Climate change: the trouble with trees

On Friday at 1:00pm GMT we are hosting a live Q&A about the issues surrounding climate change. What do you want to ask our experts? Comment below. They won’t just be discussing trees, so ask anything to do with the issues and approaches to tackling one of the biggest threats to humanity.

I have seen a study where the cost of remediation of Environment degradation exceeded the total output of the combined economies of the North America and Europe since the Industrial Age to NOW.

Thanks Jair B. More cattle does not mean more prosperity. It means less water in the Amazonian Basin, the rivers will die, the animals will die and the people will die. You were wrong just as the Europeans that changed the Great Plains of North America into pasture and farm land.

The main issue is with the "economist" and the "discovery" channel [and the likes thereof] raking in millions each year from recording and televising the effects of climate change yet refuse to hand some or at least 50% those same funds over to counter climate change effects

Bill Gates says we need to cut all the trees down....lol. seriously, he did

Usually trees are harvested after 40 or 50 years. By then we might have other carbone capture techniques ready. Besides, we don't have to harvest the trees, we can keep the forests. Trees have many benefits, they help the soil storing carbon, temper the weather, harbor animals, etc.

even when humans are trying to save the planet, its for selfish reasons. not accounting for the native wildlife and ecosystems always comes back to get us

lets say if you transfer all food/organic waste (that does not have pests) to very very poor soils, they can decompose over the years and natural regeneration takes place very quickly, like when an orange company threw hundreds or thousands tonnes of in a Park with degraded land, over the 15 years everything grew back

Veniros a España, desertizada completamente y vereis cómo cambiareis de opinión. Los arboles fijan el suelo, liberan oxigeno, impiden el avance del desierto y atraen la humedad y los insectos que abren el camino de los otros animales. Es un circulo virtuoso que rompimos en España hace centenares de años y ahora padecemos las consecuencias. Luchar contra la desertificación es plantar árboles. Don't be stupids!

Please put atractive voice and phisical beautiful women, with high intelect wome as you are doing, to inpire to go on conservation.

Planting trees isn't the issue, accessing enough land to let the trees regrow is the issue. We need to de-agriculturalize and put a moratorium of suburban houses.

With slight rises in CO2 concentration in the earth's atmosphere, forests are growing faster and thicker. So, will deforesters be able to keep up with natural reforestation on a global scale?

Plant trees

logistically, it just doesnt make sense to focus efforts into planting trees as the combatant against climate change. more green spaces and rewilding is great but it's not even close to being a solution to the problem. it's just not

Reforestation is a complex process, complex but not impossible.

Simon Lewis of Global Change Science is inaccurate in saying there is not the space on Earth to plant enough trees to recapture all the carbon that has been emitted. According to the late Pieter Hoff, if we replant worldwide an area roughly equivalent to the size of Texas every year, in other words 50 million hectares, we can compensate for CO2 emissions.

How much carbon dioxide is there in air

To many climate change perdictions have been proven false they can tell you how many tons of carbon humans put into the atmosphere but when asked the percentage of carbon humans put into the atmosphere they don't know . We need to be cleaner as we have been doing without trying to do it to quickly as has been happening recently

to think the whole world used to be a forest once.

Interesting I wrote a report about this back in 1990 when I was studying Forestry in Ontario. It's almost like they took my report.

Why not grow algae? Algae sequesters 10 times as much carbon as trees, and that algae can then be used as a food source.
Go ahead and point out that not all species of algae are edible for humans and can actually be harmful for humans. Don’t forget that about 75% of our planet is covered by water and that water also has its own problems with carbon. If we were to promote oceanic algae growth instead of planting more trees that we will just cut down releasing the carbon later, then we could potentially make a huge impact in the war against climate change.
Approximately 99.9% of the people where I live refuse to give up meat products. One of the problems with the meat industry is land usage. Algae doesn’t necessarily need to be grown horizontally, it can also be grown vertically. This means that it might not require as much land to grow. When some species of algae are fed to cattle it also solves a second problem with the meat industry. Methane is 10 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and cattle that are fed certain types of algae tend not to produce as much methane. This means that not only could we reduce land usage by producing algae, we could also reduce methane and carbon emissions.
Perhaps algae is food for thought.

Great video. My goal is to plant 21 trees on my property ❤

It just seems like that we just need to find a fine balance between trees and growing crops

Cannot watch the amount of lies you publish to cover the global elites shoulders.

This info is BS...canada where I live forests have not shank at all....billions of trees are planted every year by Mother nature...not man

Thank you for this critical deep dive into the economic benefit of giving the management of the forests back to the aboriginal folks. This is a strategy we should all be supporting since it is more sustainable and affordable. Why not reach out to Warren Buffett about investing in those efforts. I understand he has around 88 billion dollars not currently invested which could go a long way in supporting native people managing their forests. Lord knows the carbon footprint of a billionaire is extraordinarily large. I would say this would be the least billionaires could do to address the harm they've done to our life support system. Be well.

So the obvious solution: HEAVILY tax fossil fuels and use the taxes to buy land, which becomes public forest. This would simultaneously decrease fossil fuel consumption and increase old growth carbon sinks.

The trouble with The Economist.

Carbon makes trees grow faster???? does it not?????

we have to decrease consumerism by 90 %, forget about GDP, money , just live on bare minimum happily , no rat race, live on frutis and millets, 100 days of fasting in a year.. no more jobs, just live with a family a village life...no more coroporate rat race...

Still nothing happened tho everything still feels normal to me. Nothing changed.

Hempsoil/Circular Farming/Permaculture/Cannabis Era begins

As romantic as it may be, "wilding" ist not a general usable solution. If you start calculating properly, especially including the various soil carbon layers, you will find that highly productive agriculture does store a huge amount of carbon, which will turn into emissions during the transformation process, and henceforth it takes many decades for the actual carbon sink to be filled up again and surpassed by naturally grown forest.
It is ofc a big gain for biodiversity, but not automatically net carbon negative for the first few decades. We are doing years of studies on this now and it is not as easy as you make it sound. Unfortunately. And lets not start about the necessity of agricultural self-sufficiency, especially in these times.

In cuba the land is so lush because it’s so diverse. It was so special to see their land. They also grow diverse plants that help each other.

the current rate of temperature change of the earth has been revised downward to 1.1C/century. Of that , an unknown quantity is natural however that higher CO2 levels are greening the earth according to NASA. NASA Goddard has some great slides of the earth greening rate which are shocking. Between vegetation , reduced carbon emissions , proper forest management, and modification of the desertification with dams and permaculture, we could be at a stable condition from manmade temperature change in 50 yrs.

One of the best things to do for climate change is to stop tilling soils in farming. Watch: Kiss the Earth, it's fascinating. Farm subsidies (to promote producing soy and corn) as well as burning fossil fuels are the worst contributors to climate change.

Oh look 👀 the climate change FRAUD. I like trees but let’s quit the climate scam

Thank you, for this story🙏🏽the importance of trees in helping combat climate change is so pivotal.🌲🌳🌴💚💚

So we are f. Plant a tree I'm trying to make are forest health by take acorns and pine and Manzanita ,ash trees qild apple trees no out side trees out of the western United States.

Trees are a large part of the solution that globalist elitists want to distract from. Globalist elitists want you to buy high-tech, brittle, EXPENSIVE, centralized solutions rather than go for cheap, fairer, durable, low-tech, decentralized ones.
Walter Jehne proposes using adapted natural processes starting with 1) rainwater harvesting techniques (see Brad Lancaster for dryland adapted ones), 2) regreening through diverse, site-appropriate plants ( especially trees and this can easily include food producing ones), and healthy natural soil regeneration.
This has many benefits including fire reduction, recharging aquifers, adding food diversity and nutrition, reducing flood and drought damage, etc. The list of specific benefits is much much longer while the harms of globalist solutions is long.
Even city people can enjoy the benefits of localized rainwater harvesting. Brad Lancaster is in a video on urban rainwater harvesting that lowers the need for city water and other benefits.

Take the time to look at alternative, low harm solutions.

We have cut way to many trees people the trees clean the air I was taught that in junior high its called photosynthesis stop cutting the planets air cleaners.

would it be right to say that capitalism is the trouble with trees ?

Eucalyptus trees absorb a lot of water Their roots go deep and take lot of water Can we plant other native species which allow other vegetables and fruits trees to grow amidst them Of we just throw seeds of fruit trees and medicinal plants and vegetables around these areas they will all grow simultaneously creating a balanced ecosystem. After a year we can install some beehives cages or boxes which will accelerate the pollination and increase in the growth of all forest or orchids. The local community will benefit within a year Once they realise the usefulness they will look after them in the years to come If we make manmade canals and lakes every rain will nourish them and they will never have any water scarcity and even if there is no rain for one or two years there will be sufficient water in those water bodies. Even animals will have enough water They can have fish in them if they want.

Sometimes I think if we have a mandatory EARTH HOUR every month can we rent longer on earth?

At the beginning of the video the main interveiwee talks about "pulling carbon out of atmosphere". By the end, he's framing the narrative as "offsetting fossil fuels". The way these pundits flip between the two completely different projects demonstrates the total confusion surrounding this subject. A gift to fossil fuel industry and protecting the status quo.

This video makes it clear that preserving current forests is vital!
Animal agriculture is a major cause of deforestation!
Why are they intentionally burning the Amazon?
To graze cattle and to grow soy to export for feeding farm animals.

Great presentation. Honest science. Carbon cycle. Decreasing the use of fossil fuels and increasing the use of nuclear and renewable energy is the path to a solution. On this path, the public
must educate itself and we must be practical. However, history tells us that we are neither educated nor practical. Therefore, the actual solution may be for humans to adapt to the inevitable.

It's so ironic/amazing/sad to think that saving the planet won't be pursued as strongly/effectively as it could be because it doesn't make money.

Planting trees is fine. But planting trees as offset to business as usual fossil fuel burning is a scam. It does not make sense. Trees are already fully occupied in the natural carbon cycle. Not one tree on earth has excess capacity to participate in the fossil fuel or industrial agriculture methane cycles. Every tree on the plant in pre industrial times was 100% occupied in maintaining the equilibrium of the "natural" carbon cycle. The oceans acted as a buffer to absorb the occasional step function increases like huge volcanic eruptions Karatoa , Tarawera, etc or huge forest fires...then over a long time the equilibrium of 350 ppm would reestablish.
So claiming that trees can be the solution to ANY industrial fossil fuel emissions is simply a scam. We must call it such.

Because trees release a substantial amount of C back to the atmosphere when they die, planting lots of trees now at best postpones the release of the absorbed C by a few decades. The main benefits of trees lie elsewhere--> less erosion/cleaner air/more wildlife/lower temperature via shade and transpiration; not in slowing down global warming. The only real way to combat global warming is to stop burning fossil fuels and to stop population increase (not more than 1 or 2 kids per family -->reduced energy consumption).