Will increased plant growth absorb the excess CO2 and slow down global warming?

Answer 1

Im not sure many of you are thinking in the right direction. the largest producer of O2/consumer of CO2 , is algae. trees and terrestrial plant life make up a very very small percentage of the cycle. the smarter way of going about the whole thing would be to mass farm algae :) not only is it a food source, but it would do its job governing green house gasses

Answer 2

We would have to increase the amount of trees and plants on the planet by a huge amount. In the short term we could plant loads of trees and they would absorb much of the CO2 but when they start dying in a hundred years or so much of the carbon would be released, in effect we'd be delaying the consequences and passing the problem on to future generations.

Certain trees and plants in certain environments are better at absorbing CO2 than other species in other locations and if we were to plant the right type of trees in the tropical regions we could slow down global warming.

To apply some numbers - each person on the planet produces an average of 4 tons of CO2 per year. Some species of tree produce a net CO2 loss of up to 3 tons during their lifetime. We'd need to plant 1.3 trees in the tropics every year for every person on the planet. That's nearly 10 billion trees a year that would need to be planted just to offset CO2 emissions at their current levels, we'd need a further 3 billion trees to offset other greenhouse gas emissions.

Answer 3

the biggest thoughts that the human beings can strive against global warming is getting rid of their older type vehicles (1979 Buick) because, older vehicles emmitt extra poisonous fumes into the air. Its obtrusive that the added technological stepped ahead a vehicle is, the a lot less risky gases it emmitts. A vehicle that develop into equipped 3 or 4 years in the past will be extra economy pleasant than a vehicle that develop into assembled 35 years in the past. for prime populated cities along with long island, Bus and Taxi companys might want to replace cutting-edge automobiles with vehicles that are powered through hydrogen or electrical energy. merely imagine, if each major city used the Toyota Prius as taxi's, there's a decreased element of pollution, and also taxi fares might want to be truly decrease to boot.

Answer 4

They're doing that some right now, but they can't keep up with us burning fossil fuels. We'd need maybe 5-10 times as much plant life to do that.

Look at this graph.

http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/mauna_loa_record/mlo_record.html

The little squiggles are nature doing its' thing. CO2 falls a bit during summer when plants are active, and rises during the winter. The huge increase is us, burning fossil fuels. The natural carbon cycle buried carbon in fossil fuels over a very long time, little bit by little bit. We dig them up and burn them, real fast. That's a problem.

Man is upsetting the balance of nature. We need to fix that.

By the way CO2 does both things; it creates warming, and is released from the oceans by warming. Historically that meant CO2 came after warming. Now warming and CO2 are going up together, one clear sign this warming is not natural.

Answer 5

We'd have to get a heck of a lot of trees! It think it would be wiser to change our consumption habits and change the amounts of CO2 we spew out, rather than change the environment. I mean, think of all the forests we can save in BC or the Amazon if they were NEVER CUT DOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE. This way, we're not waiting for a tree to grow in 40 years, and then suffer from even worse pollution down the road.

Answer 6

Only temporarily. When the plants die and decay, they put all the CO2 back into the air. Trees may live 200 years, but eventually they die, so all planting trees does is delay the problem for our great grand children to worry about.

Answer 7

You've got it backwards. Historically, temperature increases always cause more CO2 to come out of the world's water. We can look at ice cores for thousands of years and that's always the case.

Answer 8

According to my Bio course I just finished, yes. But will it really make a difference? Does it really matter? who knows...