This is true. Add “geological” to the beginning for added clarity.
Burning coal produces two types of by-products that have significant effect on the climate: those that exacerbate the greenhouse effect (CO2) and those that reduce it (particulates.) For years, we’ve been able to reduce sulfur and particulate pollution from coal-powered power plants, which has made our air cleaner, but has perversely worsened global warming by reducing the density of light-reflecting particulates in the atmosphere. This is, I think, what you are referring to. But I believe What Exit was talking about the next generation of clean coal, which is about actually taking the CO2 out of the emissions (likely by sequestering them under the sea or in stable geological formations.) That would certainly be a win for reducing the global warming effect, but, unfortunately the technology isn’t there yet.
Do you have a cite? It’s my understanding that it’s been years since this was true.
But, again, I think What Exit was talking about slowing the rate of population growth, not reducing the population.
nitpick: actually the highest per-capita carbon emissions tend to belong to oil-producing countries that subsidize hydrocarbons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_carbon_dioxide_emissions_to_GDP_per_capita.
Sure, slash-and-burn has been practiced for millenia. Doesn’t mean we can still do it with modern population levels and still have forests.
Here is a short wiki article, by the way, about a proposed zero-emission (including CO2) coal-burning power plant. It’ll be interesting to see how well this technology works out, and what kind of costs we’ll be looking at for it as compared with other zero-emission options like wind or nuclear.
A meaningless if innocent stunt based firmly on his innumeracy.
The Amazon basin and Andean foothills would cover well over 2 million square miles of forest. At an estimated 1 million trees (of various sizes and ages) per square mile that would be 2000 billion trees. on 4% of the planet’s land area alone.
So the turnover of new growth to replace old growth in the Amazon would easily exceed the proposed 1 billion plantings (to be financed, presumably, by gullible governments).
Her.
I make one billion trees about one and a third million acres of forest, about the size of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, so it’s unlikely to tip the planetary environment one way or the other, particularly in the existing context of massive deforestation .
However, from what I recall, the whole Kenyan planting movement was about replanting areas denuded by charcoal burning, overgrazing, etc., not about trying to create massive forests where there were none before. From their site they quote the figures of 10% tree cover being desireable, versus a current level of 2% for Kenya. So I would take this to be more about planting small copses, hedgerows, shade trees, etc. rather than big plantations. Given that just one charity has planted 3 million trees in the UK alone (about .16% of the worlds land area), a billion trees is a trivial effort, and well worth doing just to make neighbourhoods nicer to live in, providing the local ecosystems can accommodate it.
Personally, I think this is just Maathai trying to get her pet hobby horse (trees! trees!) some more attention by linking it to the big issue of the day, but that’s what advocacy is all about these days.
Can anyone provide a cite that planting trees is actually more of a carbon sink than planting crops annually? After all, the seed from crops goes as food to us or animals, and the stems go as hay, all of which store carbon.
What about the role of domestic food animals (ruminants)/ Cows, goats and sheep regualrly fart/burp and outgas large quantities of methane (CH4)-what happens to all of those smelly farts? Does the atmosheric methan decompose; or does it combine with other stuff (and sequester the carbon). Somebody ought to fit catalytic converters to all of those polluting sheep and cattle! :smack:
I just need to add that slash and burn like we think of it may not have been what was going on in the Amazon for millenia:
Terra preta is produced by slow burning to produce charcoal, which is then stirred into the soil. It stores far more carbon in the soil than does slash-and-burn. This is according to a book, 1491, that is now out, and that I just read.
My dad used to make charcoal like this when he was a youngster. I have to ask him about the above supposition.
Perhaps killing off the vast herds of buffalo and wildebeeste wasn’t such a bad move after all?
Which isn’t actually clean coal at all. Rather it is simply geosequestration.
No, I don’t. I kind of hoped someone else would have some figures.
It doesn’t change anything. There is no known way of controlling human population, period. People reproduce at self-governing rates. In the entire history of the world nothing has been shown to make people produce faster or slower, with the possible exception mass murder.
No. That is a link to a disputed (read “worthless”) Wikipedia page on carbon emissions relative to GDP. Absolutely nothing to do with carbon emissions per capita.
Nor does it mean we can not. I don’t quite see the point here. Swidden agriculture is provably sustainable precisely because we know it has been practiced for millennia.
It doesn’t work that way. This is an accounting exercise, you can’t count use a stable asset to offset an accumulating debt. The turnover in the Amazon is nothing but a stable asset, it’s a carbon pool. It does nothing whatsoever to offset carbon sources. In contrast 1 billion plantings represents a real carbon sink, it can and does offset carbon sources.
The error is not Maathai’s innumeracy but your own failure to evaluate this as an accounting exercise, not merely basic mathematics.
No, they don’t. If you were storing carbon you would need to be getting heavier every day. The fact that you aren’t (or at least not to any significant degree) proves that there is no carbon storage taking place. Humans and other animals are nothing but carbon fired engines. We take in crops and hay and burn it, releasing CO2 as an exhaust gas. There is no net carbon storage.
In contrast tree seedling do get heavier every day, and in appreciable quantities. A tree will gain several tonnes of weight over an 80 year lifespan, something that isn’t true of more than a few thousand individual animals.
Ruminants are a problem, though nobody is sur how significant they are. Most places already had significant ruminant population before human intervention, indeed we may well have reduced ruminant numbers over much of the world. Remember the vast bison herds that roamed over north America, or the herds of deer, bison and cattle that roamed over Europe have been all but exterminated by people.
So all we really need to be concerned about is any increase in ruminant numbers we may have achieved. That’s hard to evaluate and is based on a lot of guesswork outside areas that had no natural ruminant populations.
But even allowing for a significant ruminant increase, it’s all complicated by the carbon dynamics involved in those ruminants removing thatch that would have decayed anaerobicaly, and in the role of grazers in suppressing fires and promoting tree growth. At the moment the jury is out on whether grazing has a positive or negative impact overall.
As far as catalytic converters, there are numerous schemes aimed at reducing rumen methane production.
Seems like the Chinese have succeeded in slowing down their pop growth, enough to start relaxing restrictions.
I have not studied it, but haven’t China and Singapore had success in slowing down their population growth rates? Am I misinformed on these two countries? This seems to be a commonly heard factoid.
Jim
China’s rather draconian laws have produced nearly the identical reduction in birthrate that India has seen.
Prosperity and the reduction of childhood deaths reduces childbith rates more effectively than any legal strategem (other than providing more wealth and health care to keep kids alive).
Let’s double the number of new trees to 2 billion, plant them all in the Sahara just North of the equator, and let their mass as the Earth spins pull the Earth out of its stable orbit. That would give us new things to worry about rather than overheated climates.
What?
Planting a billion trees would be the easy part. Getting them to grow would be much harder. You would have to ensure that weeds and grasses don’t outcompete them. They would need water and soil with enough nutrients to grow. Also they would be vunerable to weather extremes and animals/insects. Also, assuming the people in the area have cut down one forest what is to stop them from doing it again. Reforestation is possible but there is a lot more to it than just putting seeds or seedlings in the ground.
Can you cite the above please. I thought India’s growth rate was higher than China’s. I know Indonesia’s is higher and they have been fairly successful economically. The are even more densely populated per square mile that the big two in population.
This still does not address Singapore, which I have heard was fairly successful.
Jim
India’s growth rate is higher. However, the reduction from earlier rates, (my “reduction in birthrate”) has been similar. On checking, I see that overall, India has been less successful than China–although in the South of India, where wealth and health are expanding faster, India has surpassed China; it is the poorer North of India that keeps India on the wrong side of the scales.
From an earlier thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2153055&postcount=32
Singapore might get away with using laws simply because it really is not that large a country. (It is also very wealthy.) I’ll still support health and wealth as the best way to reduce birth rates.
Tom, I put together this Google Spreadsheet for fair comparison.
Please note that China’s Population growth is extremely low at only 0.59% (2006 est.). My other three test countries are all around 1.40%.
You will see that both China & Singapore have much lower birth rates and much higher median ages. Most of Singapore’s growth rate is immigration if you check the stats. It appears that China and Singapore have indeed disproved **Blake’s ** statement above. Population can be controlled.
Using the word **draconian ** seems to be putting a lot of prejudice into what others might term smart planning if they were being equally non-objective.
Jim
Your link takes me only to the Google spreadsheet front page, not to any numbers.
The growth rates in the sites to which I indirectly linked were, in 1999,
India 1.68%
China 0.77%
Singapore 1.15%
The growth rates for China and India were both near 6% in the early 1950s.
From 6% to 0.77% or from 6% to 1.68% in the same period is a very similar drop.
You say that China now has a rate of 0.59%–at a time when they have backed off their harsh penalities for having more than one child --down from 0.77% just seven years ago and earlier in their economic boom.
It would seem to me that the decline of growth appears directly connected to increases in wealth. On what basis do you believe that active government family planning has actually played a greater role than simply letting the people make their own decisions based on wealth and standards of living?
For example, the Wikipedia article on the topic quotes Hasketh, Lu, and Xing, “However, the policy itself is probably only partially responsible for the reduction in the total fertility rate. The most dramatic decrease in the rate actually occurred before the policy was imposed. Between 1970 and 1979, the largely voluntary “late, long, few” policy, which called for later childbearing, greater spacing between children, and fewer children, had already resulted in a halving of the total fertility rate, from 5.9 to 2.9. After the one-child policy was introduced, there was a more gradual fall in the rate until 1995, and it has more or less stabilized at approximately 1.7 since then.”
I see no reason to not label the Chinese actions as draconian, since they have achieved greater reductions of growth in periods of rising economic wealth than they have in periods of harsher family law.
I am disappointed the googlelink failed.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pg0TnA5z8KeMZ3ioozJX_WQ
This is suppose to be viewable to anyone.
This is the preview, maybe it will work better.
My numbers are est. 2006 from the CIA factbook.
Here are the 4 links to the CIA in case the googlelinks fail.
Indonesia https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/id.html#People
India https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/in.html#People
China https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html#People
Singapore https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/sn.html#People
How far reaching across China’s Billion people has the economic success been? For a large portion of the country, are they significantly better off then they were in the Eighties?
Why has Indonesia’s growth rate not dropped as they have had economic success in the last few decades?
Your argument has some very strong points, but it also appears to leave much to interpretation.
Jim