Our industry

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

I believe 98% of the worlds oxygen is produced by algae in the sea.

 

Many forests fix little or no carbon, as the carbon being fixed by the trees is the same or less than that being produced by the organisms digesting dead and dying matter on the forest floor.

 

Planting young trees, harvesting them in early maturity and using the timber in a way that keeps the carbon locked up for years or burning it instead of fossil fuel, is the greenest way to use trees.

 

You should not realy say things when you know nothing about the subjects!

 

Study forest ecology and succsesion and then re enter the debate.

 

Where do you think all that coal comes from?

[skyhuck]

You should not realy say things when you know nothing about the subjects!

 

Study forest ecology and succsesion and then re enter the debate.

 

Where do you think all that coal comes from?

 

From a time before the organisms that now digest such matter had evolved.

 

Thats why a large portion of the oil that has leaked in the Gulf has now been digested, by organisms that did not exist when it was laid down.

 

You really need to listen to radio 4 if you want to keep up Tony:001_rolleyes:

[Albedo]

Hama old chum, skyhuck is essentially correct.

 

As you know this is part of my subject which I've looked into quite a bit - climate change.

 

He's made well informed posts on this subject before.

 

Its basic carbon cycle stuff

- Short cycle carbon - trees not effecting net carbon balance when used as fuel etc.

- Long cycle carbon - Fossil fuels locked up on geological time scale, dug up and burned - adding to net carbon balance.

Edited August 9, 2010 by Albedo

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

Hama old chum, skyhuck is essentially correct.

 

As you know this is part of my subject which I've looked into quite a bit - climate change.

 

He's made well informed posts on this subject before.

 

Its basic carbon cycle stuff

- Short cycle carbon - trees not effecting net carbon balance when used as fuel etc.

- Long cycle carbon - Fossil fuels locked up on geological time scale, dug up and burned - adding to net carbon balance.

 

all good points, but we humans Manage vegatation worldwide on massive scales, allow a forest to go through its natural succsession and youll see temp forests go about 5thousand years, tropical ones 9 thousand as a rough guide, eventualy acidification, moisture retention and moss bog succsesion which if you REALLY know your bunions is the key to truly massive and global carbon sequestering. COAL/PEAT

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

Sorry for the derail tony!

 

couldnt resist

[Rupe]

all good points, but we humans Manage vegatation worldwide on massive scales, allow a forest to go through its natural succsession and youll see temp forests go about 5thousand years, tropical ones 9 thousand as a rough guide, eventualy acidification, moisture retention and moss bog succsesion which if you REALLY know your bunions is the key to truly massive and global carbon sequestering. COAL/PEAT

 

true or not, that has nothing to do with tree surgery in the urban environment. What we do to trees in back gardens is not managing vegatation worldwide on massive scales and has no effect positive or otherwise on the global environment, bad tree work is no worse (environmentally) than good tree work, so it does not matter what we do. And any pretense that we have some kind of global importance to trees as whole is, well, pretentious.

 

I'm not saying that we wouldn't suffer in this country without trees, we would. but the vast majority of trees here are not touched by us arbs, the ones we touch are a minor fraction of the countries trees, so our work does not effect the environment as whole.

 

We just do tree work to keep people happy, its no more important than that, and as an industry we are veiwed as not that impotant tradesmen doing the work that people want us to do for their benefit. We shoudl get over ourselves and get on with it rather than tryign to convince people otherwise.

[Tree Man Tom]

true or not, that has nothing to do with tree surgery in the urban environment. What we do to trees in back gardens is not managing vegatation worldwide on massive scales and has no effect positive or otherwise on the global environment, bad tree work is no worse (environmentally) than good tree work, so it does not matter what we do. And any pretense that we have some kind of global importance to trees as whole is, well, pretentious.

 

I'm not saying that we wouldn't suffer in this country without trees, we would. but the vast majority of trees here are not touched by us arbs, the ones we touch are a minor fraction of the countries trees, so our work does not effect the environment as whole.

 

We just do tree work to keep people happy, its no more important than that, and as an industry we are veiwed as not that impotant tradesmen doing the work that people want us to do for their benefit. We shoudl get over ourselves and get on with it rather than tryign to convince people otherwise.

 

Well said that man

[Alex Talbot]

Hi Tony,

I agree with Rube, I'm in it for the money, but I also love trees. It breaks my heart to see some of the really bad tree work that goes on and I tend to talk my way out of work regularly to save a tree (Doh!)

I think something could be done to save us all being "Tarred by the same brush".

Hope you're well chap.

[Albedo]

Skyhuck, I wonder how long you can use a chainsaw up a tree in pruning operations, to offset the amount of oxygen created by that tree in a year with carbon dioxide from the saws exhaust??

 

I used to have a reference for something like this and can't find it. Just on C02 sequestered, not on 02 emitted by the tree.

 

From memory, it takes about 100 mature oaks to sequester the C02 from one persons average car use for a year.

 

There is apparently some research on this on the US Env Agency web site but I've looked and can't find that either.

 

So from my rough ballpark, vague memory of a statistic, equivalent chainsaw use and travel to site etc might be calculated, in terms of trees needed to balance it. The problem is that the C02 sequestered is released at the end of the trees life so we need another 100 trees growing somewhere to lock up the same C02.

 

There aint enough space for enough trees, is the problem (in terms of soaking up our own emissions). I had the research on this too but can't find that either.

 

I looked thru the thread to see how this C02 stuff might be relevant to the OP and it seems that it arose from Hama's 'lungs of the world' comment.

 

My view is that urban trees won't solve the problems of the world, but they do help, and are also nice to look at.

[Mesterh]

If were starting to talk about coal and oil I remember either watching a really interesting program or reading in something somewhere that they may think coal and oil its produced differently than how we thought it was.

 

Hmmm reading that back it coulda been a fat bloke down the pub that told me.