"Going Cheney on Climate"

That doesn't scan. Plants are obviously carbon sinks--the very carbon we're releasing today is from fossilized plants. That is, they stored carbon in geologic deposits.

And where did they get it? From the atmosphere, of course.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

It does scan. Plants are a one-time sink. They have to keep growing to be a continuous sink, something a steady-state forest or grassland is unable to do. However, in swamps, the dead plant matter doesn't decay, and builds up to form peat and eventually, coal. This is a long-term carbon sink.

The change in forestation or grasslandification of a given area can release (or fix) a lot of carbon, it just won't continue to do so over time. Note that a lot of carbon is stored in the soil, especially in areas with high turnover, like grasslands (the soil is rich and the roots go deep). In fact, grasslands store almost as much carbon as forests do, as much in the ground as forests have above ground. If a grassland is turned into cropland, all the carbon in the soil is going right back into the air, which is as bad as clearing a forest with fire.

Note that cutting down forests is not inherently bad. If the lumber is used in buildings, it will probably never return to the atmosphere. Lumber is a net sink.

Tim

Actually, it takes a lot of CO2 to be lethal, 15 or 20 per cent or some such. Even a violent discharge of stored CO2 into the air would be unlikely to trash things that badly.

CO2 is as natural and as vital to life as oxygen. It's not a toxic or a "pollutant." Imagine what beer, or a rum and coke, would be like without CO2.

John

Why not just store it in forests and food crops, the way Mother Nature has been doing for millions, if not billions, of years?

Thanks, Rich

Jan, I prefer the dream of generating hydrogen from solar panels, and pumping that down in the wells. The hydrogen is small, and fills all the nooks and crannies, and helps 'lighten' the oil, giving much more production. When it starts to go dry, you just pump out the hydrogen again... ;-)

Charlie

On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:20:22 -0800) it happened Charlie E. wrote in :

Just one word: 'Hindenburg?'

One-time? Not so. Plants suck carbon from the air, grow, then fall over and die. New plants replace them. Some of fallen matter decays, some doesn't.

However, in swamps, the dead plant matter doesn't decay, and builds up

Plants are a net carbon sink. If they weren't we wouldn't have coal, oil, and gas today. The issue today is exactly about freeing carbon stored by ancient plants.

They aren't a 100% efficient sink because some gets recycled (plants that decay). But, part gets trapped (plants that don't decay), making plants a net sink.

Again, that's not strictly true--generation replaces generation, each leaving some carbon trapped in the soil, swamp, or bog. That's how we got today's coal, oil, and gas.

But forests aren't the whole of it...marine life traps more.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

It can happen, though...

The hydrogen might have started the Hindenburg, but it was the aluminized canvas skin that made all the billowing orange sooty fireball. Hydrogen burns almost invisibly - you need a UV detector to see the flame in daylight.

Pure hydrogen could be burned in a suitably modified gas burner; it's only the hydrogen/air mixture that's explosive. I once acquired a small[1] cylinder of H2 somewhere, I don't recall where, but I filled up a balloon with it to about 6" diam, expecting an explosion; lit it with a propane torch at arm's length, and it went, "Phut."

The problems with H2 are that's it's hard to store, hard to transport, sickeningly expensive to produce, and has about the lowest energy density of almost anything on Earth.

Cheers! Rich [1] about 1 1/2" dia, about 13" long.

'Old growth' forrests are ecologically quite barren. They support very little diversity, as very few plant species can compete with the trees that cut off sunlight.

I have a couple of acres, partially wooded, around me. While it is nowhere near 'old growth', the maturity of the trees has reached a point where the ground between them is quite barren except for a couple of ferns.

Meanwhile, the land that I've cleared supports enough grass, bushes, small tree species and blackberry vines that, if I didn't keep after it with my brush cutter, I'd lose my house under it. The open space also attracts far more wildlife than the forest. Not many animals can eat fully grown trees, or hide under them.

While my wood lot still has some decades left to mature, once it does, it will effectively stop absorbing carbon. What grows will be offset by what dies and rots.

Interesting note about carbon credits for forests: While many third world countries are actively conserving them in order to sell potential carbon credits to developed nations, this same strategy is not available to the developed nations themselves (particularly the USA) under the proposed AGW treaties. Which is one reason Bush refused to sign on. Its pure politics and its being used as a means to extract cash from the wealthy. While that's not all bad, the science itself has to be agnostic about the politics and economics. A tree is a tree and it is worth X tons of carbon regardless of the GDP and or politics of its owners.

Depends how you burn it:

Remember when they used to say, "They've turned over the looney bin keys to the lunatics"

Well, it seems to have happened for real.

Thanks, Rich

Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on what you grow and how you manage it. Some crops are grasses, for all practical purposes.

We're getting smarter about which land to leave as swamps and wetlands (natural carbon sinks) and which are better used for crops. And it also depends on the kind of crop.

President Carter killed deployment of them.

A lot of oil and methane may well be of non-biological origin, or at least non-atmospheric.

John

On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:36:11 -0500) it happened Spehro Pefhany wrote in :

I like that sort of pictures, amazing. So much power...

ty

It was a public relations disaster "The capitalist bomb - it kills people but leaves the factories intact".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Shell expects to be able to sequester some 80% of the CO2 that it is producing from the plant that is going to feed CO2 into the Barendrecht gas field. Enriching the air in greehouses doesn't capture nearly as much CO2 - most if it leaks out before the plants can grab it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not the ones on the west coast of Tasmania, where there is a "second scrub" under the trees that is denses enough to walk on - mostly. People have been known to fall 25 or 30 feet to real ground level when it has thinned out unexpectedly.

at

Precisely. Genuine "old growth" forests include trees that got so old that the trunk rotted and the tree fell over, creating an open space that accomodates lower-growing plants. Wood lots are planted to grow the maximum amount of timber, and what is cut is hauled away .

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen