Trees and carbon credits
Bob Morris @ Aug 17th 2007 09:42 - Category: Unfiled
A decade-long experiment led by Duke University scientists indicates that trees provide little help in offsetting increased levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
The trees didn’t offset nearly as much carbon as once thought and is not nearly enough to offset emissions. Worse, only those trees that got substantial water and nutrients were able to store “significant” amounts of carbon.
That means proposals to use trees to bank increasing amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by humans may depend too heavily on the weather and large-scale fertilization to be feasible.
So now we have a burgeoning trading market in carbon credits that may have no scientific credibility to back it up.
Tip: SusHI
1 Comment »
One Response to “Trees and carbon credits”
Leave a Reply
Comments subject to deletion at whim of capricious webmaster. Disagreements are ok. Flames, trolls, and right-wing attacks are not. If your comment doesn't appear immediately, then moderation is on, thus there's no need to re-send it.
(However sometimes the anti-spam programs here go awry. Email us if your comments seem to vanish into the void.)
Joe Hartley on 17 Aug 2007 at 10:12 am #
This should come as no surprise to anybody who ever studied the carbon cycle in high school biology. I realize that leaves out all of the Bush administration.
Apparently there’s one place that additional CO2 does have an effect, and that’s in vines like kudzu, which don’t fix as much CO2 as something as massive as a tree does. There is some cleansing effect of trees and vines and rain forests, of course (provided they don’t get clear cut), but hardly enough to act as an atmospheric filter for human-released CO2.