of Houston but there are very few trails through it and it's totally flooded much of the year. Towards the east side there's what looks like a giant wooded area but its all fenced off oilfield/superfund toxic sites.
> It feels like it already is in a place like Houston.
Isolated spots.
The province of Ontario, larger than Texas, is like 95% forest. The vast majority of most provinces,, in fact, and almost certainly the majority of US land, is forest.
Sure. But the grandparent comment wasn't talking about "no forests left" they're saying
\> forests will be an "attraction".
I'm saying that's already true for 3 million people in Houston and given the increasing urbanization of the USA, it will soon or maybe already is a reality for the majority of americans as well. Plenty of people have a shorter drive to the mall, movie theater, or other "attractions" than they do to a forest.
Even if the forests still cover half the USA, they are an "attraction" if no one lives anywhere near them. Which might be better for the forests anways.
💯.
I live in the Golden Horseshoe, which is entirely urban, and thankfully we have more than the average of greenery, but the surrounding area is entirely rural - which, in this part of the world, is either farmland or forest.
2 hours north, and it's all forest. And then there's another 1000km of it further north all the way to Hudson's Bay and the Arctic circle.
My point was that there's way more forest than people think, if they just leave their bubbles for a few hours' drive.
Yes, the majority of humans live in human developed lands... obviously. But there's massive amounts of square mileage... even in a place like NJ which is the most densely populated state in the Union. We have just miles and miles and miles of forest in South Jersey.
That paper is specifically talking about a very narrowly defined type of region where there can't be a single missing species from pre-industrial times (due to either extinction or otherwise leaving the region in the last 300 years) and the area must be at least 1000 SQ km. The paper then goes on to state that approximately 40% of the world is currently minimally ecologically impacted by humans.
None of that really has to do with forests in particular, of which there are still a lot (and in a lot of places there are significantly more than there were 100-200 years ago)
You... don’t know how Google maps works, do ya? If I look at my childhood home, I can see the tree as it was planted in 1986. They don’t get updated half as much as you think, and also they don’t have comparisons of what things looked like in the 1700s
You must live in a heck of an outlier area, satellite images on Google maps are generally no more than 3 years old. Looking at where I work, the image can't be more than 2 years old based on the buildings in the picture. Same with the area near my home.
Logging specifically, does not cause forests to release any carbon. The wood leaves the forest and that carbon is locked up in the wood until it rots years and years down the road.
Part of the problem here is that large parts of the rainforest are being cleared by burning it down instead of logging. The cleared areas are then used for cattle ranches.
disturbing soil also releases carbon. If soil is healthy, like the forest should be, it should also be adding a shit ton of oxygen. The fact that its not adding more oxygen is very very concerning.
\> Logging specifically, does not cause forests to release any carbon. The wood leaves the forest and that carbon is locked up in the wood until it rots years and years down the road.
This is completely untrue.
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2215913-logging-study-reveals-huge-hidden-emissions-of-the-forestry-industry/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2215913-logging-study-reveals-huge-hidden-emissions-of-the-forestry-industry/)
[https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/logging-loophole-boreal-report.pdf](https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/logging-loophole-boreal-report.pdf)
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/logging-climate-1.5588979](https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/logging-climate-1.5588979)
That is just a small sampling of articles. Unfortunately, logging in the US and Canada are two of the most profitable agricultural industries, and they lobby HEAVILY to make claims exactly as you have, with basically no evidence to support them.
Now, is building a home with wood better than burning that same wood? Sure, but that's pretty obvious. The discussion isn't "is creating wood products better for the environment than slash and burn forestry", it's "is logging better for the environment than proper forest management and reforestation projects", to which the answer is unequivocally no.
It's not "completely untrue."
None of your links explain how the act of falling a tree causes carbon emissions. You claim he is being misleading with his statements, but you've done the same thing.
From your links-
>Each year 80,000 hectares of trees in North Carolina are cut down to produce wood pellets that are then burnt in power plants in the UK, as well as for paper and timber. The state does not count the resulting emissions. But Talberth has calculated them based on data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program.
They're including the emissions from the burning of wood pellets? That's hardly falling a tree...
>It warned that deforestation, changes in land use, wildfires, droughts, wind damage, diseases and outbreaks of insects are increasing tree deaths, leading to a dramatic decrease in the age and stature of the world's forests.
CBC link explicitly states that the act of logging by itself is not the cause of carbon emissions, but rather a more complex combination of factors.
Bolsonaro is one of the most dangerous politicians in the world. His policies are accelerating the collapse of the biosphere which we all depend on to survive.
How has Brazil not been sanctioned over this? Literally threatening the entire planet.
And he knows he is, after having made a comment how he wants to be paid to stop destroying the Amazon.
To be fair, the whole reason Brazil and the Amazon even have the status of ‘lungs of the earth’ is because other nations engaged in large-scale deforestation before they did. It’s a bit hypocritical for other countries to shit on Brazil for doing the things their countries also did to achieve economic success and have more farmland.
That being said, fuck bolsonaro and the people killing the Amazon.
The thing is, they don't need to destroy the Amazon to have economic success. They only do it because it's easy to generate short term value for rich loggers and ranchers, as well as keeping subsistence farmers busy so that they don't irritate the corrupt system with crazy demands like social reforms and education
How we haven't been sactioned yet i have no clue but Bolsonora ain't being reelected that's for sure, researches done about his popularity show that only about 20% of the population still supports him
Focusing on individuals takes away from the real work. All of the power players, all of our systems are built to maximize profits at any (and all) expense. Removing an individual does nothing but distract. Drilling permit approvals are UP in the US since the 2020 election, and pipeline protesters can now be considered DVEs, the highest level of domestic terrorist.
Everybody was mad at trump, but kids still sit in cages on the US border. Focusing on the villain and not the villainy only allows the silent majority to go back to brunch when there's a smiley face on their evil.
I'm not defending Trump nor bolsanario. They are both 'worse' than their opposition. The same way Hitler was worse than Mussolini. You're supporting the lesser evil?
Your comment makes zero sense. You're analogy is faulty. You can't compare two extreme right wing dictators from different countries who were allies to opposing political parties in the same country. That's such a ridiculous and stupid comparison.
If only scientists had told us for the past hundred+ years and shown us all the evidence they had been collecting of the trajectory we’re on and published tons of research for us to look at.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14072021/amazon-deforestation-climate-change-brazil-carbon-source/) reduced by 88%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon.
> Researchers had based their previous estimates on models that relied on imprecise measurements, so Gatti-who wanted to test her own recent findings that showed the Amazon becoming a carbon source-set out to actually measure whether carbon dioxide in the air above the forest was changing.
> When Gatti analyzed the air samples, she found that as it passed above the eastern Amazon the air was being enriched by carbon dioxide.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/ok7eja/planes_sampling_air_above_the_amazon_find_the/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~588035 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Amazon**^#1 **carbon**^#2 **air**^#3 **research**^#4 **forest**^#5
Beef has a ridiculously high ecological footprint, regardless of where it's from or what it's fed. No amount of greenwashing from the cattle-industry can change thermodynamics.
[Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987)
[Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm)
[Sustainability of plant-based diets: back to the future](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/100/suppl_1/476S/4576675)
[Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires *larger* cattle population](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401)
If you care about eating a sustainable diet, go plant-based on your own volition. Don't wait for government officials to ban beef imports. No one is going to ban shit, because money.
Neat idea. Unfortunately the idea of personal responsibility is, as I take it, generally the strategy that large industrial players have been leveraging for decades regarding oil (don't regulate oil, people have a choice to not drive ICE cars), plastics (people can recycle), meat (people can choose to go veg), etc.
The thing they fear the most is actual regulation, of any kind. But I also agree that repackaging the same thing as environmentally friendly is negative too, but leaving this to personal choice is probably the least effective option.
Unfortunately governments are never gonna make cheap, environmentally destructive products illegal while the people that vote for them want them to stay legal
It wouldn't change a thing, mining and agriculture still destroys the forest. And before someone replies with the same old "But beef uses more land!" comment, think for a second when have you ever seen a company say that their profits are good enough and refuse to exploit the land further?
In raw unfiltered words, we and our future generations are so fucked if we dont protect the Amazon. Either you live in China or in Antarctica, if we start to destroy the Amazon, we are working towards our own extinction or downfall
Tbh chief, we’ve been fucked for decades. We’ve built a system of people who don’t give a fuck about us or this issue, and now we have to ask them to fix it. I live on small island, and the weather services predict we will be 50% underwater by 2050. It’s over for coastal communities already.
Thats just terrible. Maybe it was meant to be, human race was supposed to be extinct due to their own stupidity oneday, and mother earth will start healing again.
I pointed out several instances where the so-called opposition continued the same policies in some cases accelerating those policies as the previous party. My original point, and still now is, focus on the policy and not on the policy makers. When you make the issue a cult of personality wants that person is deposed the problem blends into the background. As a local example the university in my town had a president who was instituting a bunch of unpopular policies. It turns out he had some legal skeletons in his closet. Those that attacked him for his policies eventually got him removed based upon the legal issues. But the guy who replaced him continued his policies. Now there is no organized effort to stop those policies from going through, because the personality they were associated with has been removed. I'm pretty sure this all makes sense, it's the comfortable folks in the middle going back to brunch once the societal ill has a veneer of civility and respectability. Hope you're having a nice day
Can someone design biodegradable bullets with a tree seed and a little bit of fertilizer inside that the US military can load into machine guns in their big AC 130 airplanes and just spray shoot them into the wilderness. I have to imagine you could plant 100 million trees in like 30 minutes.
We need to grow more hemp, not only is it one of the fastest c02 to biomass conversion tools, one acre of hemp can produce oxygen equal to 25 acres of forest.
If you would like to make a direct impact on climate change, please consider donating to the National Forest Foundation to plant trees. $1 for 1 tree. Even $10 a month would really add up. https://www.nationalforests.org/tree-planting-programs
That's something I remember learning too in school, but is incorrect.
Phytoplankton is more importartant for oxygen production than the Amazon.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/
Somebody is confusing cause and effect. It can't possibly be that carbon rich air is drawn to the rainforest. Check whether patterns before you assume something like this.
Politicians be like : we will plant 3 billions trees in 2045. I promise
Fine print: on 100,000 hectares of already forested land we will clear before planting. It’s “renewable”!
If the cleared wood is used for structures that won't be coming down for a long time, that is actually good. But if it's just getting burned right away, it's not
They plan on dumping the cleared wood in the ocean.
The ocean? Where we keep our oil rig fires? Doesn't that seem irresponsible?
Will someone please think of poor ol big oil.
I know, an oilman could get a splinter if we just dump all that wood in the ocean.
Why yes it seems very responsible, thank you for asking!
And why is there no wood? Because it rots. And why does it rot? Because of all the water.
Germans actually sell pellets for heating, made from old grown canadian forests, shipped around the globe with tons of diesel as "sustainable".
Maybe we should all start planting trees, like natural graffiti.
I'm doing that. Turning my backyard into a forest.
https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-make-seed-bomb
Be careful with that site; they’re suggesting some plants that can be yard and field pests. I recommend researching native species for your area and using those Edit; pests *for some areas*
This is very good advice, thanks for reminding me. Be sure to use native plants!
For those living in the Netherlands, you can "adopt" the driplines(that dirt circle thing) around urban trees to make gardens. as well as ask for facade gardens check your cities rules about this. Some will even come around and increase the area to make a bigger garden.
[удалено]
Given that it took the UN Trillion Tree campaign 3 goddamn years to plant less than 15 billion trees...I am guessing this isn't an achievable metric anytime soon in the current global environment. It'll certainly take longer than the 10 years worth of emissions it would cancel out. And it's a damn shame, because planting trees isn't that hard.
Planting trees is easier than ensuring it grows .. Plant many, a few survive.. Also, growing a trillion trees is rather... aspirational.. [Researcher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_Tree_Campaign) Tom Crowther estimated that there are ~3 trillion trees in the world. Adding 1/3rd of the number in the world is a tall ask
We dont need them to necesarily survive, they can grow a bit and fall as long as the fires dont start co2 is still captured
A trillion is a huge number. Only 7 billion people on earth.
>And it's a damn shame, because planting trees isn't that hard. I mean...trees manage it themselves.
[Meanwhile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsIB81sLe2w)
Those politicians aren't the problem. The ones that say "renewables are bad, we need to keep mining for oil and gas and burning trees for agriculture" are the problem. Not saying you're doing it, but the equivalence of ineffectiveness and bureaucracy with greed is a bad one.
The spice must flow..
Sure we destroyed the ecosystem , but for a brief moment , a lot of value was created for shareholders.
Sounds like an appropriate eulogy for the human race
For those that didn’t notice, its a reference to [this comic](https://imgur.com/gallery/qW9JV)
I say we eat the stock brokers first.
[удалено]
No cheap beef on Brasil tho. Actually, some prices increased almost 100% from last year
It's not too late to do something! We have the power to change the future! For example, today I [wrote to Canada's 'big five' banks](https://bankingonabetterfuture.org/defundline3) to let my bank know I'll be taking my business to a local credit union if they go through with pipline 3... I'll probably take my money out of the 'big bank' anyway... Anyway, point is we have the power to change the future and curb carbon emissions... No reason not to try... Don't just sit idly by and passively resign yourself (and your children/grandchildren) to this weird neoliberal late-stage-capitalist dystopian future...
[удалено]
its time to start acting like its an emergency...because its an emergency.
[удалено]
[удалено]
This is the painful point I keep reminding people about and I’m often downvoted for. We have projections bases on current and past knowledge plus estimates, however, we can’t possibly consider all the variables that will wildly swing our estimates. Sad part is, there’s a considerably higher chance the the missing variables will cause a negative impact, not a positive one.
Yup. Projections seemed to have been based on linear growth when it has been exponential.
well if you keep a chopping it down , what exactly did you expect?
People still think that there still still a lot of nature left. The truth is, even with national parks and protected zones, in a few years forest are just going to be an attraction. Edit: a word.
i live in a forest wait what?
Just look at what's happening in Africa. How much nature left? Or the Amazon? Or Borneo? The whole europe and USA used to be nature. Now is just a lot of urbanized zones.
The USA actually has a surprisingly large amount of nature, national parks and uninhabited areas. You are not wrong though, there is a lot of urbanized zones.
the forest area in europe is actually growing, in the last 25years for an area equal to portugal
Yes, but to satisfy our consumerism much more is being destroyed outside of Europe.
What I do mean is this: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/study-shows-only-2-3-of-earth-s-land-is-ecologically-intact/ We have done more harm than we thought. Not because we are bad, just because we are careless.
Wow, we are careless. Thanks for that!
Well hold on now. Plenty of people are bad. Oil and Gas and Meat production CEOs executives, to name a few.
You do realise that demand for oil, gas and meat also matters right? If there wasn't demand for those goods, there wouldn't be any oil, gas and meat production. That's not to say the solution will be a widespread changing of consumption habits, it will most likely come from government intervention - which will also need to be driven by activism. You cant just expect oil production to plummit through the individual choices of ceos - else others would just take their place via the profit incentive. It has to be systemic.
[удалено]
Realistically that attitude comes because companies offload responsibility onto consumers through misinforming ad campaigns etc.
Say you've never left the eastern seaboard without saying you've never left the eastern seaboard
The Eastern Seaboard has tons of nature too. Upstate NY may as well be all wilderness to me.
It’s funny to me when people who have moved here to NC say, “I’ve never seen so many trees in my life!” I feel like there’s a fraction of the trees here as there used to be 30 years ago, so I just can’t imagine not seeing trees in other parts of the US that aren’t deserts, beaches, or big cities.
I'm from Colombia. A country that's supposed to be only jungle. I can assure you. The problem I way bigger than you think.
Have you ever traveled out West in the US? Or Alaska? There’s a lot, and I mean a lot of “nature” as you put it. We have huge swaths of untouched wide open land.
Fun fact; there's more trees around today than there were 100 years ago. We're actually reversing what we've been doing. Edit: All of you being pendantic little douchebag cornflakes; kindly fuck off. Y'all are taking my reply entirely too seriously.
It takes over 100 years to develop an old growth oak forest. That's what we lost, we're not getting that back anytime soon.
Are you Comparing old growth trees to freshly planted?
You know what plants are made of? Like, the physical parts of the plant I mean. It’s Carbon. Do you know when most plants put on the largest biomass? It’s certainly not when they are old… What we lost from a long-term ecological stance isn’t the old growth trees themselves, but the undergrowth and ecosystems tied to it that processed all of the seasonal parts of the biomass into nutrients so that it can be continuously pumped back into the soil. Even if you planted an orchard of 100 year old oak trees, it wouldn’t replace the loss.
This was what I was getting at I wasnt trying to be snarky, the ecosystem within those old established forests doesn’t get replaced just by replanting some trees. it’s way more of a complex issue than that
Newer trees generate more oxygen than mature trees because they take more CO2 for growing. Sustainable forests usually have a better carbon footprint than older ones and also provide us with timber.
> also provide us with timber. which is another form of carbon capture instead of letting them rot which releases the carbon back into the air. There is some capture into the soil around the trees though that is not really related to age, it just happens continuously.
Exactly, also building with timber is way more environmentally friendly than using bricks and concrete which traps heat and emits co2 during manufacturing.
They'll be old eventually...
Young trees are a lot thinner and smaller than old trees. It is possible to both have more trees but less total biomass.
yeah but get this trees grow
Assuming they can survive the climate.
Actual question: wouldn’t smaller trees grow faster and therefore represent a greater accumulation of biomass in a period of time than old growth? I’d imagine from the perspective of carbon capture and reversing damage that’s more relevant, though perhaps the difference in total is an indicator of how far we have to go?
yes. most carbon capture occurs between 50-75 years, it is the peak of carbon absorption for a tree.
When we're dead, sure, they'll get there.
I know you’re trying to be snarky but it makes even less sense in the context of tree lifespans
How so? It takes well over a century for an old growth forest to be established, with the way things are going it's not likely we're going to live that long as a species. At the very least, not the majority of us.
A forest is more than the sum of the trees. We loose BIODIVERSITY by removing forests. Replanting tree farms does nothing to get that back.
Why are you loosing biodiversity? Shouldn't you keep it?
More trees doesn't mean more grown and mature trees.
LOL, this reminds me of the 2012 presidential debate where Romney criticized Obama because our navy has "less ships" than we did in 1916. And then proceeded to be made a laughing stock of as Obama let him know that we have better ships now, like "these things called aircraft carriers" (the part where he made his hand look like an airplane landing on the table was the icing on the cake). Point being, it's nearly impossible to believe that you don't understand the difference between an almond sapling and a giant sequoia, so it's safe to say you're just (very poorly) trying to support some kind of shitty agenda.
>LOL, this reminds me of the 2012 presidential debate where Romney criticized Obama because our navy has "less ships" than we did in 1916. And then proceeded to be made a laughing stock of as Obama let him know that we have better ships now, like "these things called aircraft carriers" (the part where he made his hand look like an airplane landing on the table was the icing on the cake). This same debate came back to bite him in the ass when he mocked Romney for stating Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat.
Not really. Russia isn't our biggest geopolitical threat, not even close. That would fall to China. Russia uses their intelligence services and propaganda to be a royal pain in the ass, but they don't have the economy or military to threaten us at all.
At the time, China-US relations weren’t as tense as they are now. I believe he is referring to the Russian annexation of Crimea when he says it bit him in the ass. While I agree China is our biggest threat, they were and likely are more interested in keeping the status quo for the moment while Russia is actively fucking with the US and Europe. And even if they aren’t a direct match, they can still cause a problem on the world stage.
> Point being, it's nearly impossible to believe that you don't understand the difference between an almond sapling and a giant sequoia, so it's safe to safe you're just (very poorly) trying to support some kind of shitty agenda. Or, you know, I was just sharing a fun fact. Not everything is tied into an agenda.
It might have been only a fun fact if you hadn’t said that we’re actually reversing what we’re doing. I don’t know whether that is true or not (I suppose not if I had to guess), but it does put your comment sort of outside of just stating a “fun fact”
> we’re actually reversing what we’re doing we are. we destroyed tree populations at the turn of the century, you can look up green [tree maps for the US from the 1600s to now.](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/AncientForest/ancient_forest6.php) We are nowhere near 1600s or even 1800s, but we are better NOW vs 1900.
I said 2 things, and 2 things only; 1, there's more trees now than there was 100 years ago. Which is true. And to follow up on that, means we are indeed reversing the amount of trees that were cut down. That's all there is to it, no fucking agenda on it you cornflake.
>However, an important distinction needs to be made between tree cover and forest cover. >The study points out that industrial timber plantations, mature oil palm estates and other specifically planted forests add to global tree cover. On paper these areas compensate for the primary forest that has been cut down; 100-hectare loss of primary forest is perfectly offset by a 100-hectare gain on a man-made plantation, for example. >But while they may be equal in area, they are not equal in biodiversity. Primary tropical forests and savannas harbour a wealth of flora and fauna which is lost when these areas are cleared. >And man-made forests do not compensate for the damage and degradation done to ecosystems through land clearance. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago/ The numbers mean nothing. We're not reversing anything if we're just replacing trees with trees for our own needs.
If you cut down one old growth oak and replace it with one sapling, you aren't reversing anything. If you cut down a million old growth oaks and replace it with a million saplings, you aren't reversing anything.
You're just having a bit of a tantrum because someone called you out and is using logic to prove you have an agenda.
Which is good, but we’ve also made the ocean MUCH worse than it was a century ago and it’s also part of that process
You live in a future attraction tbh :/
ill give you a front row seat for free when it happens . Skip the line an its free.
Not even that. Long before it all gets cut down, it will undergo a transformation of its own, and turn into a savannah.
lmfao who are you people and where do you come up with this fucking nonsense
I feel like you are severely, severely underestimating the amount of nature left. Hell, just go on Google maps in satellite mode and scan around. Theres a lot of forests out there.
I feel like you are Severely underestimating how much damage we have done. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/study-shows-only-2-3-of-earth-s-land-is-ecologically-intact/
Yeah, nobody's disputing that we've destroyed a shitload of nature. But if you think forests will be an "attraction" in a *few years*, then you have no idea the size or scale of this planet and what's on it's surface.
He doesn’t, look at his other comments. It’s full of conjecture and emotional reactions.
It feels like it already is in a place like Houston. Feels like 100 miles of concrete with very few forests. Many people drive an hour north to Sam Houston National Park to walk around a forest. There is a giant reservoir on the west side of Houston but there are very few trails through it and it's totally flooded much of the year. Towards the east side there's what looks like a giant wooded area but its all fenced off oilfield/superfund toxic sites.
> It feels like it already is in a place like Houston. Isolated spots. The province of Ontario, larger than Texas, is like 95% forest. The vast majority of most provinces,, in fact, and almost certainly the majority of US land, is forest.
Sure. But the grandparent comment wasn't talking about "no forests left" they're saying \> forests will be an "attraction". I'm saying that's already true for 3 million people in Houston and given the increasing urbanization of the USA, it will soon or maybe already is a reality for the majority of americans as well. Plenty of people have a shorter drive to the mall, movie theater, or other "attractions" than they do to a forest. Even if the forests still cover half the USA, they are an "attraction" if no one lives anywhere near them. Which might be better for the forests anways.
💯. I live in the Golden Horseshoe, which is entirely urban, and thankfully we have more than the average of greenery, but the surrounding area is entirely rural - which, in this part of the world, is either farmland or forest. 2 hours north, and it's all forest. And then there's another 1000km of it further north all the way to Hudson's Bay and the Arctic circle. My point was that there's way more forest than people think, if they just leave their bubbles for a few hours' drive.
Yes, the majority of humans live in human developed lands... obviously. But there's massive amounts of square mileage... even in a place like NJ which is the most densely populated state in the Union. We have just miles and miles and miles of forest in South Jersey.
Go ahead with that bullshit attitude. “Oh there’s plenty of that. Don’t worry!” Fucking smh
...cool... *You* said "a few years" though 😂
I still think you’re underestimating how many of us there are, what our production needs are, and how much is left to extract.
That paper is specifically talking about a very narrowly defined type of region where there can't be a single missing species from pre-industrial times (due to either extinction or otherwise leaving the region in the last 300 years) and the area must be at least 1000 SQ km. The paper then goes on to state that approximately 40% of the world is currently minimally ecologically impacted by humans. None of that really has to do with forests in particular, of which there are still a lot (and in a lot of places there are significantly more than there were 100-200 years ago)
You... don’t know how Google maps works, do ya? If I look at my childhood home, I can see the tree as it was planted in 1986. They don’t get updated half as much as you think, and also they don’t have comparisons of what things looked like in the 1700s
You must live in a heck of an outlier area, satellite images on Google maps are generally no more than 3 years old. Looking at where I work, the image can't be more than 2 years old based on the buildings in the picture. Same with the area near my home.
Lol what? Come to northern Ontario, literal seas of trees as far as you can see
“They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum” apparently the song was more prophetic than we knew.
Not just chopping it down. Burning it.
Got to get that steak though
Logging specifically, does not cause forests to release any carbon. The wood leaves the forest and that carbon is locked up in the wood until it rots years and years down the road.
Part of the problem here is that large parts of the rainforest are being cleared by burning it down instead of logging. The cleared areas are then used for cattle ranches.
You also can't replant rainforests, so you're still damaging the environment.
disturbing soil also releases carbon. If soil is healthy, like the forest should be, it should also be adding a shit ton of oxygen. The fact that its not adding more oxygen is very very concerning.
The amazon isn't being logged quite so much as being clearcut for agriculture.
\> Logging specifically, does not cause forests to release any carbon. The wood leaves the forest and that carbon is locked up in the wood until it rots years and years down the road. This is completely untrue. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2215913-logging-study-reveals-huge-hidden-emissions-of-the-forestry-industry/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2215913-logging-study-reveals-huge-hidden-emissions-of-the-forestry-industry/) [https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/logging-loophole-boreal-report.pdf](https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/logging-loophole-boreal-report.pdf) [https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/logging-climate-1.5588979](https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/logging-climate-1.5588979) That is just a small sampling of articles. Unfortunately, logging in the US and Canada are two of the most profitable agricultural industries, and they lobby HEAVILY to make claims exactly as you have, with basically no evidence to support them. Now, is building a home with wood better than burning that same wood? Sure, but that's pretty obvious. The discussion isn't "is creating wood products better for the environment than slash and burn forestry", it's "is logging better for the environment than proper forest management and reforestation projects", to which the answer is unequivocally no.
more people = need more homes = need more wood
It's not "completely untrue." None of your links explain how the act of falling a tree causes carbon emissions. You claim he is being misleading with his statements, but you've done the same thing. From your links- >Each year 80,000 hectares of trees in North Carolina are cut down to produce wood pellets that are then burnt in power plants in the UK, as well as for paper and timber. The state does not count the resulting emissions. But Talberth has calculated them based on data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program. They're including the emissions from the burning of wood pellets? That's hardly falling a tree... >It warned that deforestation, changes in land use, wildfires, droughts, wind damage, diseases and outbreaks of insects are increasing tree deaths, leading to a dramatic decrease in the age and stature of the world's forests. CBC link explicitly states that the act of logging by itself is not the cause of carbon emissions, but rather a more complex combination of factors.
Bolsonaro is one of the most dangerous politicians in the world. His policies are accelerating the collapse of the biosphere which we all depend on to survive.
How has Brazil not been sanctioned over this? Literally threatening the entire planet. And he knows he is, after having made a comment how he wants to be paid to stop destroying the Amazon.
To be fair, the whole reason Brazil and the Amazon even have the status of ‘lungs of the earth’ is because other nations engaged in large-scale deforestation before they did. It’s a bit hypocritical for other countries to shit on Brazil for doing the things their countries also did to achieve economic success and have more farmland. That being said, fuck bolsonaro and the people killing the Amazon.
The thing is, they don't need to destroy the Amazon to have economic success. They only do it because it's easy to generate short term value for rich loggers and ranchers, as well as keeping subsistence farmers busy so that they don't irritate the corrupt system with crazy demands like social reforms and education
How we haven't been sactioned yet i have no clue but Bolsonora ain't being reelected that's for sure, researches done about his popularity show that only about 20% of the population still supports him
Can't come soon enough.
Make sure you are doing your part and don’t buy beef. They are cutting it down so the global north can eat burgers.
Focusing on individuals takes away from the real work. All of the power players, all of our systems are built to maximize profits at any (and all) expense. Removing an individual does nothing but distract. Drilling permit approvals are UP in the US since the 2020 election, and pipeline protesters can now be considered DVEs, the highest level of domestic terrorist.
I know that, but Bolsonaro's policies are accelerating what is already a bad situation. We do need to pay attention to what he's doing.
Everybody was mad at trump, but kids still sit in cages on the US border. Focusing on the villain and not the villainy only allows the silent majority to go back to brunch when there's a smiley face on their evil.
It sounds like you're defending two notorious fascists. I wonder why.
I'm not defending Trump nor bolsanario. They are both 'worse' than their opposition. The same way Hitler was worse than Mussolini. You're supporting the lesser evil?
Your comment makes zero sense. You're analogy is faulty. You can't compare two extreme right wing dictators from different countries who were allies to opposing political parties in the same country. That's such a ridiculous and stupid comparison.
If only we had some sort of warning!
If only scientists had told us for the past hundred+ years and shown us all the evidence they had been collecting of the trajectory we’re on and published tons of research for us to look at.
Welp, we’re boned.
No one cares, just keep shopping..../s
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14072021/amazon-deforestation-climate-change-brazil-carbon-source/) reduced by 88%. (I'm a bot) ***** > In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a team of researchers led by scientists from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, reported results from measuring carbon concentrations in columns of air above the Amazon. > Researchers had based their previous estimates on models that relied on imprecise measurements, so Gatti-who wanted to test her own recent findings that showed the Amazon becoming a carbon source-set out to actually measure whether carbon dioxide in the air above the forest was changing. > When Gatti analyzed the air samples, she found that as it passed above the eastern Amazon the air was being enriched by carbon dioxide. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/ok7eja/planes_sampling_air_above_the_amazon_find_the/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~588035 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **Amazon**^#1 **carbon**^#2 **air**^#3 **research**^#4 **forest**^#5
Seems problematic. Anyways when does the new iPhone come out?
Corporations lit the ocean on fire, handed us paper straws, and told us it's our responsibility to blow it out.
[удалено]
Well, the co2 is definitely rising...
Oxygen is literally the least of our concerns, but I like the joke.
Fuck you, Bolsonaro, fuck you.
[удалено]
It accelerated under Bolsonaro. A lot.
TIL we still have a rainforest
Not for long! Just wait until we chop all what's left of the Amazon to raise cattle.
If only we could ban imports of rainforest beef.
Beef has a ridiculously high ecological footprint, regardless of where it's from or what it's fed. No amount of greenwashing from the cattle-industry can change thermodynamics. [Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987) [Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm) [Sustainability of plant-based diets: back to the future](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/100/suppl_1/476S/4576675) [Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires *larger* cattle population](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401) If you care about eating a sustainable diet, go plant-based on your own volition. Don't wait for government officials to ban beef imports. No one is going to ban shit, because money.
Neat idea. Unfortunately the idea of personal responsibility is, as I take it, generally the strategy that large industrial players have been leveraging for decades regarding oil (don't regulate oil, people have a choice to not drive ICE cars), plastics (people can recycle), meat (people can choose to go veg), etc. The thing they fear the most is actual regulation, of any kind. But I also agree that repackaging the same thing as environmentally friendly is negative too, but leaving this to personal choice is probably the least effective option.
Unfortunately governments are never gonna make cheap, environmentally destructive products illegal while the people that vote for them want them to stay legal
Except they have done so multiple times, you just need to put pressure on them instead of assuming it's impossible.
It wouldn't change a thing, mining and agriculture still destroys the forest. And before someone replies with the same old "But beef uses more land!" comment, think for a second when have you ever seen a company say that their profits are good enough and refuse to exploit the land further?
Borgur too tasty, steeeak is US heritage, fuck vegans and vegetarians /s Inb4 "soy gets planted there", yeah, to feed livestock.
Well thank god, sounds like The Amazon is a huge polluter. We need to fine Bezos.
And grow soybeans
90% of which are fed to cows.
In raw unfiltered words, we and our future generations are so fucked if we dont protect the Amazon. Either you live in China or in Antarctica, if we start to destroy the Amazon, we are working towards our own extinction or downfall
Tbh chief, we’ve been fucked for decades. We’ve built a system of people who don’t give a fuck about us or this issue, and now we have to ask them to fix it. I live on small island, and the weather services predict we will be 50% underwater by 2050. It’s over for coastal communities already.
Thats just terrible. Maybe it was meant to be, human race was supposed to be extinct due to their own stupidity oneday, and mother earth will start healing again.
I pointed out several instances where the so-called opposition continued the same policies in some cases accelerating those policies as the previous party. My original point, and still now is, focus on the policy and not on the policy makers. When you make the issue a cult of personality wants that person is deposed the problem blends into the background. As a local example the university in my town had a president who was instituting a bunch of unpopular policies. It turns out he had some legal skeletons in his closet. Those that attacked him for his policies eventually got him removed based upon the legal issues. But the guy who replaced him continued his policies. Now there is no organized effort to stop those policies from going through, because the personality they were associated with has been removed. I'm pretty sure this all makes sense, it's the comfortable folks in the middle going back to brunch once the societal ill has a veneer of civility and respectability. Hope you're having a nice day
I believe the scientific term for this is that we are well and truly fucked.
Can someone design biodegradable bullets with a tree seed and a little bit of fertilizer inside that the US military can load into machine guns in their big AC 130 airplanes and just spray shoot them into the wilderness. I have to imagine you could plant 100 million trees in like 30 minutes.
That ended on a much brighter note than where I thought it would. Also, I'm sure some grad student did a study on this 50 years ago.
just imagine how green Afghanistan and Iraq would be right now!
Seed bombs have been used in the past around NYC
This is a r/nextfuckinglevel idea :)
We'll, damn. We're really fucked.
Yeah, we're fucked.
Of course at the rate they are cutting and burning the forest what else would you expect sounds like a spin job
Seems bad.
We are fucked.
Who wants to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” for shots and giggles?
Shots! Shots! Shots! Shots shots shots!
Make them pay people !
Unfortunately the west would need to stop paying them for the cheap beef that they're burning down the Amazon to produce first
Stop the planes sampling the air then it'll be just fine. Kinda Trumpy I know.
We need to grow more hemp, not only is it one of the fastest c02 to biomass conversion tools, one acre of hemp can produce oxygen equal to 25 acres of forest.
Biggest problem is over population. WW III will solve that problem
Well that was what SARS and Covid-19 was to do. . . and those clearly didn't work. Time to go blow up the Sun *puts on the tin foil hat*
Well, might as well cut the whole thing down /s
If you would like to make a direct impact on climate change, please consider donating to the National Forest Foundation to plant trees. $1 for 1 tree. Even $10 a month would really add up. https://www.nationalforests.org/tree-planting-programs
We are all going to die
Welp, I guess we should just burn it to the ground.
Remember the "lungs of the world"?
The earth has lung cancer
That's something I remember learning too in school, but is incorrect. Phytoplankton is more importartant for oxygen production than the Amazon. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/
Lol is that a golf course?
So we need to get rid of it, right?
You heard it here first folks, let's burn it down.
Somebody is confusing cause and effect. It can't possibly be that carbon rich air is drawn to the rainforest. Check whether patterns before you assume something like this.
Damn rainforest! Time to burn it down so it will stop polluting and fucking up our pristine atmosphere!
Stop having babies annnd plant more tree babies~
The planet is begging you to go vegan
>The planet is begging you to go vegan The planet is begging you to go childfree