Oxygen is toxic anyways. Every organisms that breath or has breath oxygen is dead or will die one day.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Trees don't actually produce a lot of oxygen, at least not in aggregate. That's because for every ton of biomass the worlds forests gain through trees growing, you get an equal or larger amount of biomass disappearing through rotting or burning, which... releases CO2 and consumes O2. Only if tree cover as a whole grows can trees in aggregate actually increase atmospheric oxygen and decrease atmospheric CO2.
Unfortunately, that hasn't happened in centuries, maybe millenia if you discard some minor short-lived recovery periods after major reductions in human population after, for example, Gengis Khan's conquests in the 13th century, the black plague in Europe in the 14th century or the extinction 90+% of North America's native population by Eurasian diseases in the 16th century.
iirc when algae die, chances are they sink down to the bottom of the ocean, where they (and their captured CO2) will stay for the next million or so years.
So start tying up bundles of dead trees and sink them?
/s
Seriously though, that would be an easy solution for hemp roots, and hemp captures 10 times the amount of carbon in one harvest, the thing is that you can harvest hemp 4 times a year in many places, and 80% of the carbon is stored in the roots. If we compressed the roots and dumped them to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, that might be a viable solution that we could get funded. You can make a shit ton of stuff out of the plant (including both food and biofuel) and only release back 20% of the carbon.
That's a very interesting idea.
Quick question, you say 80% of the carbon is stored in the root and that you can harvest hemp 4 times a year. Do you harvest the roots when you harvest it? Or are you only harvesting 20% of the total captured carbon on each harvest?
Yeah, harvest the roots so that you dump that 80% in a compactor. Once you have a cube that won't float, and is a couple tons of carbon, dump it in the ocean.
Just don't use the roots or let them rot above sealevel.
The best idea I've heard is to grow fast growing plants then burn them to make power while you capture the carbon using a portion of the power generated - the carbon is either mineralised into building materials or dumped in the old coal mines where the carbon originally came from.
It's a great way of dealing with excess biomas from managed spaces like coppiced city trees, the same can work with algee either cleared from waterways or grown purposeful in polluted water where it'll help extract various toxic elements.
We really have made so many amazing advanced in tech the can help balance the atmosphere but there's so much negativity from both sides they don't get anywhere near the attention they should.
Not if it is in a puddle.
Indeed. Swamps and bogs experience significantly less decay than other biomes, a dead tree will just sink into the bog and stay there a long time.
Bogs, specifically peat bogs, are indeed an exception, but that has very little to do with the trees.
That's not entirely true. Yes, trees lose most of the Carbon they fix when they die, but a part goes into the soil and can remain there for hundreds of years. Also, the type of forest matters - as a forest matures, or if you let a monoculture plantation rewild into a forest, it will be able to suck CO2 even without increasing in area.
As far as I know forest cover in most of Europe is higher than it's been in over 100 years?