Effect of planting 1 billion trees...

[What_Exit]

Tom, I read the complete article you linked from Wikipedia.
This section says:

Achievement
China’s population of 1.3 billion is said to be 300 million (.3 billion) smaller than it would likely have been without the enactment of this policy.[1]. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.7 births per woman, a sub-replacement fertility rate (compared to 2.1, essentially a replacement level rate, in the United States).[5] Such a reduction in fertility reduced the severity of problems that come with overpopulation, like epidemics, slums, overwhelmed social services (health, education, law enforcement, and more), and strain on the ecosystem from abuse of fertile land and production of high volumes of waste.

We have within the same article a section that appears to be declaring the one-child policy a success.

Jim

[Aquila_Be]

@Blake

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.

The point I was trying to get across was that the impact of planting 1 billion new trees to add to the vast number of existing trees would have a miniscule effect.

If we were talking about a 100 billion new trees, then there might (or possibly might not) be a measurable impact on the composition of the atmosphere.

Targo

[Quartz]

@Blake

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.

Since when do we burn hay? It goes as food and bedding, not on the bonfire. And the hay is the vast bulk of the mass of the crop.

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…

But is this more than 80 years of crop growth?

[ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies]

@Blake

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.

Hmmm…how about the availability of food?

Most of the global population has been stockpiling since the Agricultural Revolution, which has allowed our population growth to boom. But there is a heck of a lot of the “history of the world” that took place prior to the cultural migration to stockpiling food.

[Do_Not_Taunt]

@Blake

Which isn’t actually clean coal at all. Rather it is simply geosequestration.

No, you missed the point. Clean coal has a dual meaning. One meaning refers to scrubbing all the sulfur and particulates so there’s little pollution; the other, however, refers to the entire system of creating zero-emission coal-fired power plants.

Since we’re talking about what people mean by a phrase, I think it’s fair to offer this cite: clean coal - Google Search

Click on a few of the links. See what the predominate meanings of ‘clean coal’ are.

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.

A lot of others have responded to this point, but I’ll just add that while people reproduce according to self-governing rates, they do so in response to certain conditions and incentives. Change those, and you can change the birth rate. For example, quite a large body of evidence shows that combining the lowering of child-mortality rates and the empowering of women have a drastic effect on birthrate.

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.

First, I’ll reproduce the link for everyone’s ease of fact-checking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_carbon_dioxide_emissions_to_GDP_per_capita

Second, I encourage you to click on it and look for more than a couple of seconds. The first column is clearly labeled “CO2 emissions per capita in 2002” - not relative to GDP. The third column is the one labeled “CO2 emissions per capita/GDP per capita”. For the purposes of my point, which was a nitpick anyway, you can pretend like second two columns aren’t even there. See - there, now it’s nothing more than a chart listing carbon emissions per capita by country.

And thirdly, I also encourage you to visit the ‘talk page.’ Here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_carbon_dioxide_emissions_to_GDP_per_capita. It discusses exactly what was disputed about the page. In summary, there seemed to be some earlier complaints about exactly how the data were laid out, and a couple of errors were pointed out and since fixed. No one has disputed the accuracy of the carbon emissions numbers.

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.

Blake, you’re a smart guy. I’ve read a lot of your posts. I know you understand that millenia of use of swidden agriculture with a low population density in no way proves its sustainability with high population densities. So what are you getting at here? Why do you seem to be claiming the opposite?

[What_Exit]

It took some checking, but I just found out that Google docs does not allow publishing of spreadsheets. Instead I had to use the much inferior table in Google Doc feature and publish that.
Here is the table I was trying to link to earlier in the thread.

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddjb6kdz_5dpk7t5

Anyone that wants a clean Excel 2000 version of it, Email me and I will send it to you.

jim

[Sleel]

Re: embodied energy of solar cells. I found three links in a quick search.

Worst case, energy return in 7 years, possibly in 3 or less. Most recent source cited is 1996. I think we’ve improved since then.
http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/pvpayback.htm

Modern (2002 publishing date) photovoltaic cells pay for themselves in 1-5 years and generate enough energy over their lifetimes to create between 6 and 31 solar cells that take an equivalent amount of energy to produce.
http://jupiter.clarion.edu/~jpearce/Papers/netenergy.pdf

Link to a PDF on this page. Solar cells pay for the energy used to produce them in 1-4 years.
http://www.solarcentury.com/knowledge_base/files/solar_cells_and_energy_payback

I didn’t check on this claim previously and thought that it was plausible that the cost of production in terms of energy might actually be higher than they could provide. That was obviously wrong. When I was looking at prices for used solar cells in doing some preliminary planning for a zero-energy home I found that some cells from the late 70s are still viable in some cases, though their watt/area production was much lower than original spec. Those cells may have paid for themselves a hundred times over.

[ralph124c]

So we should plant a lot of trees, then cut them down, and sink the logs in deep, cold lakes ( where the wood will not decay)-or ship them to the arctic?

[What_Exit]

@ralph124c

So we should plant a lot of trees, then cut them down, and sink the logs in deep, cold lakes ( where the wood will not decay)-or ship them to the arctic?

Do not forget the cutting, shipping & transporting have their own carbon burden.
Shipping to the arctic would probably yield no net gain and be cost prohibitive. We have ways to greatly reduce CO[sub]2[/sub] production without cost prohibitive methods being used.

Jim