Planting Billions of Trees Is the 'Best Climate Change Solution Available Today,' Study Finds

Planting more than 500 billion trees could remove around 25 percent of existing carbon from the atmosphere, a new study has found. What's more: there's enough space to do it. 

London skyline and Primrose Hill Park. 

The study, published in Science Friday, set out to assess how much new forest the earth could support without encroaching on farmland or urban areas and came up with a figure of 0.9 billion hectares, an area roughly the size of the U.S., BBC News reported. That makes reforestation "the most effective solution" for mitigating the climate crisis, the researchers concluded.

"Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today and it provides hard evidence to justify investment," senior study author and ETH-Zürich Professor Tom Crowther said, as BBC News reported. "If we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25 percent, to levels last seen almost a century ago."

The new trees would remove around 200 gigatonnes of carbon, or two thirds of what humans have pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.

Read the EcoWatch story by Olivia Rosane - “Planting Billions of Trees Is the 'Best Climate Change Solution Available Today,' Study Finds.”

Climate change could be paused by planting trees, researchers say, as they map out available land

Planting trees to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems like a no-brainer in the fight against climate change.

Australia is one of six countries that together hold
around 50 per cent of the world's tree planting potential.

But until recently it's not been clear how much land we'd need to make a tangible difference to warming, and whether we'd need to reclaim farm and residential land to do it.

Now new research published today in Science estimates there's enough suitable unused land on the globe for reforestation to store around 205 gigatonnes of carbon.

That's enough to buy us about 20 years in the fight against climate change, according to researcher Jean-Francois Bastin from the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich.

Read the story from ABC News by Nick Kilvert - “Climate change could be paused by planting trees, researchers say, as they map out available land.”

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

If you want to make a lot of money, figure out a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and stash it somewhere for several hundred years or forever. Everyone will thank you and shower you with cash. Ahahaha! That’s not true, but it should be true. Unfortunately, Trump is gutting U.S. funding for research in this area. That leaves the Chinese as the world leader for this technology. At the rate CO2 levels are increasing, we may end up renting the technology from them. Ironic, since they probably stole the idea from us to begin with.

Is carbon capture and storage an idea worth pursuing?

Our modern lives insulate us from and make us forget a knowledge that came simply and unforgettably to our hunter-gatherer forebears. That is the discrimination between needs and desires. We don’t need smartphones, automobiles, TV, indoor plumbing, granite countertops, Nikes, non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles, YouTube, scented candles, or video games. We do need food, air, water, a modicum of shelter, and a proper temperature range in which our species can exist. The last was a given until recently. That’s why there’s no life on Mars or Venus — too cold, too hot. The fact that temperatures go up in lockstep with CO2 levels now makes CO2 capture and sequestration mandatory to provide us with one of our necessities, a livable temperature range.

Read the story from Medium by Glen Hendrix - “Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring.”

BHP joins Bill Gates in backing technology to kill off CO2.

BHP has invested $6 million in a company that has developed technology with the potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale using huge fans.

A digital image showing "direct air capture" technology
 which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
deployed on a large scale.

BHP said Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which counts Bill Gates among its private investors, was leading the development of "direct air capture," a technology with the potential to deliver "large scale negative emissions”.

Read the story from The Age by Darren Gray - “BHP joins Bill Gates in backing technology to kill off CO2.”