A tree farm has more trees than a forest, and is pruned regularly. The great planes growing cereal crops that are harvested absorb more than the grasses that were there.
Wrong, and wrong. Why? Because in an old-growth forest, the plant mass isn't just the trees - it's EVERYTHING in that forest: the moss, the ferns, the vines, the bushes, and the weeds...all of which is removed in a tree farm. And FYI the total number of tree farms on the planet don't even comprise a fraction of the amount of old-growth forests we've cut down over the centuries.
And cereal crops absorb more than the grasses? Really? And you can back that up with, what? Guy, I grew up in farmland, and even in the biggest farms, maybe half of the ground is covered with plants. Why? There's these things called "rows" - you may have heard of them. In between each row of plants, there's bare dirt...dirt that in a meadow or wild grassland would be filled with...plant life. What's more, grasslands don't get plowed up to be bare dirt for months at a time. And how much CO2 is that bare dirt absorbing? None.
Okay, guy? Your points...aren't what you thought they were.
The hardiness zones have moved north about 100 miles, improving the growth capability of vast millions of acres.
And the tundra is melting and releasing methane (which is 25X worse than CO2 when it comes to global warming). And vast tracts of land (
including much of the US RIGHT NOW) is in the throes of extreme or exceptional drought.
[/QUOTE]Some amount of the CO2 increase is unquestionably man's doing, we just do not know how much.
Wrong. We DO know how much. We know the natural sources of CO2, what can cause the CO2 level to spike, and what can absorb it...but we also know how much we're adding every week of every year of every decade.
Thankfully there are limits on how much CO2 we can rearrange, many say we have already passed peak oil.
It's not just regular oil wells. Fracking - which has enabled America to become the world's largest producer of oil - is also used to extract natural gas...and
a surprising amount of that is leaked to the atmosphere.
The reality is that oil, gas, and coal, will get harder and more expensive to extract.
The problem is, the point at which fossil fuels will become economically impractical is several decades in the future...but we need action on the climate NOW. Climate change is here NOW. The ice is melting NOW. The sea level is rising NOW. The ocean's acidification is increasing NOW.
Man made carbon fuels will get less expensive, as the technology improves, and alternative energy sources increase.
Again, that's decades in the future. Humankind needs action NOW.
The curves will cross, and people will on average always choose the least expensive option.
Again, that's decades in the future. Humankind needs action on climate change NOW.
