Wednesday, May 21, 2008

More on Burying Trees

There's another paper out on the prospect of growing and burying trees in order to combat global warming. The authors, Scholz and Hasse, calculate that the world would have to grow and bury about a billion hectares a year to counteract the 32 GtC/yr we're putting in the atmosphere. That's about 4 million square miles (which more or less agrees with this calculation from an earlier paper by Zeng on the same subject), which is about the size of the entire United States (including AK and HI), or, as the authors put it, "roughly to the surface of the virgin forest cut down in the last century." Every year.

Still seems kinda crazy.

Via Science Daily.

1 comment:

MT said...

Felled with solar powered chainsaws and buried with nuclear backhoes? Sounds like a bit of work.