3 story semi-detached townhouses with units of various sizes and little patches of grass outside and enclosed play areas for kids, and a 24 hour fitness gym, on-site.

It should be walkable to grocery stores and outdoor malls with movie theatres and gaming places, like Noobs, a totally cool place where you can sit in state of the art gaming chairs and play Rainbow Six on 50 inch screens.

Then people wouldn't drive so much and we wouldn't be having the mess.

I thought this was the experiment that exposed trees to higher levels of CO2 and then measured the difference in biomass accumulation.

Just to be clear, thats different than the debate of temperate trees as carbon sinks (cue debate...)

Tom


Tom Arnold Chief Environmental Officer TerraPass

That trees are a significant sink has been an assumption for a long time. Like most assumptions it is very hard to prove or disprove.

soilcarboncoalition.org

If trees were thinned, coppiced, charred and the char buried in a Terra Preta permaculture cycle substantial carbon could be sequestered. The caveat is that the sequestration of existing excess carbon in the atmosphere will take at the least several hundred years.

Amazonian agricultural settlements sequestered carbon this way for something like 7,000 years. It is quite possible that large sections of "natural forest" are in fact artifacts of Terra Preta agriculture. So this is not infeasable.

The idea of Terra Preta has now escaped the Amazon and is being experimented with around the world. Anywhere it improves soil quality on a permanent basis it will be put into practice in the long run.

While there are other sources of biomass for char the easiest source in a savanna or riparian zone will be low-grade wood and leaves. Locally, in California's almond growing region, anything that isn't easily cut to cordwood is piled and burned. Sometimes it's composted.

By diverting urban, suburban and rural woody waste to biochar for Terra Preta we reduce atmosphere inputs of methane and CO2 and initiate a permanent carbon sequestration cycle in the soil.

So trees COULD sequester more carbon if the proper work is done by humans to help them out.

http://forums.hypography.com/terra-preta.html

Put the Carbon Back

the assumptions in the press report are pretty wild, but it's so badly written one can't tell just what the experiment's goal was.

Maybe it was to disprove the notion that trees will remove all the fossil carbon we've emitted ?

But if so, how have we achieved a 36% excess airborne CO2?

Are Duke Uni academics really that incompetent ?

The idea of dissing "trees" as a crucial means of addressing GW is,
as Pangolin makes very clear,
sheer nonsense.

What we surely need to discuss are the parameters of the sustainable reforestation by which
C BANKING can occur in new forests' growth;
C SINKING can occur in worldwide Terra Preta farming; and
FOREST ENERGY can be supplied in forms ranging from Firewood to Charcoal to Woodgas to Syngas to Methanol (and derivatives) to electricity.

The idea that trees can be dismissed as a relevant tool for addressing GW
looks to me like nothing more than special pleading by big oil
for funds for their mega-scale Geosequestration fantasies.

Regards,

Bill

You have added foxnoise and drudge some much needed publicity in their campaign to turn the world into lawns, golf couirses, and parking lots.  You may just get that think tank job after all.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

I agree that, from the article, it is difficult to tell what the objective of the study was, what hypothesis they were testing, what the methods were, what the data points were, how they were collected and analyzed and the basis of the conclusions.

What I can tell is this:  Some loblolly pines were exposed to "extra" CO2 (at what concentration? how much extra than current CO2 levels? for what period of exposure?). Some loblolly pines were not (how far away was the control stand of pines? how to control for basic environmental differences? sample size?).  The CO2-exposed pines grew to be 20% larger than control pines.  These larger trees required more water and nutrients (shocker!). These trees removed "some" (how much?) CO2 from the air, but not "enough." (Enough for what?)

I'm not knocking the study, which may be very well designed and executed... simply not reported well in this article. I did a quick search of the Duke & ESA websites and did not find anything.  Perhaps it is not published yet - but this article is hardly convincing of anything.