LET'S STOP BEING
FOOLED WITH TREES (and explain it to all your friends)
The United States
and most affluent Western societies produce about twenty
tons of carbon dioxide per year, per head of population.
A growing forest produces about twenty cubic metres of wood
per year, per hectare. Timber growth in rain forests
can reach forty cubic cubic metres, but all the tropical
rain forests are already saturated and can't absorb any
more CO2. That dump is full. (Forest Soils and Nutrient
Cycles by Dr. Peter Attiwill and Prof. Geoffrey Leeper.
University of Melbourne. Australia).
Wood has twice
as much carbon as carbon dioxide but it's porous and less
dense - that's why it floats. So we need to grow twenty
cubic metres of wood per year to compensate for the twenty
tons of CO2 we each produce.
In about
thirty years the old trees start dying off. So forest growth
stabilizes and ceases absorbing CO2. As a CO2 sink, our
forest is full.
At age thirty
each of us would need another empty hectare of land to plant
and grow more trees for our next thirty years of CO2 production.
Then the next generation would need their couple of hectares.
Humans on
average have about 0.8 ha or two acres of agricultural land
to live on and grow all their food and fibre. Trees as a
carbon sink is a giant PR fabrication.
"The
great masses of the people will more easily fall victims
to a big lie than to a small one.".. Adolf
Hitler in Mein Kampf 1925.
But I prefer
Lincoln "---but you can not fool all of the people
all of the time".
