Tree Planting Can’t Limit Anthropogenic Climate Change To Any Significant Degree Without Massive Ecological Destruction, Study Finds
Whenever there’s a discussion going on related to high carbon dioxide emissions and anthropogenic climate change, there’s usually someone who will mention the widespread planting of trees as a “solution.”
Image: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Dillian Bamman
While planting trees isn’t something that I’m going to object to, the idea that all that people have to do in order to undo all of the ecological destruction of the last few thousand years is plant some trees (completely out of context with any wider ecosystems, and unaccompanied by any of the now long-gone animals and plants that once lived within these systems) has always sounded more than a bit ridiculous.
A real “solution” to anthropogenic climate change — real “change” — would require genuinely restructuring the fundamentals that the modern world, and modern lifestyles, rest on, which isn’t something that people are going to willingly do. A change of detail s… a change of the surface qualities … a change of PR and consensual truth … sure. But genuine change, no. Genuine change is something that people generally avoid until the day they die.
With that in mind, genuine change, whether welcomed by the current batch of rapidly expanding generalists or not, is clearly on the way. And simply planting some trees won’t be enough to avoid it, as noted in a new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
In order to actually counteract unmitigated carbon dioxide emissions, it would be necessary to convert essentially all of the remaining wild ecosystems of the world (which would itself result in increased carbon emissions in ways not discussed in the new work) to sequestration plantations, and to also convert some existing agricultural land, according to the new work.
The researchers argue, though, that selective biomass growth and sequestration plantations, if well placed, could play a limited part in broader plans to limit anthropogenic climate change.
Notably, this work doesn’t seem to take into account, to any significant degree anyways, any of the positive feedback loops that now seem to be coming into play. Nor does it seem to directly acknowledge the rapidly growing problem of soil depletion/erosion and the looming issue of synthetic fertilizer shortages (phosphate, in particular) — or, for that matter, the social and geopolitical problems that would accompany any such land-use changes (what would happen to rainfall patterns, etc.).
Lead author of the new study, Lena Boysen of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, commented: “Even if we were able to use productive plants such as poplar trees or switchgrass and store 50% of the carbon contained in their biomass, in the business-as-usual scenario of continued, unconstrained fossil fuel use the sheer size of the plantations for staying at or below 2°C of warming would cause devastating environmental consequences.”
The press release explains the findings as related to a scenario where some solid action is taken by governments as well: “If CO2 emissions reductions are moderately reduced in line with current national pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement, biomass plantations implemented by mid-century to extract remaining excess CO2 from the air still would have to be enormous. In this scenario, they would replace natural ecosystems on fertile land the size of more than one third of all forests we have today on our planet. Alternatively, more than a quarter of land used for agriculture at present would have to be converted into biomass plantations — putting at risk global food security.”
With regard to an “ambitious” emissions reductions scenario: “Only ambitious emissions reductions and advancements in land management techniques between 2005-2100 could possibly avoid fierce competition for land. But even in this scenario of aggressive climate stabilization policy, only high inputs of water, fertilizers, and a globally applied high-tech carbon-storage-machinery that captures more than 75% of extracted CO2 could likely limit warming to around 2°C by 2100. To this end, technologies minimizing carbon emissions from cultivation, harvest, transport, and conversion of biomass and, especially, long-term Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) would need to improve worldwide.”
There are other alternatives of course, but they are culturally and politically unpalatable by most people’s standards. I’ll state here that while I’m not opposed to the widespread rollout of some renewable energy technologies, electric cars, etc., such things are no more a “solution” to the ecological destruction being wrought in the world now than any cargo cult of other time periods ever has been.
As always, differing opinions that are well argued are welcome in the comments section … but I’ll note here that just because someone disagrees with a position doesn’t mean that all that one has to do to do away with the unwelcome viewpoint is to “win” the argument.
It’s not simply a matter of “educating” a person until they agree with you. People who have different opinions on a matter than you often have a very different body of experience that they are drawing from, and good reasons for believing what they do. It’s not a matter of simply possessing different ideas, in other words, but different experiences.
And what are ~7.5 billion people with very different experiences and beliefs going to agree on? Only the most vacuous, inconsequential, and surface-level solutions — as evidenced by the complete toothlessness of the Paris climate change agreement, and also by the sheer division of the populaces witnessed in essentially all of the recent elections in the western world.
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