Can this be true ?

[jim king]

In the Amazon there are 1.7 billion acres of jungle and if two trees fall per acre per year that is 3.4 billion trees a year.    Assuming that each tree has a minimum of  11 cubic meters of mass  that is 37,400,000,000 cubic meters of rotting mass per year.    Let´s now assume there would be a 5 year  accumulation of rotting mass that would be equal to just five years of  fellings as some would be in the process of rotting and some would last many more than five years before gone.    Now we have 187,000,000,000 cubic meters of rotting mass.
An average cubic meter of tropical wood weighs  2,544 pounds per cubic meter.  Now if we take 187,000,000,000 cubic meters of  rotting garbage times 2,544 pounds per cubic meter  we have 475,728,000,000 tons of rotting mass on any given day giving off carbon dioxide.
Does the Amazon qualify as the biggest carbon dioxide producer on earth ¿?.

[Don_Papenburg]

So it is you !!!!!!!   And Osoma is blaming the USA and other indutrialized nations for the global warming.

[Tom]

Hmmmm   I been cojitatin' on that a bit sumthin' just don't seem right.  Is those trees hardwood or softwood?  Did they make a noise when they fell, 'cause they might not have fell down?  If your figgers are true, you better line up the natives at the border 'cause Br'er Al will have a bunch of loggers down there trying to cut everything down to get rid of the CO₂.  Or would he be there trying to sweep up all the sawdust?  I don't know, but you best watch that kind of Kyoto talk or you'll get invaded for sure.  :P :D

[fishpharmer]

I'm just glad you didn't figure in the monkey flatuant.  Hmmm. :

[Coon]

Maybe guano ???

[Meadows Miller]

Gday

Its true mate but the figures are variable but as id think the average would more like 1 or 2  per 5 to 10 acres in an ageing forest which is nearing the end of its cycle pa  which is still a sizable figure in anyones laguage  ;) but its gettn the other 80% of the population the are compleate bloody Morons to understand that live in the citys and belive all the bull that the  green movment has been feeding them for the last 50 years  ;) ??? ??? : >:(

First it was the pulp industry and how we did things and managed our forests  which in aust was and is worlds best practice  second it was because of some bloody animal or plant which has never been proven to be made extinct  from forestry operations other than on urban developmet sites around citys and largescale land clearing for farms   ;) : Next it will be to lock up all forests to create carbon sinks I tell you that these Bloody Clowns wont be happy untill we have most of the native forests locked up around the world and have succesfully replaced the only enviromentaly frendly building material we have with high corbon emiting substitutes eg steel,plastic and concrete  also  what natural product can be used to create alternative sorces of energy cheaply ;) ??? : :( :( :'( More than ever we have centralised populations living in citys that dont have a bloody clue how the real world works and Dumber than Ever  : : I just ask whats happend to common sence these days   : :

Sorry for the bit of a rant but im abit feedup with Our Industry been used as a get out of jail free card  to make the real offenders fell good about their place in the world and get that nice warm feeling while they are sitting in their home with more appliances swiched on than a person would ever need to own with the aircon flat out  chewing through the coal from a power station ;) there is more than enough timber out there around the world to sustain the human races needs but getting access to it will become more of an issue If the green movement thorugh their continuing devious and manipulative ways  like stating figures in the media and online without the scientific evidence to back up their clams while discounting any solid evidence the industry comes up with and whenever we do get it out there in the media we get shot down by popular opinion and treated like a bunch of dumb arses who have no idea of how the enviroment works as a whole  ;) :( :'(

The first round of the CTS  will be a shambles as they will be after votes and only thinking in 3 to 5 year terms and its eaiser to lockup a forest than it is to solve the real issues which the main one is how people use resorces and what cost that has ont the enviroment

Ill leave it at that for the timebeing but i get alittle wound up about this subject   ;)

Regards Chris

[scgargoyle]

Since plants absorb CO2, I would think that in the natural balance of things, the remaining trees in the forest would absorb the CO2 being emitted by rotting vegetation and whatever sustainable animal population lives there. It's when you remove the trees, and replace them with thousands of animals (people) in hi-rises that things get out of balance. IMHO, very nearly all of the world's problems stem from there being too many people. We've overpopulated so many areas, it isn't funny. No one seems willing to look ahead to see what the long-term effects of a perpetually increasing population will have on all of us. People keep cranking out babies, and modern medicine keeps finding ways to keep us all alive longer. At some point, you go past the point where there is enough land to sustain everyone, and the results where this has already happened are tragic. Sorry to be so grim, but it is what it is. Where's the 'soap box' emoticon when you need one?

[jim king]

Its true mate but the figures are variable but as id think the average would more like 1 or 2  per 5 to 10 acres in an ageing forest which is nearing the end of its cycle pa  which is still a sizable figure in anyones laguage

The life cycle of the forest in the Amazon is short and the figures I stated as to yearly cubic meter per acre loss I believe to be correct based on several studies.   Plus a lot of years crawling over 2 to 5 foot dia trees that are rotting, slippery and slimey .   

Since plants absorb CO2, I would think that in the natural balance of things, the remaining trees in the forest would absorb the CO2 being emitted by rotting vegetation and whatever sustainable animal population lives there. 

Thinking about the "carbon nuetral" phrase I am wondering how that works.  When a 3000 board foot purpleheart falls over and a seeding shoots up to fill the hole left open how can that seedling consume the rotting gases from a tree that has 3000 bf of lumber plus the limbs etc..  ??

This post started out to be a joke when I was writing and doing the calculations but now it has me wondering.   ??? ???

Now as long as I did this on my computor everyone can say this is a new computor model forcast. :D

[zopi]

nahh..it's all cow flatulence...centered in Bovina TX.

[Tom]

Carbon neutral has to be measured over millennium, not a generation or two of trees.  The idea, if carbon sequestration is the proper avenue, is that the same carbon keeps getting tied up over and over rather than it all being released at any one given point in time.

My opinion is that the measure of Carbon isn't a valid mark of the world's health to begin with, much less the assumption that we can control were it goes and when it is released.  You folks have volcanoes down there that spew more carbon into the air than generations of locals can release by cutting trees.

Now, that's not to say that all the trees can be cut indiscriminately.  There are other reasons to keep the ecosystem in some kind of balance, but Carbon is just a political football to get a handle on controlling the local societies.

Carbon Sequestration would not have that tree rotting in the woods.  It would have to be placed in an environment where the carbon remained in that wood state forever, while new trees grew and tied up  more carbon.  I've always wondered how the Carbon Sequestration people would know when they had tied up enough of it.  and start micromanaging its release.  You can't tie up a natural nutrient for all of eternity and expect your action to not need some kind of reverse management later on.  That's what is so good about nature.  It doesn't realize that we are as important as we think we are.   It just goes on about its business of letting too much of something here, take away from something there until the "too much" and the "too little" get along.


What we have is too many people.  Nature might just be rebelling and is in the process of getting rid of some of them.  We don't like it because we are so arrogant.  The fact is that this world might have decided that we aren't needed any longer.  We haven't been here too long anyway.  Perhaps our being here was a fix for something else, like Atlantis sinking and the Atlantic Ocean being created  and stuff like that.   Who's to say that our saving the human race is a proper thing to do, ecologically.

Has anyone measured the amount of carbon and sulfur, etc. being released from the fissures in the bottom of the oceans, or, the chemicals spewing forth from all of the volcanoes, or, the stuff that bombards the earth from space every million years or so?  How are the micro-managers going to handle the next solar flare?

Is there really a difference in the tree that fell from a high wind and the tree that was felled by a pygmy to make a canoe? 

Now there is an answer that hasn't been broached.  How about we make everybody pygmies.   That way the trees go further and we will be arguing about the felling of sunflower stalks.  It seems that the world's guru's can think of nothing but how healthy we are because we keep getting bigger and bigger.  What with the manipulation of genetics, perhaps we should be trying to get a corn crop to produce less and injecting people with "don't grow big" genes.  Look at the size of Al Gore.  The guy is 6'1".  He doesn't need to be that tall to be important.  A case in point is James Madison, the fourth President of the USA, he was 5'4" and was considered a founding father.  Maybe what the world needs is a shrink-a-rater.

How's that for running on?

[jim king]

Tom:
You maybe were doing it jokingly but you made a lot of good points.  I still wonder about the continuous falling of big  trees being replace by small trees.  To me that is a constant positive carbon emission ¿?¿?

Your are right about people being the problem.  Here are the results of a Google search on non profit companies helping 8 of the countries of the Amazon.  Four and a half million web sites asking for money and they have never been here. 

99% have a box in the corner somewhere where to send money to them.  With the hundreds of millions of dollars they collect how many trees could be saved to absorb monkey farts if all that paper money was not needed  8)   It gets very difficult to determine if being GREEN means collecting dollars or saving the world ?

The information below looks more like dollars than ecology.  For those that have not heard the name NGO it means Non Governmental Organizatio  which operates and collects donations from anybody who believes them and they pay NO taxes.  NGO´s are BIG uncontrolled business.

Try this:



FORESTRY
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 395,000 de Ngo peru forest. (0.27 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 944,000 de Ngo brazil forest. (0.27 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 270,000 de Ngo ecuador forest. (0.24 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 709,000 de Ngo guyana forest. (0.38 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 402,000 de Ngo surinam forest. (0.42 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aprox 225,000 de Ngo venezuela forest. (0.28 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 1,300,000 de ngo bolivia forest. (0.60 segundos)
Resultados 1 - 10 de aproximadamente 347,000 de ngo colombia forest. (0.26 segundos)
4,592,000 sites

[crtreedude]

Jim, as you probably know, if a healthy forest, some trees are dying, and they leave room for others to get bigger. All the trees on the side of the "corridor of light" will respond with new growth due to more access to light, nutrients.

A stable forest is considered neutral regarding absorption of carbon. It is a carbon sink, but a static one. Some things are decomposing, other growing - but they balance out.

[Don_Papenburg]

You need to get the portable saw mill out there and cut up the fallen purpleheart  into nice boards that you send to the midwest  so I can use that wood to build things  . Then the sawdust and slabs will decompose faster and new trees can sprout faster in the space that the former huge trunk  lay.

[Brucer]

Does the Amazon qualify as the biggest carbon dioxide producer on earth ¿?.

Nope.

Trees use sunlight to convert water and CO2 to  sugars, starches, cellulose, etc. -- the essential building blocks of the tree. The entire "forest" is growing and absorbing C02. In a healthy forest there's trees of all ages. The young ones are too small to take up much carbon dioxide. The larger ones take up a great deal of CO2. And eventually the trees die, fall down, and rot. As they decompose they break down into water and C02. As long as the mass of the forest remains the same, the net CO2 contribution is zero.

Same thing applies to burning wood. If you remove dying trees from a forest and turn them into firewood, all you've done is generate the CO2 somewhat faster than nature would do it.

Now when folks start clear-cutting large swaths of forest and leaving the wood to rot, or burning it in open waste piles, it's a different story. Farmland doesn't consume CO2 as fast as a healthy forest.

[jim king]

Brucer:

I have been searching and searching on the internet to find out how the carbon obsorbing occurs and details about all phases.  All I can find is the general theory that you have given but no where can I find where some one actually took an acre and followed thru to see if the theory is true.

Watching a mature forest that is continually dying and being replaced by small trees it seems logical that any forest would be a carbon producer and not nuetral.   The mature trees as I see it are not adding much if any growth and the leaves that grow are only replacing those that are falling and rotting.

I can see where a managed forest where the trees are harvested and made into products that do not decompose creating the feared carbon dioxide and new growth replaces them
would be accomplishing something.

Slash and burn as is done here is certainly bad and laws have to be changed to permit people to log to eliminate that.  Clear cutting in the States of a pine plantation where everything is logged , chipped and whatever should be positive in the greenies mind and the newgrowth has no carbon producing rotting mess to cover up for.

Does anyone know how much carbon an acre of corn absorbs a year compared to a mature forest ?

Analyizing your comment you seem to lean the same direction as myself.  The problem of the CO2 is not going to be solved by the forests but something has to be done to make cities and populated areas responsible for thier own actions and stop putting the problem on to the forest industry. :

[Wudman]

I saw a little blip on the radar screen a few months back concerning a study that was being conducted in the Amazon Basin in relation to Co2 emissions and global warming.  It was a long term study (from the enviro side) that was supposed to support the notion that clearcutting lead to an increase in CO2 emmissions.  They had 100 monitoring platform set up across a large area monitoring the emissions of various cover types.  Their long term data indicated that mature forests were a net contributor of CO2.  Younger forests were a CO2 sink.  The data was counter productive to their agenda so the study was buried.  I can't remember who was doing the research but I couldn't turn up anything with a quick search.

I know the Smithsonian has been researching the issue for 25+ years.  Their research indicated the same.......A young vigourous forest is a better carbon "trap" than an "old growth" forest.

Wudman

[jim king]

zopi:

nahh..it's all cow flatulence...centered in Bovina TX.

Livestock such as cows, sheep, goats, camels, buffaloes, and termites release methane as well.  Bacteria in the gut of the animal break down food and convert some of it to methane. When these animals belch, methane is released.  In one day, a cow can emit ½ pound of methane into the air.  Imagine 1.3 billion cattle each burping methane several times per minute!   (32 million tons a day or 93,440,000,000 tons a year)   :



http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/society/greenhouse.htm

[jim king]

After finding a trove of buzzwords that led me into the carbon and global warming dilemma I will summarize what I deciphered as follows .

There is no agreement that there has been global warming over the last 150 more or less industrialized years.  One site showed a graph that maybe temperatures have risen 1 degree in the last 150 years but had no way to back it up.

There does seem to be agreement that the ocean temperatures are rising somewhat from the floor of the ocean up and changing ocean currents and moving mini climates around.

As Wudman says there now seems to be a wide concensus that a mature forest as the Amazon is a dud for carbon secuestration.  As you guys say it is nuetral.  Everyone needs to cut more trees down so the new growth sucks the carbon out of the air.

Also one web site showed the carbon absorbtion of corn and soybeans.  They do very well but the lights went out when I had those pages on the screen and I lost them.  I went thru a lot of pages today.

Carbon accumulation in forests and soils eventually reaches a saturation point, beyond which additional sequestration is no longer possible. This happens, for example, when trees reach maturity, or when the organic matter in soils builds back up to original levels before losses occurred. Even after saturation, the trees or agricultural practices would need to be sustained to maintain the accumulated carbon and prevent subsequent losses of carbon back to the atmosphere.

http://www.epa.gov/sequestration/faq.html#3

Here are some more interesting excerpts:

Carbon Sequestration
http://www.cypenv.org/Files/sequest.htm

Photosynthetic sequestration

There has been some emphasis that the notion of planting trees will make a significant difference to the carbon loading in the atmosphere. To be able to absorb the excess annual loading of 3 Gt would mean that about 15 Gt of extra trees would need to be grown each year and this would do nothing for the carbon already added as a result of human activity. Some of this would be returned in the short term as a result of rotting leaves. What exactly does this mean? The General Sherman tree in the Sequoia National Park in California is estimated to weigh a little over 6 kt; it would therefore require an extra annual growth equivalent to 2,500,000 such trees, just to sequester the excess carbon dioxide we are adding to the atmosphere each year, and we would have to repeat this feat every year. This is unimaginable. Of course, sequoia trees are not ideal for this, and smaller fast-growing species, such as willows, pines, hazel etc. would be more suitable. These would require vast quantities of water, which is a precious commodity in many places, and nutrients, some of which are derived from fossil fuels sources.

Let us imagine that, by some means, we are able to plant millions of new trees, obviously quick-growing, in sufficient quantity to make a significant photosynthetic absorption. What will happen? Two scenarios are possible: either man culls the new trees when they have reached the end of their main growth period (say, after 20 or 30 years) or nature takes its course. Such trees are unlikely to be a suitable source of timber. The main usefulness would be as fuel for renewable energy generation. So, they are burnt. All the sequestered carbon is therefore returned to the atmosphere and we are back where we started. The same applies if they are used for cheap paper production (newsprint): sooner or later, the carbon will be released back to the atmosphere, no matter how many times it is recycled. If we let nature take its course, the trees will die and rot or be burnt in forest fires. Either way, the sequestered carbon will be returned to the atmosphere.

Such sequestration, at the best, can be only a very temporary palliative and can never represent a permanent solution to the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Conclusion
There is no possibility of being able to sequester sufficient carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that would make any significant impact on the amount that man is adding annually, let alone capturing the amounts that have accumulated over the past century or so. Nor does it seem practical for large scale schemes to prevent carbon dioxide from being emitted. As an approximation, it is probable that any possible action that could be undertaken would fall short of the needs by many orders of magnitude. It would require a total of about 200 Gt of carbon to be sequestered to restore the atmosphere to 1850 levels of carbon loading.

An interesting day.

[pineywoods]

nahh..it's all cow flatulence...centered in Bovina TX.

Actually Bovina is in Mississippi, right on I 20 just west of Jackson

[zopi]

nahh..it's all cow flatulence...centered in Bovina TX.

Actually Bovina is in Mississippi, right on I 20 just west of Jackson

See? it's spreading!  Bovina TX is a wide place in the road with cattle for miles...wonderful smell..bought some equipment there once..

[Ernie]

The most effective way to cut CO2 emissions globally would be to get all the worlds politicians, federal, state/provincial and municipal as well as senior civil servants and UN staff to stop exhaling for an hour.  That would also solve a multitude of other problems and the world would be a much better place.

[Banjo picker]

Amen

[SPIKER]

The action of carbon sequestration has gone on a long time, that is where the coal comes from old forests that grew million years ago fell into a swamp and didnt rot only got compressed and buried ever deeper until the pressure and temp turned it into coal, and or diamonds ;)   but if you let them get that squished it is hard to get much fuel out of them.  lol

I say that the stopping those politicians form exhaling all that hot air is a great start hahaha

Mark

[Don_Papenburg]

Not only stopping them from exhaling  the bad breath but , Make them take trains and passenger ships for travel to places that they do not want to drive themselves.   



trains use about one tenth the fuel as a jet per person /mile I don't know about ships but I would think it would be close  as barge shipments on the Mississippi Is one of the most economical forms of transit

[isawlogs]

Theres enough of them that they could boatpool .. take turns rowing .