Hate to be the “actually…” guy, esp. after your long hiatus, but wood is much too short-term a form of storage for this challenge. We need to get CO2 stuck into *rocks*.
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can't it be modelled as a decay of the stock in whatever wooden sequestration mode it's in? Does more than ~1% of the carbon mass of a wooden structure cycled out per annum on avg? Shingles last only 20, telephone poles about 30 but that's got to be on the extreme end of things
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Replying to @DanielleFong @patrickc
I have no doubt you can do the match better than I can, but even if you “only” had to re-store the carbon you temporarily sequestered in wood every 50 years, that’s still much too short….requires a very stable & continuous re-sequestration process for millennia.
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We need sequestered carbon to stay sequestered, effectively forever.
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Replying to @chrisnelder @patrickc
The atmospheric levels are too high, on that we can agree. We took something in the ground that was effectively out of the atmospheric cycle except as a sink, and we are putting it in the air. We need to put it in something else: could buildings work? In principle, yes.
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but it does boggle the mind when you consider what society would be like with that much wooden construction. Imagine a small home's worth, per person, per year. You'd have to have a future where we'd build wooden cathedrals to our forest religion. It doesn't sound too bad, tbh
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Replying to @DanielleFong @patrickc
If you could grow that much wood that quickly… “And why do we call them ‘buildings,’ anyway? Shouldn’t we call them ‘builts?’” —John Gallagher
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Replying to @chrisnelder @patrickc
yeah; that's a very fair point. Indeed there are massive challenges with forestry: activities in Canadian forests they account due to the forestry itself are net negative carbon but the forests as a whole are emitting because of damage from insects (esp. pine beetle).
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but as a comparison, nature does cycle carbon impressively quickly. Taken as a whole, terrestrial plants absorb ~120 Gt C / year, that's 15% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Forest biomass is 92% of all terrestrial biomass and is about 400 Gt C; but it doesn't cycle that fast
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temperate and boreal forests aren't keeping up with the 10 Gt/C year human emissions; they are off by about a factor of 2, based on these figures: https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon … you'd have to cut emissions it's totally different if you can manage tropical forests well. (the Amazon...)
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